With just seven months to go until the General Election, the electoral landscape has never been more unpredictable.
With just seven months to go until the General Election, the electoral landscape has never been more unpredictable
‘Do the Math’ is the phrase so often used in the United States. This morning, as the dust settles on what has been a truly historic night in British politics, strategists at Labour and Conservative HQ will be doing just that, probably with the Alka-Seltzer close by.
Clacton
Whatever hyperbole gets used to describe it, the Clacton by-election was truly astonishing. Having defected from the Conservatives to UKIP, Douglas Caraswell managed to take what on paper was one of the Tories’ safest seats.
Having not stood in the seat in 2010, UKIP last night secured 59.75 per cent of the votes cast, with a majority of 12,404. To put that into some perspective, both these figures are higher than what Carswell secured when standing for the Conservatives at the General Election.
The Conservatives meanwhile saw their share of the vote drop to 24.64 per cent, a fall of 28.38 per cent. The remainder of UKIP’s vote came largely from Labour voters. Having held the seat’s predecessor until 2005, the party secured just 11.2 per cent of the vote last night, down 13.84 per cent on its performance in 2010.
The Lib Dems were also humiliated. Pushed into fifth place behind the Greens on 1.37 per cent of the vote (483 votes), the party that was once such an effective by election machine lost yet another deposit, with a fall in its share of the vote compared with 2010 of 11.57 per cent.
Attempts by Conservative party chairman Grant Shapps to scare UKIP voters by declaring that voting UKIP helps Labour won’t wash based on the Clacton results.
Heywood and Middleton
If Clacton was a predictable win for UKIP, Heywood and Middleton was the most surprising result of the night.
Whilst bookies had shortened the odds on a UKIP victory in a traditional Labour heartland seat, no one seriously thought that the Farage machine would realistically threaten Ed Miliband. Lord Ashcroft’s polling in the seat ahead of the vote put Labour on 47 per cent, 19 per cent ahead of UKIP on 28 per cent. Indeed, Ashcroft declared somewhat ominously that Labour was “on course for a comfortable victory in this week’s Heywood & Middleton by-election”.
What happened last night could not have been more of a contrast.
A night of high tension for Labour saw UKIP demanding a recount as it managed to slash Labour’s majority from the 5,971 secured in 2010 to just 617 last night.
Whilst Labour managed to increase its share of the vote from around 40 per cent at the General Election to 41 per cent last night, this is not the kind of increase that a Labour party headed to form a government on its own should be securing this close to May’s election.
UKIP on the other hand saw its share of the vote increase by just over 36 per cent.
Again, as with Clacton, Grant Shapps’ mantra that voting UKIP gets Labour cannot be supported by a result in Heywood and Middleton, which showed that voting UKIP nearly got the constituency a UKIP MP.
For Labour too, if they hadn’t got the message by now, this result should shake strategists out of the complacency they have wallowed in for too long and realise that UKIP doesn’t help Labour one bit.
All strategies at Labour HQ, if they have not already done so, should this morning be settling down and reading the Fabian Society’s excellent Revolt on the Left research, showing not just the threats posed by UKIP but also, crucially, how to respond in policy, communication and organisational terms.
With just seven months to go until the General Election, the electrical landscape has never been more unpredictable. UKIP and the SNP on the way up, the Lib Dems in near terminal decline, and both Labour and Conservatives stuck in a rut and unable to cope or understand how to respond to such a volatile landscape.
A hung parliament now looks more certain than ever next May and anything is possible.
Ed Jacobs is a contributing editor to Left Foot Forward
43 Responses to “UKIP isn’t helping Labour”
Guest
And you support a party dominated by a Banker, who is outright out to touch the pockets of the normal British working-class people in bad ways.
Leon Wolfeson
Most of the voters interested in those policies are still with their current party, the Tories.
Leon Wolfeson
“The remainder of UKIP’s vote came largely from Labour voters.”
This is absolute nonsense. You have *absolutely no evidence* whatsoever for this. Following the polling tabs, it is far more likely that the right have come out to vote, and the left have not. The low turnout means that this is an entirely possible scenario, far moreso than left-wing voters voting for a right-wing party.
A hung parliament will happen if you keep moving right.
Stephen
It’s only a by-election on about a third of turnout. It may have been (and still probably is) a strong Labour seat, but also relatively strong for the BNP whose voters surely defected to UKIP along with many Conservatives raising their share substantially. This was probably not a defection from Labour but from other parties to UKIP, and only of the die-hards who vote in most elections. Come the general election on a much greater turnout, Labour will take this easily.
littleoddsandpieces
Labour has left behind millions of its core voters to poverty, starvation, a freezing winter, and a penniless old age.
The hungry are mostly the working poor and low income self employed, benefit sanctioned or benefit losses of disabled / chronic sick even at 60 and delays lasting months of any food money at all.
Backing the slavery of Workfare also does not help.
The lie that people living longer has made the state pension unaffordable, when the ring fenced National Insurance Fund has been full for decades, not needing a top up from tax. As the NI Fund is not a tax, it cannot be emptied by government to use for general expenditure.
Now is the time for Labour to do a policy u-turn and offer a better version of:
– The Greens’ universal Citizen Income, non-means tested and non-withdrawable
that would end most hunger and save lives from the winter’s cold.
And for Labour to do something that no party is offering now:
– Repealing Pension Bills 2010-2014
– Payout women’s state pension at 60 in 2015
– Payout women’s state pension in 2015 to those who turned 60 from 2013, who began the loss of payout for all women born from 1953, as a tax free lump sum
– Equalise men’s state pension at 60 in 2015
Income Tax is only a quarter of the tax from people to government.
We are all taxpayers and therefore no-one on benefit or state pension is a burden on the working public, from the 75 per cent of tax from people to government coming from stealth taxes, we all pay, in or out of work and however long we live.
If Labour offer these policy u-turns tomorrow, they will win any more by-elections in their safe seats by landslide victory and form a majority government in 2015, from a huge rise beyond all parties of voters coming back to Labour.