Most eyes will be on the Feltham & Heston Parliamentary by-election, but there are also a handful of council by-elections being held including a double-header in near-by Kingston, where the Liberal Democrats are trying to take two seats off the Conservatives.
We will update the site in due course with the results and party reaction, but for the time being here is a discussion thread…
UPDATE:
Sky News reports turnout in Feltham & Heston at 31%. Very low, but also in typical Sky ‘never wrong for long’ style, wrong. Turnout turns out to be even lower: 28.8%. It was 59.9% at the general election.
Liberal Democrats have hung on to third place in Feltham and Heston, just: Labour 54% (+10%), Conservative 28% (-6%), Lib Dem 6% (-8%), UKIP 5% (+3%).
Conservatives have won in Kingston: Conservative 44%, Lib Dem 30%, Labour 17%, Green 4%. CPA 3%, UKIP 2%.
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24 Comments
Looks like a comfortable Tory win in Kingston…
looks like Feltham very closely mirrors opinion polls nationally insofar as the Lib-Dem/UKIP relationship.
#knife-edge
Full Kingston result here: http://www.kingston.gov.uk/information/your_council/elections/coombe_vale_by-election.htm
>Labour 54% (+10%), Conservative 28% (-6%), Lib Dem 6% (-8%), UKIP 5% (+3%).
More realistically:
Labour – down about 10,000 votes on 2011.
Tories – ditto
Lib Dems – down about 6,000 votes on 2011
UKIP – up about 300
Makes any analysis or claims of endorsement pretty meaningless.
@cassie,
Labour are down 8535 votes (40.3% lower than the number, 21174, that voted Labour in 2010)
Lib Dems are down 5305 votes (79.5% lower than the number, 6669, that voted Lib Dem in 2010)
The turnout dropped by 52% from 2010, compared with the a drop of 79.5% in the number of people that voted Lib Dem. This means that the real term fall in Lib Dem voters is 57% (measured as a percentage of the number of people that would have voted Lib Dem if the fall in vote was the same as the fall in tournout – the total number of Lib Dem voters would have fallen to 3202 if the drop had been the same as the drop in tournout).
You lost over half your vote.
Cassie,
What is your point here?
Everyone’s vote is down except UKIP?
Why does that render analysis meaningless? I would have thought it made it very very meaningful. That Lib Dems were only 100 votes ahead would make analysis ver important. The poll is very significant because it points to the veracity of opinion polls and points to a bleak electoral future for Lib Dems everywhere. Charles Kennedy hinted as much last night. The turn-out is worrying and it points to a repitition of the scottish election and the meltdown of lib dem support.
Feltham result as good as we could realistically have hoped for – 3rd place is still 3rd place, no matter how close.
Kingston result disappointing, particularly after all the hard work many people put in and the quality of our 2 candidates. It suggests the belief that our likely future areas of success will be Tory-facing areas may not be as straight-forward as many had hoped/wished (myself included). Though one santa does not a Christmas make.
One interesting point re the Kingston numbers – we seem to have been the only major party that suffered a big drop in the vote between our 2 candidates, despite them being right beside each other on the ballot paper. You can expect a certain percentage of voters to opt to vote for only one person, to believe they can only vote for one person, or to deliberately split their vote between 2 different parties. In all 3 cases you would expect the alphabetically highest-placed candidate from each party to be the beneficiary from this, and this was the case with the 3 main parties (not with the smaller parties – but their numbers were so small that personal votes play a much bigger part). But if you look at the percentage variance between the 2 candidates from each of the main parties, it reads :
Lib Dems : 14.4% variance.
Labour : 4.6% variance.
Cons : 2.4% variance.
That suggests one or more of 3 dynamics may have been at play :
1) We were the worst at educating our voters that they had two votes.
2) Kamala had a large personal vote.
3) A sizeable number of people gave us only one of their two votes, with our highest placed candidate alphabetically the beneficiary.
In a much closer election that variance for two candidates right next to each other on the ballot paper could have really hurt us. It would be usful if our election whizzes could chew over that to see what we can do to address it in future multi-vacancy elections (e.g. London Assembly 2012).
Three and a half years until next General Election.
‘ A week is a long time in politics’.
‘Don’t Panic’ just yet.
How does such a low turnout sit with those arguing for a change to strike ballot thresholds?
Most worrying is that we didn’t even put up a candidate in Mid Devon. Someone needs to get a grip.
This result, while not surprising, is another disaster for our party. We’ve lost over 50% of our vote. And those who think our vote will pick up in 2015 are, sadly, deluded. The only thing that will save us now, frankly, is a miracle.
