The result of the Thirsk and Malton delayed election has just been announced:
Anne McIntosh has been elected as the Conservative MP for the new constituency, having previously represented Vale of York.
The votes cast were as follows:
Conservatives: 20,167 (+1%)
Liberal Democrats (Howard Keal) 8,886 (+4.5%)
Labour: 5,169 (-9.9%)
UKIP: 2,502 (3.5%)
Liberal 1,418
From the notional figures, this result shows a 2.6% swing from the Conservatives to the Lib Dems, and a swing of 11.6% from Labour, with the Liberal Democrats moving from third place to second.
Mike Beckett, Chair of Thirsk and Malton Liberal Democrats said:
This result is an endorsement of the coalition, and the sensible stance the Liberal Democrats have taken.
The hard work of our local candidate, Howard Keal, has resulted in a 2.6% swing away from the Tories. It’s another catastrophic result for Labour, and shows that they are still being punished.
Liberal Democrat Party President, Ros Scott said:
Howard Keal and his team ran an energetic and spirited campaign for the Liberal Democrats, achieving the biggest vote increase of the night.
The result is yet another damning indictment of Labour’s record.
Despite all its arrogance following the coalition, Labour has been beaten into third and proven to be way off the mark when it comes to public opinion.
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44 Comments
The wheels are coming off the Lib Dems (or is it Lib Tories?) already. The squeeze is on.
I’m amazed how quickly the Lib Dems are attempting to jump on any result or poll and twist it to portray a ‘vindication’ of the Lib/Con coaltion.If you are this desperate in the government’s honeymoon period just how desperate are you going to be when the cuts start to bite and the wheels come off. Without the ability to blame others the Lib Dems simply have nothing to offer.
@Edward – this dork can’t even do maths – the Lib Dem vote went up nearly 5% on the previous notional total
Get a life chum – and do the stats before you sound your mouth off!
Interesting that the two negative posts both use the phrase “wheel come off”
One suspects Aj and Edward are the same sad individual….
you can suspect all you wish, but you are, as ever, wrong.Although I suspect you know I will be proved correct 🙂
A good result from the Lib Dems – the party clearly have not lost vast swathes of support to Labour yet. I’m amazed how quickly some wish to portray the wheels coming off! They clearly didn’t read the article before posting their comments, which don’t tally with the reported swings to the Lib Dems. The honeymoon period angle is a better argument from their point of view, but they spoilt it with inanities.
Edward: looks to me like there’s a typo in your comment and you wrote “Lib Dems” when you meant “Labour” 🙂 It was Labour who got squeezed, with their vote falling and the party moving from 2nd to 3rd. That’s rather more of a squeeze than what happened to the Lib Dems: vote up and moved up from 3rd to 2nd.
Staggeringly bad Labour performance – I think their wheels have come off and they really need to work out what they stand for… What is impressive is the turnout for an election where the other 649 results were already known.
Might I take the opportunity to ask members of the Liberal Party to focus on the rationale for their party’s continued existence. In other contests at the General Election, leaving aside Steve Radford’s 9.3% in Liverpool West Derby (where he nonetheless finished in third place behind a Liberal Democrat), they polled respectively 2.1% in Exeter, 1.3% in Hackney South and Shoreditch, and 0.8% in Edinburgh North and Leith. In Thirsk and Malton, with a relatively well-known local candidate poised to take advantage of any post-coalition formation backlash, they were still unable to save their deposit and were not able to prevent an increase in the Liberal Democrat share of the vote compared with the notional figures for 2005.
All of us would recognise that those who have been continuously involved in the Liberal Party since 1988 have conscientious grounds for their political standpoint, but is it fair to individuals who have joined the Liberal Party more recently, and who may have lengthy potential political careers ahead of them, that the continued existence of the Liberal Party keeps them while they belong to it at the outermost fringes of British political debate ?
I would agree with you entirely Hugh about the continuing Liberal Party. There are I am sure very capable liberal-thinking people within it who could make a more worthwhile contribution within the Liberal Democrats.
A swing to us from the Tories, with Labour falling into third place? Very nice.
AJ – “Without the ability to blame others” – what are you talking about? I know who I blame for the state of the economy, and I’m not going to stop telling them, either.
As a left of centre Conservative who is really happy with the Coalition, I was delighted with the Thirsk result.
