Labour’s North Shropshire disaster
Published
by
Richard Kuper
JVL Introduction
It was hard to fathom Labour’s strategy in the North Shropshire by-election.
What is clear is that Labour has moved from being a contender in 2017 to being a marginal political force in the area.
All self-inflicted. Voters clearly wanted to give the Tories a kicking. Who better to support than Labour – if only Labour had anything to offer!
For starters, Labour HQ refused to allow Graeme Currie, the candidate in 3 previous General elections, to even stand for selection.
In this guest post on Skwawkbox, Labour activist Rosie Dee offers a general diagnosis: listen to your members on the ground!
“‘Quality candidate’ spin can’t replace community involvement and activism…”
But does Starmer’s Labour want to learn?
A post-mortem of Labour’s N Shropshire disaster
Labour activist ‘Rosie Dee’ on her party’s humiliation in last night’s by-election, in which a leave seat voted for the most ‘remain’ party and rejected Starmer’s offering outright
Loading article text…
Why was Graeme Currie not allowed to stand for election??? Surprise, surprise! He put a Palestine flag on one of his comments on social media!! He committed other grave crimes against Starmers dictates. He MAY have been found guilty of not liking bagels? At any rate he is clearly a raging antisemitic and so are all those ex labour voters who did not endorse his Starmer chosen replacement!
A provocative analysis of Labour’s disappointing, or should I say, ominous performance. If Labour did far worse than in 2019 when Brexit was the primary election issue and currently with Johnson’s ‘fall from.grace’ in the public’s eyes, then the future looks grim. Not only has Labour lost touch with the electorate; it has lost touch with the Party’s activists. It is obsessed with eradicating any lingering Corbynist influence, that it has failed to keep an eye on what Labour stands for.
I’m not sure how “In 190 years, Labour has almost always been second”. Labour was only founded in 1900, that’s 121 years ago for those who are mathematically challenged. The ILP was fed in 1893, that possibly gets us to 128 years. Just saying.
But more seriously, from its first creation in 1832 to its abolition in 1885, the constituency almost always elected 2 Conservatives (a Whig came second on one occasion). When the modern consituency, with different boundaries, was created in 1983, the Liberals took second place until the Labour national landslide of 1997, when Labour moved into second place.
Does it matter? Well, if an article has such blatant errors, why should anyone trust the rest of it?
Graeme Currie was told that he was under investigation shortly before the election. It was on dubious grounds of an email sent some years before. It looks as if this was cooked up to get somebody out as a contender who was a Corbyn supporter. The candidate was in effect parachuted in as an unknown with little understanding of the area. The result is not surprising.
I think there are two things at work here. Firstly, in a true-blue seat like North Shropshire, disaffected Tory voters find it much easier to vote for the Lib Dems than the Labour party and that was obvious before the election. Secondly, the huge drop in Labour votes can only be down to Keir Starmer and the current leadership of the Labour party. In this, too, disaffected Labour voters found it easier to not vote, vote for the Greens or even vote for the Lib Dems than the Tories.
That the 60% Leave-voting constituency decided to vote for the party which was the most Remain of all, at the last election, is a sign that Brexit is no longer seen as a strength for the Tories (and, conversely, its Remain position less of a weakness for the LIb Dems). We can – tentatively – say that the domination of UK politics by Brexit may be coming to an end.
Of course, people will vote differently in General Elections than they do in by-elections and the seat (and Chesham and Amersham too, likely enough) will revert to the Tories then. But the trends seen will still be present, albeit smaller. Maybe the Labour vote will only drop by 10%, instead of halve. Maybe the Lib Dems will only increase by 10%, instead of double.
What all this will amount to is hard to predict. I mean, under PR, it’d be easy – if the Labour vote dropped by 10%, they’d lose 10% of their MPs, if the Lib Dem vote went up by 10%, they’d gain an extra 10% in MPs. FPTP doesn’t work that way and it’s entirely possible for the two factors above to lead to a stasis or even small gain in Labour MPs (an increase in the Lib Dem vote usually benefits Labour as it takes votes from the Tories). But if this was combined with a drop in Tory MPs and rise in Lib Dem MPs, it might deprive the Tories of power.
The other scenario – also possible under FPTP – is that the Tory loss of votes to the Lib Dems is balanced by a Labour loss of votes to the Greens or to non-voting. Leaving the Tories in power with a slightly reduced majority.
Only under FPTP could a party loses so many votes and stay in power. PR Now!
“‘Quality candidate’ spin can’t replace community involvement and activism…”
“But does Starmer’s Labour want to learn?”
I think there will be many of us, waiting – with bated breath – for an answer to Rosie’s question.
Sadly, there will be many of those waiting, who know the answer, already.
We’re, just, awaiting confirmation.
The Party of the Sleaze vs. the Party of the Smears.
Strange how MSM, especially BBC & Channel 4 have not addressed the Labour Party’s poor turn out, nor analysed reasons why. Criticism of Starmer not allowed?
It’s a bit rich praising the LibDems for not supporting the Tory Covid vote when it is they who enabled the whole Tory disaster to take place.
The comments on Labour are tragically correct.
Paul Seligman (18 Dec., 22.51) has pointed out some weaknesses in the lead article by Rosie Dee. Election buffs may like to dig a bit deeper. Paul is correct that the present Shropshire North or North Shropshire constituency dates from 1983, when the previous Oswestry constituency was extended to include the town of Newport. However from 1997 Newport was removed from the constituency and since then the North Shropshire constituency has had almost exactly the same boundaries as the Oswestry constituency had before 1983. Ever since Labour first stood a candidate for parliament in this area in 1918, only once has the party got fewer votes than in 2021. That was in 1923, when the electorate (which excluded women under 30) was less than 33,000, as compared with the present 82,000.
We are seeing the magic Starmer effect in action. Labour votes just vanish!