The Chairman Mao resembling, Monarchy hating, threat to Britain, Labour Party thread

[HanoiVillan]

It's not 'a great result', come on. It is a seat they held, and they are the main opposition party, yet the seat swung away from them and they nearly lost it. This is a seat that has been trending toward Labour, whose demographics do not favour the Conservative party, and which would be a 'nice to have' but in no way a target for the Tories come election time.

It's not an awful result, and *relative to the extremely low expectations they have set with previous poor results* it is a decent result, but if they tell themselves this is 'a great result' they are in denial.

I'm happy Labour have won, and Leadbeater will be a better MP than the Tory or Galloway would have been, but the polls are what they are, there is a mountain to climb, and clinging on in a defensive performance is not where they want to be. They have, however, done the minimum.

[HanoiVillan]

18 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

[Batley and Spen] would be a 'nice to have' but in no way a target for the Tories come election time.

Should modify this bit actually, because I see people have spotted that with the boundary changes, this seat might be adding a very Tory-leaning ward from Calderdale that would make it in theory an ultra-marginal, so I guess the future level of competition in the seat is very dependent on that.

[Mark Albrighton]

 

[bickster]

1 hour ago, HanoiVillan said:

It's not 'a great result', come on. It is a seat they held, and they are the main opposition party, yet the seat swung away from them and they nearly lost it. This is a seat that has been trending toward Labour, whose demographics do not favour the Conservative party, and which would be a 'nice to have' but in no way a target for the Tories come election time.

This doesn't stand up to scrutiny, The seat has not been trending towards Labour at all, since 2001 the vote has generally been in decline apart from the 2017 outlier

2001 - 49.4%

2005 - 45.8%

2010 - 41.5%

2015 - 43.2%

2017 - 55.5%

2019 - 42.7%

2021 - 35.3%

If you add the George Galloway votes to the Labour Votes you end up with a percentage higher than any of the above. In that timeframe the Labour vote has never really faced a challenge until yesterday. The Tories however have nearly always had Ukips / BNP / Yorkshire Tea Party taking decent chunks out of their side of the vote

Viewing it the way you have is the way the Tories are spinning it. It isn't true

[HanoiVillan]

8 minutes ago, bickster said:

This doesn't stand up to scrutiny, The seat has not been trending towards Labour at all, since 2001 the vote has generally been in decline apart from the 2017 outlier

2001 - 49.4%

2005 - 45.8%

2010 - 41.5%

2015 - 43.2%

2017 - 55.5%

2019 - 42.7%

2021 - 35.3%

This is an insufficient way to look at the data.

If we go back to 1997, when Labour won the seat, we can see a pattern of better and better performances in Batley & Spen, with a very tiny reversion in 2019:

In 1997, Labour won Batley & Spen by 13 points, and won the election by  a margin of 12.5 points, which meant that Batley & Spen leaned to Labour by only 0.5 points more than the nation as a whole (no surprise really, since it was a 1997 win). By 2017, Labour won by 17 points, while getting 2.5 points less than the Tories across the country; by this point, the seat is Labour leaning by 19.5 points relative to the nation. You can see that there was a pretty big jump from 2001 to 2005, and then the story has been one of a gradual drift to Labour relative to the country ever since, with the exception of a slight drift back in 2019.

To put this election into the most similar context we can (obviously there is no GE to compare it to, so this is inevitably an approximation), Labour won the seat by 1 point and are 9 points down in Politico's poll of polls right now, so the 'B&S dif to national' is +10, quite a way below recent results. That's why it's not 'a great result'.

19 minutes ago, bickster said:

If you add the George Galloway votes to the Labour Votes you end up with a percentage higher than any of the above. In that timeframe the Labour vote has never really faced a challenge until yesterday. The Tories however have nearly always had Ukips / BNP / Yorkshire Tea Party taking decent chunks out of their side of the vote

'It's more complicated than that'. Prior to the election, there were plenty of people out there simply adding the Heavy Woollen vote to the Tory vote, and saying that would lead to a Labour loss, but clearly the Tories did not pick up all that vote; their vote share declined. That vote probably split between the Tories, Labour, and staying home, with maybe some going to Galloway as an 'anti-system'/protest choice (though on the surface there doesn't seem to be much overlap as they seem to have been pitching to very different crowds). In the same way as the Tories couldn't just add the Heavy Woollen vote and say 'job done', neither can Labour simply add the Galloway vote and say 'job done'. It probably won't split all in Labour's favour come election time, though - see table above - they *should* be winning the seat comfortably if they are close enough to the Tories nationally to seriously challenge to win an election (as above, this is assuming the boundaries stay the same, which they might not).