Everybody is trying to throw cold water on the Coalition – yet it could prove to be one of the most successful governments ever – supported by the ‘silent majority’ of voters. I am particularly pleased that the LibDem vote went up considerably. This should steady nerves. It is Labour that is becoming isolated.
Now if only both the Cons and LibDems parties can keep their heads…
Michael Brocklehurst – as someone who is liberal and Liberal, as opposed to authoritarian, I hope the coalition brings out the best in both parties. The early signs are good.
Very disappointed with how this result has been reported on other news. Only the winner mentioned, not the rest of the result. I had to come to LDV to find out. BBC fail.
PS. Very well done Howard 🙂
Is there a maths teacher in the house (a serious Q by the way)?
The swing away from Labour was 9.9 %, the Con/LD/UKIP parties all saw an increase (that equates to 9% of the vote that Labour lost). So how do you work out that there was a swing from Con to LD (especially as the Con vote didn’t go down)?
Chris-sh – although the Con vote invreased, the LD vote increased by more – technically that’s a swing to us.
Sorry – I can’t resist the urge any more;
“Ooooooooooooooooooooooklahoma where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plan … ”
😉
Surely the swing to LibDems, Cons & UKIP all came at Lab’s expense?
@Tabman (still a serious Q by the way)
Sorry, stil can’t get my head around this. If part of the swing was Con to LD then it would mean that there must be a corresponding increase of previous Labour voters who voted conservative (as these didn’t go to the LDs), I somehow find it hard to believe that people leapt str8 over the LDs to Cons as obviously you are another socialist party. If the Cons has lost share, then I would have said it was far more likely to have been lost to UKIP (as that was the running story in the GE). But that would have then posed the same Q.
It’s not logical and doesn’t seem to make mathematical sense. As far as I can see, the only possible way that you could say that is if you carried out an exit poll asking people what they voted now & previously – even then it wouldn’t be guaranteed because of the margins of error.
So the genuine Q still exists in my mind – how did you work out that there was a swing Con – LD?
Which is great news. It wasn’t clear whether voters would decide there wasn’t much point in voting for us over the Conservatives if we were offering effectively the same policy platform, being part of a government, or would vote for our representatives (a) as representatives and (b) as liberal voices within the coalition. It sounds as though they’ve picked the latter at least in Thirsk and Malton.
@Tabman – “Chris-sh – although the Con vote invreased, the LD vote increased by more – technically that’s a swing to us.” – No. Only in the BBC strange way of looking at swing. A swing to us from the Tories is if people who would ordinarily vote for the Tories voted for us instead. Now that might have happened of course (in fact, it always happens in every election everywhere at least in a few individual cases) but the safest bet if two parties’ vote share has gone up and another down is that the voters for the latter ‘swung’ to the former. In fact, given the most likely source of the UKIP voters is the Conservative vote the results mask a more substantial swing from Labour to the Conservatives than is depicted here; about 4.5%. Without looking at things like box returns and canvassing data I’d say both coalition partners knocked a similar amount off the Labour vote and the Tory vote came mainly from UKIP.
Sorry, that last remark should have course read ‘the UKIP vote came mainly from the Tories’.
We also have to consider (1) the lower turnout and (2) the BBC’s dodgy “notional result” in a constituency that has had boundary changes.
The BBC’s results have a single-digit typo for Labour’s percentage: it was 13.6%, not 16.6%. The other figures (such as the notional percentage decline in Labour’s vote) seem to match the correct numbers.
Another BBC story gave the turnout as 50.3%, as opposed to 50.0%. Without knowing the total electorate, one can’t tell which figure is closer.
@Duncan Crowe
Exactly my thinking, which is why I can’t work out the 2.6% – and it was a genuine question as I’m not a pollster so I don’t know how these things are worked out.
If it came from the Beeb I’ll have to go there to see if they gace an explanation on how they worked it out.
However, mathematical head scratching aside, it was a good result. It’s still early days of course, but if things go well with the coalition, then perhaps it’s a sign that the LDP will be challenging Labour as the main home for the left vote.
