So the dust has settled on a couple of by elections this week. Both produced terrible results for the Tories and one in particular, Mid Bedfordshire generated a lot of heat because it was an extremely rare event in Britain – a three way contest. Precisely because Mid Bedfordshire had a unique set of circumstances attached to it I’m not going to infer anything about policy, strategy or comms for future contests. Sorry if that disappoints anyone! During the course of this blog, however, I hope to make sense of the outcome.
We’ll never see the like again
Some by elections have a generic feel to them, others such as Batley & Spen a seat that often features a third party that isn’t the Lib Dems or the Greens, are idiosyncratic. Mid Bedfordshire was more than that, there will never be a by election remotely like it. For that you can blame Nadine Dorries – the campaign, which involved a lengthy phoney war, lasted four months due to her procrastination. That meant when I and the Sevenoaks Lib Dem team rocked up in Lower Stondon and Cranfield on the penultimate weekend all but the hardest to reach and most inattentive members of the public were struck with election fatigue. I laboured to slip a leaflet through a ground level letterbox only to have it shoved back onto the doormat seconds later.
Sometimes we complain about a short timeline leading up to election day but four weeks is clearly better than four months – if the election had happened in mid-July we probably would’ve won as our campaign and resource strategy is geared up for an intense short-term fight. In campaigning so hard, for so long, we outstayed our welcome for a certain swathe of voters. We don’t need to agonise over this too much as we’ll probably never see another four month campaign in our lifetimes.
Emma Holland-Lindsay, Alistair Strathern and Festus Akinbusoye fought a long hard campaign
I’m done with electoral calculus, opinion polling is in trouble
My surface impressions from driving extensively through the seat and doing some door knocking is that there were a roughly equal amount of Lib Dem and Labour posters and stakeboards up, and no Conservative ones. While we got a frosty reception on the doorstep – partly down to the election fatigue that had set in – I was picking up no enthusiasm for the Tories, not a single person said anything like, ‘In spite of everything, I’m sticking with them’.
It was quite something, therefore, to witness the twittersphere in the last week, lots of vitriol and ill will being spat in our direction by people who didn’t live in Mid Bedfordshire or near it, and hadn’t been involved in the campaign. One visit showed it was obvious the Conservatives weren’t going to win. The coup de grace was an apparent ex-Lib Dem ex pat member telling us how disappointed he was that we had the temerity to campaign from 12,000 miles away in New Zealand.
What was yanking the chain of all the keyboard warriors? A combination of opinion polls and electoral calculus predictions. Now I’m a very consistent person, I’d identify as a liberal left environmentalist since the age of 10, my friends would say I’m very stubborn. I’m also a Keynsian so sometimes I change my mind when the facts change. In the last few years I’ve become far more reluctant to shine a light on individual opinion polls, only referring to aggregated polling, and I’m totally done with electoral calculus predictions. There’s about 8 – 10 individuals or organisations doing electoral calculus predictions – some of them are thoroughly braindead and extrapolate out a uniform national swing. Some of them rely on individual modelling methodology that must remain secret, unlike the methods of the organisations that are official members of the British Polling Council, who must be open. If you have to be like the magic circle and not reveal your intellectual property then as far as I’m concerned it’s nothing better than guesswork, and in some cases amounts to nothing more than propaganda from people who are hugely biased.
The official polling organisations are struggling at the moment too. Earlier this year it was pointed out that Reform UK’s support is overstated in regular opinion polls because there is a high-engagement bias built into polling now it’s predominantly carried out online, not on the phone so much. Thus Reform UK has been polling in the 5% – 8%, far higher than actual election results. Let’s look at both Tamworth and Mid Beds. Tamworth was a hugely Eurosceptic constituency, voting 67% to leave in the EU referendum, but Reform UK polled only 5.4%. Mid Beds was above average on the Eurosceptic scale, voting 56% to leave, but Reform UK polled 3.7%. This would suggest that Reform UK’s real level is around 3 – 2.5% nationally. Why does this polling error matter? Lately the Conservative government has overestimated the importance of Reform UK and its new agenda – Net Stupid, War on the Motorist etc – and has shaped policy for what is a very small but vocal minority. These policies could have potentially long term damaging consequences for Britain, especially for our environment (such as axing HS2 Northern) so the General Election can’t come soon enough.