Let’s look at the facts:
-we will not have solved the deficit problem by 2015 as we promised
-living standards are set to fall by 7.5% in the next decade. All of us (except for the rich) are going to be poorer come 2015
-the economy very well might not recover at all by 2015 and many economists predict it will be even worse then than it is now. Our economic policies risk another 1930s style depression, major economists have warned. We should know better, yet those in charge of our party seem doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.
-we seem to be getting most of the blame for what the Tories are doing. By “owning” specifically Tory policy, when we needn’t have done, we’ve turned off almost the entire floating left-of-centre vote we used to attract. The Tories are particularly hated here in the North and many people, for right or wrong, see is as the same now: “collaborators” in a right-wing government who are kicking the poor and giving bigger troughs to the bankers.
-we’ve practically lost the youth vote over tuition fees, lost the votes of many public sector workers (who are often a natural constituency of Lib Dems), lost the votes of those who believe in the NHS and the welfare state, lost the votes of vulnerable sick/disabled people, lost the votes of many women & lost the votes of those who want banking reform and for us to truly be “all in this together”.
I myself will probably, with a heavy heart, not vote Lib Dem – for the first time since the 80s – at the next election as the party is now acting counter to my interests, the interests of my community which I value heavily, and the interests of the working and lower-middle classes. My wife, an intelligent university-educated woman) has lost her job due to Coalition cuts (she helped abuse victims find housing for the council), is finding it near impossible to find ANY KIND of new job and faces having to stack shelves (free labour for Tesco, no doubt) for her benefit in the new year. Why are we, as a party, making people like her suffer while those who crashed the economy in 2008 continue to get massive bonuses and light-touch regulation?
Unless action is taken to win back ex-Lib Dem voters, I see no recovery for us for at least a decade. We’ve been warned by the public in nearly every poll and by-election since the 2010 general election. We can do one of two things: stick our heads further into the sand while the Tories use us as human shields or start to think about pulling out of this coalition that is hurting us, hurting the economy and most of all hurting average British people who aren’t lucky enough to have great wealth stashed in tax havens and complex accounting.
Ian>What is your point here?
That the post only gave percentages. Which are meaningless without actual figures.
The fact Steve has done the maths that the Lib Dems ‘down 8%’ can also be said to be ‘down 57%’ to me shows that percentages are daft. Both are true, but one sounds far worse than the other.
That percentages are silly/distorted when you have a low number (‘75% of the four women we asked said they loved our shampoo’).
WIthout knowing WHY 26,000 or so fewer people bothered to vote, you can’t draw any useful conclusions about the state of any of the three main parties.
For all anyone knows, it was down to bad weather and Christmas, rather than any feeling on any of the three main parties.
Steve >You lost over half your vote.
And the Conservatives lost more than half of theirs. Are they in a panic about ‘meltdowns’? I doubt it.
Labour lost 40% of theirs. Are they worrying this would be replicated everywhere in a General Election tomorrow?
No, the candidate was claiming that polling 8,535 fewer votes than predecessor was some kind of great endorsement for Ed Miliband.
But it doesn’t prove much. Because no one’s voters switched to other parties (apart from 300 to UKIP, who are the only ones who can feel a little pleased today).
‘A plague on all your houses’? Or ‘what’s the point, it’s a safe seat?” Who knows?
As for percentages
If I have 60% of one pizza today when I had 50% of four pizzas last week*, I’m up on my share of the available pizza, but I’ve still lost a lot of slices and I’m still going to be hungry.
And sure, someone else will go even hungrier. But in the end, all three diners will be less than thrilled.
*the maths don’t equate to the by-election: it’s just an illustration.
@Cassie
Additionally, if the Lib Dem vote had been maintained (as a percentage of the vote), then you would have received 3202 votes, or 1838 more than you did. If Labour’s share of the vote had been maintained then they would have received 10166, but they actually received 12639 (2473 more).
So, 1838 Lib Dem voters disappear and 2473 Labour voters magically appear.
The tories got 1494 votes less than if their share had remained the same, which probably accounts for just over half of UKIPs vote and a small percentage of those 2473 extra votes for Labour.
If my analysis is vaguely right (hard to verify without some surveying to back it up, but it does kind of make sense), then things aren’t looking great for Labour, given they took so few votes off the Tories (which is what they need to do to win an outright majority again), but things are looking dire for the Lib Dems, with a sizeable chunk of your vote being switched to Labour. This was masked in Leicester South and Oldham East and Saddleworth where Tory voters switched to Lib Dem as the Lib Dems were perceived to be the main challengers to Labour – there weren’t many Tory voters in Barnsley to do the same – in Feltham and Heston the Tories are the main challengers, so their voters didn’t switch to Lib Dem.