“another socialist party” says Chris-Hyphen. Eh? Where did that one come from? Whats Socialist? Define meaning. Socialism, as a philosophy, is about centralisation, command and control by the centre, it is now about devolution, (once strongly opposed by the Conservatives who were socialist in outlook with their opposition to seperate governance of Scotland and Wales, as first advocated by the Liberal Party in their manifesto of 1945). Community Politics (or Localism as its now called) as first put forward as a strategy in 1970 was Liberal, and has been a theme of many a policy since. It is the opposite of socialism as it opposes centralism.
Philip Young
correct typo, second line, change now to “not” and it might make more sense.
“I somehow find it hard to believe that people leapt str8 over the LDs to Cons as obviously you are another socialist party. ”
It happens very regularly – Con / Lab switching. Goes with the authoritarian part of the political spectrum.
[To Philip Young:]
Ahem; that’s just one definition of socialism.
There have always been centralizing (Jacobin) and decentralizing (libertarian) trends in the socialist tradition, just as there always have been in the liberal (and even the conservative) tradition.
To many Americans, “liberal” means “big, tax-and-spend, over-regulated government from Washington, D.C., opposed to free enterprise, states’ rights and local control”. To many others it has different meanings.
@Philip Young
From Cambridge Dictionary = “the set of beliefs which states that all people are equal and should share equally in a country’s money”
You will notice that none of the things that you talked about (centralisation of power etc) are actually there. Just because most parties of the left/socialist persuasion believe that you can only do that by taking control of everything doesn’t mean that it is part of the definition.
Nowadays, it’s generally referred to as “left Wing”.
Simon Hughes describes himself as being on the “radical” left wing of the party and wants to replace Labour as the “progressive centre-left force in British politics”. To quote him “I would see myself as a guardian of the soul of the party,”
i.e. One of the leading MPs in the LDP would seem to believe that the Soul of the party is on the left.
P.S. I assume you mean 3rd line?
@Tabman
Thinking about it, you are right of course. However, it’s still not helping me with getting my head around where the 2.6% appeared from.
@DS Dave, Chris_Sh
The Press Association quotes the turnout as 50.03% and a swing of 1.75%, which look mathematically correct to me
I’m not that familiar with swing, because three-party contests rarely persist from one American election to the next, so U.S. swing would be usually nearly identical to (and thus redundant with) half of a party’s simple increase or decrease in percentage. (Should the Democrats go up by 4%, then by definition the Republicans decline by 4%, the Democratic margin over the GOP increases by 8% and the swing would be +4% R to D.) Swing in the States means a once-popular kind of dance music often despised by jazz purists (On the other hand, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing”.)
But by my calculations, the BBC’s reported C to LD swing of 1.8% (unlike their 16.6% for Labour) seems to be correct. I don’t know where the 2.6% comes from; is that the fabled but mysterious “three-party swing”?
Two-party wing is half the difference between one party’s change in percentage and another’s change in percentage (i.e., half the change in percentage margin between the two parties.)
In Thirsk and Malton, the victorious Tories increased their vote by 1%. The Lib Dems increased theirs by 4.5%. The difference between 1% and 4.5% is +3.5% in the Lib Dems’ favour. Half of that is 1.75%, which rounds up to a 1.8% swing from Tory to Liberal Democratic.
Here are the other swings I calculated (without the benefit of a second decimal digit for 2005):
LD +4.5% – Lab -9.8% = +14.3%; divided by 2 = a 7.2% swing from Labour to Liberal Democratic.
LD +4.5% – UKIP +0.7% = +3.8%; divided by 2 = a 1.9% swing from UKIP to Lib Dem.
C +1.0% – Lab -9.8% = +10.8%; divided by 2 = a 5.4% swing from Labour to the Tories.
C +1.0% – UKIP +0.7% = +0.3%; divided by 2 = an 0.2% swing from UKIP to the Tories.
UKIP +0.7% – Lab -9.8% = +10.5%; divided by 2 = a 5.3% swing from Labour to UKIP.
@stephen h
@Democratic Socialist Dave
Thanks – I thought I was losing my sanity – 1.8 as reported by the Beeb is what I get if rounded up, once I worked out how it was sorted. However, when I read the BBC Q&A I did note that they say:
“Although it gives an apparently clear picture, the disadvantage of swing is that it can only tell you about a shift from one party to another, not the shift between three or more parties.