[HanoiVillan]

A petty but amusing thing that has happened is that Politico's 'morning email' that everyone in politics reads contained the incorrect claim that this was Labour's 'first by-election victory since 2012':

Because political journalists just read this email and don't engage their brain, they repeat it uncritically:

It is, in fact, nowhere near Labour's first by-election win since 2012:

LOL.

You may remember Sebastian Payne - who is paid a lot of money to be the Financial Times' Political Editor, and has literally written a book about 'the red wall' - from a recent episode when he claimed that the Tories had won several seats in West Yorkshire 'for the first time' in 2019. They actually won 0 West Yorkshire seats for the first time in 2019. Absolutely useless.

[blandy]

3 hours ago, HanoiVillan said:

It's not 'a great result', come on. It is a seat they held, and they are the main opposition party, yet the seat swung away from them and they nearly lost it. This is a seat that has been trending toward Labour, whose demographics do not favour the Conservative party, and which would be a 'nice to have' but in no way a target for the Tories come election time.

It's not an awful result, and *relative to the extremely low expectations they have set with previous poor results* it is a decent result, but if they tell themselves this is 'a great result' they are in denial.

I'm happy Labour have won, and Leadbeater will be a better MP than the Tory or Galloway would have been, but the polls are what they are, there is a mountain to climb, and clinging on in a defensive performance is not where they want to be. They have, however, done the minimum.

It's (as with all of them in the past few years), not (IMO) the kind of thing you can look at long terms trends and deduce much at all. This is because of Brexit and Covid, and in this one because of Galloway too.

Party politics has fundamentally changed. "Old" trends and results are not the same indicators of "who ought to win" any more. We've seen UKIPs/Brexit party take chunks out of Tory votes,  out of (to a lesser extent) Labour votes, we've seen Remain seats go all Lib-Demy, Greens making a bigger impact in places, taking votes from Labour or Lib Dem votes and so on.

In the B&S election, Galloway stood as a "beat Starmer" candidate, targeting Labour voters. The Brexity ones were no longer standing, so ought, you'd think to have kind of handed their chunk of the vote to the tories, the vaccine boost might have helped the tories, or maybe it's starting to fade and Hancock and delaying opening up might have played a part, and then there's a previous MP murdered...

Trends, schmends.

[HanoiVillan]

@blandy to the extent what you're saying here is 'people read too much into by-elections', I agree (but of course this is also true for all the Labour centrists currently roaring around Twitter cupping their hands over their ears as well).

But I don't agree with this:

5 minutes ago, blandy said:

[..]

Party politics has fundamentally changed. "Old" trends and results are not the same indicators of "who ought to win" any more. We've seen UKIPs/Brexit party take chunks out of Tory votes,  out of (to a lesser extent) Labour votes, we've seen Remain seats go all Lib-Demy, Greens making a bigger impact in places, taking votes from Labour or Lib Dem votes and so on.

[..]

Trends, schmends.

At the end of the day, nearly all of the people who live in Batley and Spen now lived in it in 2019, and a very large proportion of them will have lived in it in 1997 as well. Of course you *can* analyse trends; the fun of it is that there are multiple ways to analyse the same stuff so we can all get irked about it

[markavfc40]

If whoever voted for these three had gone just a tiny bit less far to the right and voted Tory then the Tories would have won Batley and Spen.