I see that Labour’s spin machine is already at work. One Labour win plus one Tory win equals a “verdict on the government’s economic plan”. A verdict of neutrality and disinterest, perhaps?
Speaking as a Labour Party member I was delighted with this result.
Percentages are important and useful because they enable an objective and effective analysis to be made of the results from election to election despite huge fluctuations in turnout. I know that the Liberal Democrats revere evidence so here are a few facts. At the 2010 General Election Labour’s share of the vote in Feltham was 43.6%; in December 2011 it was at 54.4% —- up by 10.8%. In 2010 the Tory share of the vote was 34% but in 2011 it was 27.7% — down 6.3%. In 2010 the Lib Dems’ share of the vote was 13.7% but in 2011 they slumped to 5.9% — down by a huge 7.8%. Taken together (like it or not the Tories and the Lib Dems are the Government Party) the Coalition lost a massive 14.1% presumably because of its failing economic policies. But if you don’t like percentages here’s another fact: Labour polled 2054 votes more than all of the other parties put together. Whichever way you look at it this was a decisive win for Labour and a vindication of Ed Miliband’s leadership particularly when the attack dogs of the Tory press were doing their utmost to rain on his parade in Feltham. But the most heartening aspect of this result for both Labour and the Lib Dems is that depite a week when a xenophobic Tory party and its poodles in the media were rejoicing at Cameron’s betrayal of our allies in Europe, in their hour of deepest need, it was a Europhile party that won the Feltham by election handsomely and another Europhile party that came third, keeping UKIP at bay by nearly a hundred votes. The innate decency of the British people was the real victor in this election.
Both these results are part of a pattern with the Tories getting out their core vote (boosted by Cameron’s Europhobic antics last week – and thus doing us a favour by suppressing the switch to UKIP), and Labour doing well, but not that well. We saw it in Rochdale, we saw it in the main local elections in May and we’ll probably see it again next May. That leaves us with only about 50% of the support we had in 2010. Looking at our target seat here in Peterborough last May, about 2/3 of our lost support was previous DEF OURS votes staying at home, and about 1/3 of DEF OURS switching to Labour and an Independent. A lot of our previous POSSLD went back to the Tories.
If we are to win even half of our 2010 support back, we have to have a credible and just narrative that will appeal to a wider spectrum of the electorate. And we must do it by positive policies. Attacking the last Labour Govt. just will not do, although it helps to remind left-inclined voters of Labour’s instinctive authoritarianism.
Finally, we need to put the issue of Europe to bed for good. Once the Euro is either saved or broken, and probably before the next MEP elections, we must revive our previous call for an ‘In or Out’ Referendum which will force Cameron to stop playing the ends against the middle and force Milliband E to come off the fence and face down his own Eurosceptics.
A depressing aspect of recent elections has been the exceptionally low turnout. Much more use needs to be made of technology in the electoral process. It is surely a paradox that at the click of a mouse I can add my name to an e-petition which may be transformed into a motion to be debated in the House of Commons yet in order to elect one of the M.P.s who will debate that petition I have to travel to a distant polling station, possibly in dreadful weather conditions and place a slip of paper in a black tin box. Recently, it was revealed that millions are still not registered to vote and over 40% of those questioned believed that they were registered to vote when in fact they weren’t. This state of affairs cannot be allowed to continue because it is bad for democracy particularly when the possibility of pure proportional representation is a dead duck. The whole concept of suffrage based on a domestic address is anachronistic. It should not be mandatory that in order to register to vote one should have to register and give a fixed abode or a home address, one should be able to vote from anywhere on-line or appear at a polling station and simply produce evidence of one’s identity. In this respect national identity cards would have rendered the necessity of being on a local electoral role unnecessary. Another reason why it is a great shame that the Coalition abolished identity cards.
I think we should count ourselves lucky. But for the intervention of the English Democrats, who didn’t stand in 2010, some UKIP votes would probably not have peeled off and the LibDems would have indeed come a humiliating fourth.
Maybe that would have forced cassie and co. to start drawing a few painful conclusions: the main one being that a 5.9% vote share, regardless of how low the turnout, is a disaster. Even at a by-election just before Christmas, and in bad weather, this result surely can’t be (in the Councillor’s words) ” as good as we could have hoped for.”
If Nick Clegg had been rude to the French and deferred his announcement on marriage tax breaks, the result could have been different…provided that the election had been held a week later.
This was a by-election in a seat where we came third, while we are in government dealing with the worst peacetime deficit crisis in UK history, in territory that hasn’t been worked, with a short two and and half week period of campaigning to make up for that.