Swing is calculated by taking the average of one party’s fall in the share of the vote and another party’s gain in support”
Which would seem to suggest that when one of the previous top 2 parties drop to 3rd, the swing isn’t as much use, especially as the new top 2 parties gained in percentage terms (but all 3 dropped from the notional figure).
Perhaps Helen will come back at some point to tell us what the 2.6% came from?
A good result. And useful in demonstrating that it is possible to campaign against the Tories, whilst still in coalition with them.
But we must keep reminding ourselves of the tests to come. The six billion of cuts just announced were the easy part. The real pain won’t come for a year, when the cuts announced this autumn begin to take effect.
We need to mentally prepare ourselves for a big mid-term slump in unpopularity. And when that slump comes, remind ourselves that we knew this was coming, and that, if we hold our nerve, after the mid-term slump comes electoral recovery.
Thanks, Stephen, that was very helpful.
With the benefit of a second digit and a different 2005 notional definition for UKIP and “Other” (Liberal in 2010), my revised double-digit positive swings would be (sparing all the intermediate figures):
To Liberal Democratic:
1.75% from Conservatives
7.17% from Labour
0.50% from the UKIP
1.82% from “others” (Liberal Party in 2010)
To Conservative
5.42% from Labour
0.07% from “others”
To the United Kingdom Independence Party
1.25% from Conservatives
6.66% from Labour
1.32% from “others”
To “Others” (Liberal Party in 2010):
5.35% from Labour
Conservative majority over all others:
+1.08% (from a notional 28.50% to a real 29.58%)
Turnout
–15.83% (from a notional 65.86% on Election Day 2005 to a real 50.03% three weeks after Election Day 2010)
Just to spare any unnecessary head-scratching or headaches, let me correct my
So if the Democrats increase by 4%, the swing from R to D would usually also be +4%. Which is why “swing” is rarely used in U.S. election reports, except rhetorically (“a big swing to the GOP”) and in arcane historical references (to various campaign “Swings Around the Circle”).
@Stephen
@Democratic Socialist Dave
And that is the second thing I’ve learnt today. I thought there would have been an agreed notional result. I used the notional results from UKPollingreport, which seem to be different to the ones you folks used (press assoc and BBC).
It’s been an education 😀
remember a week is a long time in politics. The swing one way soon turns another when punters dont like the outcome of policies – bet the capital gains is shelved – a major plank in coilition. The lib dems will get the blame for the cuts and the tories will drop them like a stone when not needed to bolster up a minority government
all these silly comments about swing aren’t helping any. The concept of “straight swing”, to give it the full title, dates back to the days of staid two-party contests when in the vast majority of seats the third and other parties could be ignored. In the modern volatile multi-party environment it’s really not a useful concept at all and it’s quite sad that the BBC clings to reporting it when it sheds little light on anything.
“hugh p” and James Robertson
EU-sceptic and egalitarian Liberals should join the Liberal Party for the sake of our progressive country and leave the EU-fanatic LibDems struggling in vain to boost their beloved EU while in the embrace of the inegalitarian and EU-sceptic Conservative Party.
I left the Liberal Democrats when it became a kind of heresy in the party to want the UK to leave the EU. The Liberal Party will grow in strength when it becomes as clearly EU-withdrawalist as UKIP is. It is already clearly EU-sceptic and was quite rightly opposed to the Euro, which the LibDems would have joined, which would have been a disaster for our country. I am glad that the LibDems are tempering the Conservative Party in many ways, but alarmed that they may stop the Conservative Party from starting to extricate the UK from the EU. I am a Liberal but would never, ever, vote for the LibDems these days because of their EU-fanaticism.
When the SDP merged with the Liberal Party, I was Chairman of Oxfordshire Liberals and a member of the SDP and thoroughly in favour of the merger. I thought the SDP would bring a concern for equality into the combined party, but all that it really brought in was EU-fanaticism. Interestingly and tellingly , the LibDem Constitution dropped the demand in the Preamble to the Constitution of the Liberal Party for all to have property – as well as liberty and security.
In our supposedly un-ideological age, there is a new liberal political ideology of Popular Capitalism waiting in the wings to oppose the widely but often unconsciously held conservative political ideology of unlimited Dynastic Capitalism, and the Liberal Party is leading the way. It has taken the demand in the preamble to the Liberal Party Constitution for property for all seriously and has adopted British Universal Inheritance as party policy – see http://www.liberal.org.uk and http://www.universal-inheritance.org.
