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”
The_Average_Joe_UK
Do you talk this16-17 year old left wing shit hoping that some young groupie will give you head?
Peter Martin
You could be right. A lot of my evidence is anecdotal about former Labour voters who say they are going to vote for UKIP. I’m not sure they really want to vote UKIP but they do feel that the EU isn’t working in their interests at present. They are right about that IMO. The EZ is a an economic disaster are which is dragging the rest of the EU down with it.
They won’t vote Tory though but they might vote UKIP. Rationally we can argue that doesn’t make any sense. But there’s a strong aversion to voting Tory, so the rational argument doesn’t necessarily hold up at the emotional level.
So I do think we may get that crossover if Labour doesn’t get its act together and quickly. An agreement that there needs to be an EU referendum is step one. Surely the hierarchy are getting that message from its focus groups?
Leon Wolfeson
An “agreement” for a referendum could easily cost Labour a vast chunk of their vote, and would certainly cost the UK – very arguably in the tens of billions range.
I certainly could not consider voting for them regardless of their other policies if they stepped to the right of Thatcher’s arguments against referendums.
The proper place for that is at the general election. Atlee and Thatcher’s views on that were the same, and if Labour strays outside those bounds, I think British democracy is done, toasted and over in at most the medium term, if not the short term.
Guest
Keep warning people about yourself, as you label all views not like yours as “nonsense” and “no sense” – and you invent far right, totalitarian, social darwinist “mental health” tripe.
Peter Martin
So the Scots can have a referendum. So does that put them to the right of Thatcher? The Catalans and Basques too must be very right wing if their desire for a referendum so defines their politics.
Was Harold Wilson to the right of Thatcher for calling a referendum in 1975? Did that decision cost them “a vast chunk of their vote”? Why would it have done?
The Danish and Swedes were the only ones to have a referendum on the adoption of the Euro. They both sensibly rejected the idea. They too would have been told that the cost of their rejection would have been “tens of billions”. Would their politicians have made an equally sensible decision?