At 44 seats out of 158 across the three Northern regions, the Conservatives presumably think that they have hit rock bottom up here. They have not.
At the Greater Mancunian heart of their Northern Poorhouse and Northern Powercut, their share of the vote has just halved. Halved. Since May.
Although it will be less remarked upon, 2020 is going to be for Labour in the North what 2015 was for the SNP in Scotland.
The Conservatives are so indifferent to the North that they are allowing several of their seats here to be abolished by boundary changes. Do they even know that they have them?
A very high proportion of their remaining voters here did not grow up here, with Southerners in the North far more likely to vote Conservative than Southerners in the South are. But their Northern-raised children are a whole other story.
Wipe-out awaits. Place your bets as to the last Conservative seat in each of the North East (that's easy), the North West, and Yorkshire and the Humber.
Losses on this scale are easily enough to cost that party its overall majority. When that happens, then it will finally be able to see the North of England.
In the meantime, week after week, Labour is now recording local council gains all over the country, including in places to which the appeal of Tony Blair never extended even in his pomp.
May's English local elections are going to be a triumph.
Capped by the recovery of the London Mayorality, possibly on George Galloway's second preferences, but increasingly probably not.
And what if the Conservatives became the Official Opposition in Scotland and made gains in Wales, with UKIP entering the Scottish Parliament and, in some numbers, the Welsh Assembly?
The only great loss would be to those parties' self-understanding and self-respect. They despise Scotland and Wales. Yet next year, no one is going to vote for them anywhere else.
The governing parties share of the vote & total vote usually falls in By Elections, not least where that party was already in a distant third place. The Tories did appallingly in the last parliament's by-elections. It doesn't mean they'll be wiped out. As for your claims about sweeping local gains, I follow these things through several sources such as @BritianElects & the VoteUK psephology board, & I haven't seen the slightest shred of evidence of this in recent weeks & months.
ReplyDeleteYou can't have been paying attention, then. There is usually only one by-election in a given authority, but the pattern is clear: except perhaps in the parallel universe that Scotland has become, there is nowhere that Jeremy Corbyn's Labour cannot win, including places that Tony Blair's Labour always wrote off as hopeless.
DeleteIf one goes back to September, they will find that only 2 local by-elections produced a Labour gain from Tory, in Rochford, Essex. The winning candidiate only won 32.4% of the vote there. The rest of the vote was very evenly split between the Conservative & UKIP candidiates.This was indeed in a core Tory area, but the Ward had previously elected Labour councillors in 2002 & 2014.
DeleteThe Ward gained by Labour in Cherwell already elected a Labour councillor as recently as 2011.
Actually, Labour did win a ward from the Greens in Edinburgh recenly, & held on against the SNP convincingly last night in Blantyre. so maybe you're actually underestimating the Scottish party whilst overestimating the importance of English by-election results. Also, in the last couple of months the Tories have net-gained seats from Labour.
I don't know where you are getting these figures. Well, I do. But in the early hours of every Friday morning, the Labour gains duly come in, week in, week out. Tory-funded Twitter accounts are neither here nor there.
DeleteLabour are holding seats against the SNP, that seems to have peaked. UKIP are losing loads of council seats they only won in May but have to defend because their councillors are resigning all over the shop after a few months, same as the BNP ones used to do.
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