Therese Hirst (English Democrats) 207 votes

Anne Marie Waters (For Britain) 97 votes

Jayda Fransen (Independent far right activist) 50 votes

[bickster]

Another aside of this, someone earlier in the topic was putting a lot of weight behind the Survation Poll in the middle of June that suggested a 6 point lead for the Tories and that Survation have their polling spot on

Maybe we'll have that one put to bed now too

[Seat68]

1 minute ago, bickster said:

Another aside of this, someone earlier in the topic was putting a lot of weight behind the Survation Poll in the middle of June that suggested a 6 point lead for the Tories and that Survation have their polling spot on

Maybe we'll have that one put to bed now too

[HanoiVillan]

A poll three weeks before an election is a snapshot three weeks before an election though, not a prediction?

[bickster]

2 hours ago, HanoiVillan said:

A poll three weeks before an election is a snapshot three weeks before an election though, not a prediction?

It' wasn't even a snapshot, that poll was a skewed guess (sample was too low) at the behest of the Daily Mail

[HanoiVillan]

24 minutes ago, bickster said:

It' wasn't even a snapshot, that poll was a skewed guess (sample was too low) at the behest of the Daily Mail

Sure, I take your point about the poll validity. I've seen different people make opposing arguments about sample sizes, I suppose the point is just that the error bar is much bigger.

I just didn't really get why it was a gotcha, obviously even if it was exactly right 3 weeks or however long ago (and I agree it probably wasn't, British polling is famously shit by international standards) it would probably have changed by election day.

Did they do a poll in the 48 hours or so before election day? Quite happy to laught at how wrong they were if so.

[dAVe80]

I went with my union to Batley on Wednesday, and did some leaflet drops (with trusty wooden spatula in hand). Feeling was quite chipper, and there was a lot of Labour staffers there, as well as associated trade union officers and reps. Mostly people who worked for various different MPs, local Labour offices, and unions. Can't fault the effort to get the job done, and they put in a lot of hard work. 

More than a bit annoyed this morning to see Mandleson accusing the left of doing a Mandleson, and saying that the left worked against the leadership in this by-election. That was you pal, in 2019. 

[bickster]

37 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

Sure, I take your point about the poll validity. I've seen different people make opposing arguments about sample sizes, I suppose the point is just that the error bar is much bigger.

I just didn't really get why it was a gotcha, obviously even if it was exactly right 3 weeks or however long ago (and I agree it probably wasn't, British polling is famously shit by international standards) it would probably have changed by election day.

Did they do a poll in the 48 hours or so before election day? Quite happy to laught at how wrong they were if so.

AFAIA that was the only poll commissioned 

[OutByEaster?]

One of the things that I think stands out in the current political landscape is that there's a void that Keir Starmer ought to be filling with ideas and policies and a Labour party that stands for something. Kim Leadbetter won that election on her own, she may as well have been an independent.

We're now 15 months into Starmer's leadership and we're still waiting for him to get started. I have no idea what he believes, what he wants for the country, or even what he opposes - he's a stealth leader.

I think we're seeing a picture where floating voters are looking for something to vote for and struggling to find it.

[Chindie]

He believes in eradicating the former regime. Everything else is secondary.

[markavfc40]

1 hour ago, OutByEaster? said:

We're now 15 months into Starmer's leadership and we're still waiting for him to get started. I have no idea what he believes, what he wants for the country, or even what he opposes - he's a stealth leader.

I'm just about still hoping the reason for this is that covid has dominated everything since he became leader. He needs to set his stall out though and have some clear distinction between Labour and the Tories.  It shouldn't be hard as Labour should be a million miles from where the Tories have positioned themselves. 

[blandy]

1 hour ago, OutByEaster? said:

One of the things that I think stands out in the current political landscape is that there's a void that Keir Starmer ought to be filling with ideas and policies and a Labour party that stands for something. Kim Leadbetter won that election on her own, she may as well have been an independent.

We're now 15 months into Starmer's leadership and we're still waiting for him to get started. I have no idea what he believes, what he wants for the country, or even what he opposes - he's a stealth leader.

I think we're seeing a picture where floating voters are looking for something to vote for and struggling to find it.

Definitely. Have they even done a conference where they decide what their policies are?  Maybe COVID means they couldn’t?  Because they can’t vote if they’re not there. In the absence of policies no one knows what or who they stand for