I agree with Ian and Duncan Crowe that it’s probably more useful to look at the actual numbers of votes rather than swings. One interesting anomaly from the standard approaches concerns the votes for the UK Independence and Liberal Parties, as I tried to post earlier (before Dane Clouston’s appeal for the Liberal Party):
¶ Looking at those “others” in 2005, they were all votes for the same party and candidate as in 2005, John Clarke (or Clark, presuming it’s the same person inconsistently spelt by the BBC and PA) of the Liberal Party. There were no fourth-party candidates in the Vale of York in 2005, and all of the 1,522 UKIP votes and 1,417 Liberal votes counted in a notional 2005 Thirsk & Malton consituency were in fact cast in Ryedale, while apparently none were cast in the parts (if any) of Ryedale 2005 that were not carried into Thirsk and Malton 2010. The UKIP won 3.4% and the Liberals 3.2% of about 44,000 votes in Ryedale in 2005.
Mr Clarke won 1,417 votes in Ryedale in 2005 and, despite a drastically lower turnout (-23%) in the delayed election, actually increased his support by one to 1,418 within the revised boudaries of Thirsk and Malton. Either his vote is intensely personal, so he’d still get his 1,400 supporters to the polls even if 70% of other voters stayed away; or it benefitted, I suspect, from those who believe in liberalism or social democracy but dislike the Lib Dem coalition with the Tories. I suspect that part of the nearly thousand-vote absolute increase in the UKIP vote (from 1,522 in Ryedale to 2,502 in Th&M) also came from Tory supporters who are unhappy with the coalition, although no doubt some votes were cast in sympathy with the late UKIP candidate John Boakes.
If you play “what if?”, the question comes up, what if John Boakes had happily lived to fight his cause in Thirsk & Malton on May 6?
Of course, one can only guess because once the result of the general election and post-election negotiations was known, there was less incentive for some voters to come out, and this disinclination would not have been spread evenly among the parties. Whoever won (even if it were the Labour, Liberal or UKIP candidate), Britain would still be governed by a Conservative-Lib Dem coalition.
But if one does apply the general 63.2% turnout in Yorkshire and Humberside on 6 May 2010 to the electorate of Thirsk and Malton, and does increase the May 27 votes proportionately among the candidates, the numbers (with comparison to the notional aggregation of real 2005 voters) would look like this:
25,473 – 25,702 = – _,229 : Conservative
11,224 – _9,314 = + 1,910 : Liberal Democratic
_6,529 – 11,585 = – 5,056 : Labour
_3,160 – _1,522 = + 1,638 : UK Independence
_1,791 – _1,417 = + _,374 : Liberal
48,178 – 49,540 = – 1,362 : Total
I’m not sure that in a real 6 May 2010 election, the Conservative vote in Thirsk and Malton (given the knowledge that voters would and would not have had on that day) would actually have declined, but it seems likely that the Lib Dem vote would have increased perceptibly and the Labour vote would have slumped markedly. (The UKIP and Liberal votes increased even with the lower actual turnout on May 27.)
And it’s hard to judge what tactical considerations would have guided Labour voters. Not knowing on May 6 what they knew on May 27, would more of those who voted Lib Dem have voted Labour? Would more Labour non-voters have come out to the polls (to vote Labour or Liberal Democratic)?
@DANE
The comments about the Liberal party earlier in this thread were a tad crass at times but I don’t think there’s any need for that kind of response. I find what you wrote quite puzzling though.
Firstly – as an economic liberal surely you don’t honestly think there is anything to be gained from leaving the EU? 60% of our foreign trade is with other EU states – if we leave we can either ditch all that trade overnight (economic suicide) or we could join the EEA or adopt a Swiss model. If we join the EEA then we adopt the majority of EU legislation without having any input into it – surely even worse for a eurosceptic than full membership. If we adopt the Swiss model it’s like being in the EEA but with a lot more hassle and no additional benefits. I honestly don’t see any way in which leaving the EU even could be beneficial.
Secondly – the Liberal party constitution includes a section about “building a United Europe” and before the current leader it tended to be a very europhilic party, from what I know. It may well be so again when he leaves. Why would you join that party if you want to leave the EU? Surely something like the Libertarian Party would be better for you if the matter of Europe honestly means that much to you.
