811. The increase in the Labour vote yesterday in Tamworth from the 2019 general election.
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811. The increase in the Labour vote yesterday in Tamworth from the 2019 general election.
Wasnt there a referendum on PR or keeping first past the post ? - And PR didnt win the vote if I recall
When I was younger I always thought PR was a better system. These days though I think if we went PR then we would have coalition govt after coalition govt and nothing would ever get done.
It almost as bad as going red to blue, blue to red every 10 years or so.
Maybe what we should have is one cluster f uck of a shambles aka the Drakeford Party - and put them in power for 26 years....
Feels like cope when you could say that at almost every by-election, I would imagine increasing your total number of votes at a by-election is a pretty good result regardless.
I might be wrong but I think they are both record breakers or near to in terms of swing. Tamworth is apparently the Tories 55th safest seat.
I think a better justification is that it is hard to have two worse departing MPs so you can understand the disillusion felt by voters in those parts. Pincher was a very high profile scandal and made not only himself but the government look like complete shit. Dorries has a negative IQ and seems to have got into politics to help herself and nobody else.
That Labour didn't increase the size of their vote may mean there simply aren't many more Labour voters in the constituency
What worries me is that when there is the chance to give the Tories a real kicking a lot of Labour voters couldn't be arsed
Well feck em then
Interesting data. A similar situation occurred in the recent Scottish by-election where there was a much trumpeted win for Labour over the SNP.. Turnout was down from 66% in the last GE to 40%. The actual number of votes for the Labour candidate was almost the same as in the last GE but the SNP voters obviously stayed away in their thousands.
Never having looked at any individual election results in detail before (apart from our own constituency), I decided to have a look at the results of the recent Tamworth and Mid-Beds by-election results and compared them against the 2019 GE results, to see what effect the low turnout may have had on the number of votes cast for the two main parties.
Tamworth: number of electorate = 71,572
2019 GE: Lab 10,908 votes; Con 30,542 votes. Turnout 64% (equivalent to approx 46K voters).
2023 by-election: Lab 11,719 votes; Con 10,403 votes. Turnout 36% (equivalent to approx 26K voters).
So 20K less people voted in 2023 compared to 2019. Lab vote more or less the same but Con vote down approx 20K .
Conclusion: Con voters stayed at home?
Mid-Beds: number of electorate = 87,795
2019 GE: Lab 14,028 votes; Con 38,692 votes. Turnout 74% (equivalent to approx 65K voters).
2023 by-election: Lab 13,872 votes; Con 12,680 votes. Turnout 44% (equivalent to approx 39K voters).
So 26K less people voted in 2023 compared to 2019. Lab vote more or less the same but Con vote down approx 26K .
Conclusion: Con voters stayed at home?
If anyone has the time/inclination to check my figures, that would be good as I can hardly believe them myself, in the sense of the apparently good correlation between the reduction in turnout and the drop in Tory votes.
I'm surprised the Tories haven't seized on these results to reinforce their message that by-election results don't really mean very much?
If you are correct and the victory for Labour in both cases was down directly to the tory vote staying at home then clearly in the next 12 months the mantra from downing Street will change from look at us to get out and vote or you will get labour
And I would imagine the same will be said of Labour
Labour's so called landslide in 1997 was more down to a fall in the Conservative vote than a rise in the Labour one and the Labour wins in 2001 and 2005 were with a pretty small proportion of the vote - I think we live in a time where people are more motivated to vote against a particular party than for one (that definitely applies to me).
Far too simplistic imo
The issue with this type of analysis is that we already have significant evidence that seats can swing massively in a general election. Political alegience isn't an immutable characteristic like skin colour so can't be analysed as such. After a loss like 2019, there is a lot of scope for a national swing from conservative to labour under the two main narratives of Corbyn and Brexit. This analysis also doesn't allow for labour losing voters who felt allied to Corbyn in 2017 and 2019. You also haven't allowed for smaller parties, for instance reform, Britain first and ukip took nearly 10% of the vote in Tamworth, where did that likely come from?
The likely reality is:
Yes some of the 2019 conservative vote stayed at home
Yes some of the conservative vote switched to labour
Yes there was some tactical centre left voting
Yes labour will have turned off some voters
The Tories will be confident they can at very least make a good stab at winning these seats back at a GE, the issue for them is that these are probably seats they need to hold to break 200 seats let alone a majority.
This is what I meant by crap opposition
If Starmer had anything about him there would be a genuine movement towards Labour rather than voting to get the tories out
Plenty of people are voting Labour to get the tories out , me included
But it's the rest that need to be convinced
And that's why I think it will either be a hung parliament with Labour doing a deal with smaller parties or a minority Labour administration
I would be happy with anything that doesn't include the conservatives
Labour don't need to take the risk. If they start announcing things they will need to explain how they will pay for them. Instead they can just sit tight and win a comfortable majority, this is why all of the leadership's energy appears to go into keeping people away from doing/saying anything controversial.
If you truly believe that is going to happen then you may as well make some money from it. I have been convinced labour would get a majority for about 18 months now (although at times it did feel like blind optimism), the odds are now a lot closer to what I have felt the chances have been for a long time. You can lay a labour majority and make a tidy sum.