By-elections where we come from third are always difficult for many reasons. Instead of squeezing the other parties, we get squeezed, and our activists aren’t motivated to come out and help: it’s been the eternal lament of by-election teams since time immemorial, that many activists don’t come to by-elections until the last weekend, and by then it’s too late.
I’m not complaining about by-election help this time. Compared to similar by-elections, the response was reasonable, and from Liberal Youth, excellent. But we have to be realistic about what is achievable in a seat where we have a limited campaigning record, in such a short campaign.
This result tells us little about how we will do in wards next May, where the local team have been campaigning for their community over the past year, and where their canvassing for next May is already underway. But it tells us a lot about wards where we have relied on the unpopularity of the Labour party, and where the campaigning is left to the final two and a half weeks.
Don’t get me wrong. This is a tough time to campaign as a Lib Dem, and people will lose next May who don’t deserve to.
But there’s a lot of people who will win next May, because they are making their own luck, right now, campaigning long before the local election campaign officially starts.
George Kendall,
Your crumbs of comfort don’t add up, I’m afraid. Though I do admire your resilience and tenacity in trying to stick up for the leadership.
“in territory that hasn’t been worked,”
We used to hold 3 wards there. The last Lib Dem seats were lost in 2010.
“with a short two and and half week period of campaigning to make up for that.”
But hasn’t the similarly short campaign just before Christmas in Sutton & Cheam been held to have worked in our favour?
“By-elections where we come from third are always difficult for many reasons.”
What about Crosby, Glasgow Hillhead, Croydon North-West, Portsmouth South, Greenwich and Leicester South?
I cannot fault the analysis of Simon Bamonte. However we try to dress it up, our party is propping up a right-wing Tory government that is doing huge damage to this country, its economy, its public services, and its people. This is the wrong thing to do in principle, and it will prove disastrous in practice, both for the country and for our party.
The 2015 election will be fought for 50 less MPs on gerry-mandered boundaries. On 2010 levels of support I would be surprised if we won even half the number of seats. Astoundingly, our leadership actually agreed to this in return for a referendum on AV which Nick Clegg et al must have realised the Tories and the media would never let us win. Truly a case of the turkeys voting for Christmas if ever there was on.
There is only one available way out, and that is to leave the coalition NOW. Not in 2014, not next year, not even tomorrow. NOW.
I doubt if I can ever bring myself to vote Labour. But my Lib Dem vote in 2015 will be cast with a clothes peg over my nose.
@Simon Bamonte
I agree completely with your analysis. And what depresses non-Coalition supporters is that the solution, which is for the Liberal Democrats to leave the Coalition and keep the Tories reined in through confidence and supply, is no longer available because the Tories and the Liberal Democrats have locked themselves into power through the adoption of fixed term parliaments
MacK: “or the Liberal Democrats to leave the Coalition and keep the Tories reined in through confidence and supply, is no longer available because the Tories and the Liberal Democrats have locked themselves into power through the adoption of fixed term parliaments”
Not at all. In fact, I don’t understand this argument at all. Not only is the so-called “fixed” parliament not really fixed at all, because a government can be brought down by a no-confidence vote, and if no new government can be formed with a majority, parliament will be dissolved; but the whole point of a confidence and supply arrangement is that you pledge not to bring down a minority government whilst refusing to guarantee backing for all measures the government wants to introduce. A fixed term parliament makes that a more viable option, because the government can’t call a snap election the moment it sees an opportunity for stealing a majority.
@Malcolm Todd
Malcolm, I have never accepted this argument either and am aware that the government can be brought down by a no confidence vote. I agree with everything you say. But prominent members of the Liberal Democrats have consistently used the introduction of fixed term parliaments as an excuse for remaining in coalition until the end of the parliamentary term. I have always been of the view that Confidence and Supply with the Tories as a minority government would have been by far, the best thing for the country and if fixed term parliaments prevent the majority party cutting and running when it perceives electoral advantage than so much the better. But what is disheartening is that it appears that no matter how disenchanted the Liberal Democrats are with the coalition they will never leave it. The recent events concerning Europe have, I believe, only confirmed this for millions of people who support parties other than the Lib Dems and the Tories. It is also, I believe the reason for the Lib Dems demise in the polls and at by-elections.
The Feltham result combined 3rd party squeeze, local elections in a neighbouring constituency, an outrageously early election following the death of the previous MP so that we barely had time to choose a candidate, Europe in the news, and Christmas and cold early evenings making it very difficult to campaign anyway. A victory for Labour distracticians rather than anything else, I would have thought.