Thirdly, the Liberal Party was involved in the NO2EU campaign last year and joined up with three socialist parties, a communist party and a politicial society with connections to a foriegn communist party. This hardly strikes me as “popular capitalism” so much as being content to drop the whole capitalism thing altogether.
@DS DAVE
I’m not too sure we can read too much into those results to be honest. On the UKIP side you can see swings nearly as big in some other safe blue seats – Epping Forest (where I lived once upon a time) for instance had a very big boost to UKIP as well, nearly doubled I think. I have no doubt that some right-wing Tories will ditch the blues one day but I don’t think we can chalk this up to that kind of thing. I suspect it’s more that potential UKIP voters felt safe to vote for their first choice party if they knew that their second choice would get the seat if that makes sense.
The Liberal party result may be more significant but even then I doubt it – John Clark(e) must have been around for a while if he contested Ryedale, he’s got a lot more visibility than usual in this election and his result was not entirely unusual for the Liberal party. On their website you can see their election results and they did quite well in Exeter (also netting over 1000 votes) and very well in a Liverpool seat (getting 3000ish!).
I think it too early to draw conclusions – wait till next year’s elections.
@Democratic Socialist Dave
“I agree with Ian and Duncan Crowe that it’s probably more useful to look at the actual numbers of votes rather than swings”
As someone who never gave it much thought before today, I find myself agreeing, it seems like a pointless exercise for the most part.
“What if”
It is an interesting theory, but any prediction is obviously made even more difficult by the boundary change.
“but it seems likely that the Lib Dem vote would have increased perceptibly and the Labour vote would have slumped markedly.”
The demographic of the new area would seem to suggest that the population may have been more likely to vote either CP or LD, so it is possible that there would have been a drop in Labour turnout regardless of when the poll was held. However as we have no real previous figures to work on then we can’t really work out what sort of figure would be “core vote” for any of the parties and how far the LP may have fell.
As you say, there was less incentive for some voters to come out, but it is probably impossible to guess who took the hit on that. It could be said that voters for all of the top 3 parties had less of an incentive to drag themselves to the polling booth.
The other 2 seats involved in the boundary change (York Outer and York Central) are interesting as well. York outer should have been a LD win if the notional figures are anything to go by, but the CP jumped to first and labour lost votes even though the actual turnout was a lot higher than the notional figure. York central was actually won by the LP, but again although the turnout was higher than the notional they lost votes. Looking at the numbers for the increases in CP and LD votes, it looks possible that the LP vote went to the LDs. All interesting stuff and it shows how hard it must be to calculate a notional vote that matches reality (another caveat to apply when listening to the pundits).
“DunKhan”
Our trade with the EU would not stop if we were to leave the EU. We are free to adjust the value of the Pound against the Euro, which we would not be if the LibDems had had their wicked way! We have friends all round the world. We can be as independent as well as cooperative as we wish to be. I see some sort of Associate Membership, which could include Turkey at the other end of the Continent of Europe, thereby saving Turkey’s face when the French and Germans veto their full membership.
Leaving the EU would be extremely beneficial to our deficit. It would also be extremely beneficial to stop taxing ourselves in order for the CAP to pay £330,000 or so every year to the Duke of Westminster and £500,000 every year to Prince Charles for the privilege of owning land that they have inherited tax free thanks to the monstrous exemptions from Inheritance Tax for agricultural as well as business and shareholding assets, not to mention lifetime gifts, for the wealthy.
I have nothing against a United Europe. The Liberal Party is committed to
cooperating with other countries to build a united Europe, not to losing our country in a country called Europe. I am just against our membership of the European Union. I re-joined the Liberal Party for the very reason that it was EU-sceptic, Euro-sceptic and, as I thought, under Steve Radford, EU-withdrawalist. Even now it is for a “reform or else withdraw” compromise policy. I know nothing about the Libertarian Party thank you. I am a Liberal – and was twice very nearly elected Liberal MP for Newbury in 1974. I will not presume to suggest that you join a party other than the LibDems.
I am delighted if the Liberal Party was involved in the NO2EU campaign last year. That does not alter their policy of liberal popular capitalism with British Universal Inheritance.