A note from Chairman, Robin Tilbrook on the Tamworth and Mid-Bedfordshire By-elections October 2023:
The two By-elections that took place on the 19th October had interesting results which bear looking at carefully - especially since the Mainstream Media now seem to entirely specialise in misleading their readers.
Whilst it has been reported, and is of course true, that Labour won both of them, there wasn’t a swing in the way that the Mainstream Media reported.
In the case of Mid-Bedfordshire, Labour’s vote in the By-election was 13,872, whereas in the previous election in 2019 Labour’s vote was 14,028, i.e. a reduction of their vote by 156.
The only other part of this election result which has been at all accurately reported is the fact that the Reform candidate got 1,487 votes, which was slightly more than the difference between the successful Labour candidate’s vote and the unsuccessful Conservative candidate’s vote of 12,680.
The really striking element of the result is in fact that the Conservative vote went from 38,692 votes in 2019 down to 12,680, i.e. their vote was under a third of what it had been before.
For Reform’s vote to make a difference it would have to have been taken entirely from those that would otherwise have both turned out and voted Conservative. Personally I think that is a bit of a stretch, but nevertheless an interesting quirk.
Turning to the Tamworth By-election result, in this one Labour got 11,719 votes, whereas in the General Election Labour had got 10,908 votes, so they did get slightly more votes than they had got before, i.e. slightly less than a 1,000 more votes.
The difference in Labour’s result is more than explained by the reduction in the vote for the Greens and for the Liberal Democrats who went respectively from 935 votes to 417 and for the Liberal Democrats from 2,426 to 417.
Reform’s vote of 1,373 was again slightly more than the difference between the Conservative and Labour vote. Again for Reform to have really made the difference it would have to be shown that all of their voters would otherwise have both turned out and voted Conservative. Again a bit of a stretch.
The big headline again should have been the collapse in the Conservative vote from 30,542 in 2019 to 10,403, a reduction of just less than two thirds.
The interesting comparison for the General Election at the end of next year that I would suggest everybody thinks about is what happened to the “Progressive Conservative” Government Party in the 1993 Canadian General Election, where they went from 156 seats and being in Government, down to 2 seats and even the Prime Minister lost her seat!
The highly encouraging point is that the “Progressive Conservative” Party was irretrievably damaged and ceased to exist, never becoming a governing party again. Their politics, as their name sounds, was very similar to the current UK fake “Conservatives” who are in fact progressive on every policy (although they are perhaps more adept at lying about it).
The other quirk is that the Party that really pushed the “Progressive Conservative” Party over the edge was called “Reform”. In that election they took many traditionalist and socially conservative voters off the “Progressive Conservatives” and helped to cause their total collapse. Reform never became a governing party in Canada and has now disappeared, but it was the icebreaker that caused the realignment of Canadian politics.
We can and should all hope that the same happens here at the next General Election!
Robin Tilbrook, ED Chairman
