Three Conservative by-elections and the mood on the ground

On Thursday, July 20, 2023, the Conservatives could well be facing defeat in three English constituencies where their MPs have stood down.

These are Uxbridge and South Ruislip in west London (Boris Johnson), Selby and Ainsty in North Yorkshire (Nigel Adams) and Somerset and Frome in the West Country (David Warburton).

Whatever happens should provide a useful barometer for the Conservatives in these three disparate parts of England, the Conservatives’ homeland.

On July 16, Conservative Party chairman Greg Hands MP told The Mail on Sunday (MoS):

… it was going to be ‘challenging’ but said time spent campaigning would not be ‘in vain’.

He also appeared to blame the former PM Boris Johnson for triggering one of the by-elections on July 20 after resigning as MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip.

Voters will also go to the polls in Selby and Ainsty after Mr Johnson’s ally Nigel Adams resigned, and in Somerset and Frome after David Warburton stood down following revelations about his private life.

Nevertheless, Mr Hands insisted the party could reclaim the seats – though he refused to make a prediction of Thursday’s results.

Hmm.

He would say that wouldn’t he?

Hands pointed out the difference between a by-election and a general election (emphases mine):

By-elections are traditionally not the same as a General Election. People know that a by-election – whatever the result – is not going to change who is the Prime Minister.

So I find most people respect what Rishi Sunak is doing and think he’s doing a good job, including here in Uxbridge. But they’ll know that the result isn’t going to change who runs the Government. They know that that’ll be a determination next year.

The MoS reminds us:

The battles come at a difficult period in the electoral cycle: after 13 years of Tory rule and some 15 months before a General Election.

As for the mood on the ground:

Add to that a growing cost of living crisis and endless party infighting, and it looks as though the Tories may struggle. However, there appears to be no enthusiasm for Labour and Sir Keir Starmer – and outright condemnation of London’s Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan.

In outer London, where Boris’s former constituency is:

Mr Khan’s plan to extend Ulez (the ultra low emission zone) to outer London next month is deeply unpopular. Mr Hands insists the by-election is being treated as a referendum on the policy and that voting for the Tory candidate Steve Tuckwell will put pressure on Mr Khan.

Why voters are unhappy

The Conservatives have wasted their once-80-seat majority since December 2019. Granted, the pandemic landed early in 2020, which made them look Labour-lite with many policies, from lockdown to furlough.

Meanwhile, this year, Labour change their minds on policy positions nearly every week. As an example, they recently said they would increase child benefit allowance to a third child in a family rather than just two children. Now, they have changed their minds and said there is not enough money for more than two children per family to receive the allowance.

One of Guido Fawkes’s readers explains how child benefit allowance works:

The problem was that some people were knocking out sprogs to stay on benefit and get a nice handsome income out of it. Under universal credit mothers are not expected to work till youngest child is three, so if you timed it right you could stay on benefit for years; also the benefit cap was brought in to get control of this, but usually they manage to get around this with a “disabled“ child which stops the cap being applied, and a very wide range of conditions including many common mental health conditions can lead to being classified as disabled. Also you will frequently see the same father, who is absent, on the birth certificates of the children, this means that his income doesn’t get considered when applying for UC [Universal Credit], but in reality they are living as a family all together.

Disability these days even covers autism. Interestingly, more and more British children have been diagnosed with autism. Hmm.

Many English voters are suspicious of Labour’s wealth redistribution policies. Labour want middle class people to work hard so their money can be redistributed to others via tax increases. Pictured below are Keir Starmer and deputy leader Angela Rayner:

As for the Conservatives, Rishi Sunak’s most recent pledge, Stop the Boats, has not worked. Record numbers of dinghies are arriving on the southern coast of England every day from France.

Furthermore, inflation isn’t going anywhere soon. Interest rates have been rising — from 2.2% to 5%, so far — since November 2022.

Focus groups

On Monday, July 17, Guido Fawkes summarised the findings from pollster Lord Ashcroft, whose team interviewed various focus groups ahead of this week’s by-elections (red emphases in the original):

Lord Ashcroft has set up focus groups in Somerton, Selby and Uxbridge ahead of Thursday’s by-elections, and the participants certainly haven’t held back. Voters had some harsh words for Rishi Sunak, who was described as a “lame duck”, with another saying he was “just kind of place-holding“. Respondents went even further with their criticisms of the “hot mess” that is the government. The government was also called “dishonest”, “ineffective”, “a circus”, “paralysed” and “a shambles”. And these characterisations all came from Tory voters…

Other responses looked somewhat more positive for the Conservatives’ electoral prospects. Voters had some sympathy for Boris Johnson, who was ousted in a “politically motivated” campaign, as they also often bought up local issues. These including planning and hospitals as crime, the ULEZ and, above all, Sadiq Khan got mentions in Uxbridge. Although Rishi got some flack, voters weren’t exactly enthused by “drab” Sir Keir either …

North Yorkshire

Recently, Rishi Sunak invited members from the North Yorkshire Conservative Association to his home in his constituency of Richmond, not far from Selby and Ainsty. Note the sports complex in the back, complete with heated swimming pool. Photo credit — The Mail via Ben Lack Photography Ltd:

Fred Skulthorp — now, there’s a good Yorkshire name — wrote about the event for UnHerd on July 18 in ‘Westminster has failed Selby’:

It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon in North Yorkshire, and Rishi Sunak is trying to reassure the North Yorkshire Conservative Association gathered on his front lawn that all is not lost. Sheltered under a marquee, he’s like a cruise-ship crooner entertaining a ballroom full of pensioners: “Time is on our side,” he says to his audience, alluding to the discord beyond the rolling hills of Northallerton. “Eighteen months is a long time to turn things around.” After few words of reassurance, the raffle is announced with a sense of relief. A full 13 years of Tory rule have passed, and, amid the boozy, forgetful haze of the slow afternoon, the Sunaks’ garden party is mourning the decline of the modern British Conservative Party.

Labour activists have been swooping on Selby and Ainsty before Thursday’s by-election:

On Thursday, Labour will have a chance to overturn a 20,000 majority and lay the first meaningful stone in the path to a Tory electoral apocalypse. Two weeks ago, the race was compared to a coin toss. But since then, a great pilgrimage of shadow ministers and Labour activists has flooded the Yorkshire town, hoping to pull off the second-largest swing to Labour in electoral history. This would be the sort of decisive victory not seen in Selby since the days of the English Civil War, when a Royalist rout spelled the end of King Charles I’s rule in the North. The bookies now have them as favourites to win.

However, Selby is a mix of rich and poor. As such, nothing is guaranteed:

Selby, however, as both Labour and Conservative canvassers confess, is a “weird constituency”. It takes in pockets of poverty and comfortable Country Life villages. It is an area of contrasts and contradictions: a beautiful Norman Abbey within a stone’s throw of a high street garlanded with vape shops; a commuter belt to Leeds and York in the former industrial heartland once home to the most productive coal mine in Europe. A place where three-quarters of homes are owner-occupied, but the housing shortage and mortgage-rate crisis now make home ownership both untenable and undesirable. A place where you can find all of England’s problems and convince no one of their solutions.

… Selby is also a place where we can observe, in the form of political rebels and strays, the two unresolved forces of British electoral politics: the disbelief in the power of politics to change things, and a hatred of Westminster.

According to Fred Skulthorp, the locals are angry with Nigel Adams, the local boy made good in Parliament, who resigned because Boris didn’t give him a peerage:

“Good riddance, you shocking grifter,” read one of the kinder comments on a farewell post. The legacy of Adams, further tainted by his temporal association with the other more sleaze-orientated by-elections, has only contributed to a broad cynicism towards Westminster. Adams himself is now regarded as a political morality tale in the pubs of Selby: the local lad who went to London and got lost in its web in his pursuit of patronage.

The Conservatives have put up another local candidate, Claire Holmes, a lawyer and councillor. One of her campaign pledges is to protect the green belt, but it’s not enough:

“the sort of lazy politics that will stop anyone under 50 from voting for us”, as one senior councillor put it.

Labour’s candidate is also local. By happy coincidence, his first name, like that of the leader’s, is Keir. (The founder of the Labour Party was Keir Hardie.) He isn’t generating any enthusiasm, either:

Speaking in the Commons last week, Keir Starmer pointedly raised the case of a police officer from Selby forced to sell his home due to rising mortgage costs. And mortgage deals are coming to an end across the area as repayments rise by up to £400 a month. At the age of 25, the Labour candidate Keir Mather might seem perfectly positioned to court young voters stuck in the area and unable to get on the housing ladder. But — Oxford to public-affairs consultant via the office of Wes Streeting [Shadow Minister for Health] — he delivers his campaign video with the robotic flair of a sixth-former running for headboy. When I walk into his campaign office in the centre of the high street, full of students and the odd flat-capped local, Mather is whisked away into a backroom the moment I mention the word “interview”. It’s not hard to understand why. He is most effective when saying nothing and grinning weakly in front of a giant portable screen that reads: Conservative Mortgage Bombshell.

There is also an independant candidate, Nick Palmer, who, from the soundbites in the article, sounds rather foul-mouthed.

Then there is the fledgling Yorkshire Party, whose candidate is the former Conservative councillor Mike Jordan. He wants a parliament for Yorkshire. Hmm.

Near the railway station is a popular café. Skulthorp nipped in to escape the rain:

A clear “90% of the people who come in here won’t vote”, the cafe owner tells us. “Modern politicians have no power or control over the real decisions,” adds her husband. “So what’s the point?” 

We are right back where we left off early in 2019, with the parliamentary chaos over Brexit and millions of Britons saying their vote doesn’t count. So what changed their mind, encouraging them to vote Conservative for the first time in their lives? Boris Johnson and his pledge, Get Brexit Done.

This time we have neither. We don’t even have a proper Brexit.

No wonder people are disappointed with Westminster, yet again.

More on the by-election result to follow, once analysis is in.