Falling short of the winning post
In this parliament the Lib Dems have won four parliamentary by elections all off the Tories and we have a net gain of 682 council seats won mostly, though not exclusively, off the Tories. We know what we’re doing in Tory heartlands and we’re pretty good at getting their voters to switch to us. We’ve won by elections in the past, we’ll win them in the future, it didn’t happen this time, why not? Apart from the campaign going on way too long, the character of Mid Beds probably worked against us. A few years ago I wrote a blog about the potential for a Liberal revival in the countryside, I pointed out that not all countryside is the same and broke it down into four types. Here they are:
- Big city rural hinterland
- Academic rural hinterland
- Remote rural hinterland
- Middle England
We do well in the first three, less well in Middle England, this is what I said about Middle England, “Not remote, not academic, not part of a big city commuter belt, these are the bits in the middle – Wiltshire, Dorset, Suffolk, Lincolnshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire. With no academic or championing of the geographically distanced angle Lib Dems have done the least well in these places. People often vote Conservative in Middle England as a social or behavioural norm even if it’s against their economic, professional or leisure pursuit interests. The recent success of Lincolnshire Lib Dems in the wolds – winning Gainsborough and Market Rasen – show it’s possible to win in heavily Brexity, socially Conservative places – but it’s harder work than in other parts of the countryside.”
It’s possible to pick up some voters in Middle England but compared to other parts of it’s a much harder job, as those that canvassed Mid Bedfordshire will have discovered. We shouldn’t be too downhearted, however, as this result has no bearing on our ability to win in target seats such as Eastbourne, Winchester, Cheltenham or St Ives that have a completely different character.
What we achieved in the campaign
Election geography anoraks will have noted that the Mid Beds part of Central Bedfordshire council was a mix of independent and Conservative wards. The council itself is a Independent minority administration. This is not necessarily a good thing, often in Middle England areas people stand as independents as they are not a perfect fit for the Conservative party but can’t bring themselves to stand for the opposition parties either, often they are Conservative lite in nature. While a lot of people got their knickers in a twist because both Labour and the Lib Dems were campaigning hard in the same seat – going head to head is a novelty – in the end the two parties dovetailed within the seat – a natural sorting procedure that happens everywhere else in Britain. In the last week of the campaign Labour focused on the two towns – Flitwick and Ampthill – and the Lib Dems worked the villages, places like Woburn, Houghton Conquest, Shefford and Barton-le-Clay. It’s now pretty obvious as to where both parties should campaign in the future to break up the Indie/Tory duopoly within the council.
In the last week social media was full of ridiculous messages from Lib Dems or ex-Lib Dems members saying it was wrong of us to campaign hard. Either these people were lying about their affiliation or fundamentally don’t understand our party’s culture. We don’t have the Russian oligarch/Trades Union money, nationwide club/office network or extensive partisan media support that the two main parties have. If we don’t campaign we don’t win – it’s as simple as that.
When we win that’s on the basis of a mass of accumulated knowledge and experience derived from successful and unsuccessful national and local election campaigns. There are virtually no wins from pop up parties in British politics. The two possible exceptions – Respect winning in 2005 and 2012 – involved George Galloway who’d been an MP since 1987, and a load of ex-Labour campaign admin staff, not rookies. You have to earn your campaigning stripes.
We didn’t win this time, but no party has a 100% hit rate in elections they target, and the experience will feed into us Lib Dems bleeding the Tories dry in next year’s local and general elections. This is really something people on the progressive left should not have a problem with. It’s notable that in the week leading up to polling day both Ed Davey and Keir Starmer were tight lipped about the result and weren’t seen in Mid Beds, that’s because no one knew what was going to happen, apart from Rishi Sunak who probably knew he was going to suffer another heavy loss.
As they say in North Korea, “It’s a free and fair election, so expect surprises!” I hope Labour supporters enjoy their success, but Lib Dems supporters should not get too downhearted as it is not indicative of future outcomes in target seats. If there is a strategy positive, Mid Beds reminds us of what our limits are and that it’s sensible to remain focussed on our target seats. At the moment that’s a mix of leafy suburbs, spa towns, market towns, heritage towns, university towns, rugged and touristy countryside and affluent commuter belts. That’s enough to be getting on with for now.
My blog about countryside politics can be found here:
returnoftheliberal 
Clearly you had a street level feeling for what went on.
From the sky, it seems to me that both parties had a difficult task to get a 20% swing and both should be congratulated on at least getting the Tories out.
Secondly, Libdems were the only party to get more votes than the previous two elections, despite the low turnover, so well done.
With these 9,000 votes work needs to continue at council and on a day to day basis to build proof of what the Libdems can do. Then when the general election comes we can do better still.
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If you look at the council control map North of London, there’s a good variety there – Lib Dem, Labour and Conservative controlled or led councils, a Residents Society council in Uttlesford, the Independent led council in Central Beds and the Green led council in East Herts. We’ve really gained in strength in this area in recent years so I imagine a lot of cllrs/activists poured in from Bedford, Milton Keynes, Luton, Huntingdonshire, St Albans, Watford etc. It remains to be seen how many more Tories we can displace in Central Beds but I’m encouraged by what we’re doing in the region. All eyes are now on Buckinghamshire and the two Northants councils – all Tory controlled, to see what gains we can make there.
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As a High Wycombe voter desperate to see the back of Steve Baker, it felt really important for Labour and the Lib Dems to fight this one out and understand better their strengths / weaknesses before the GE (even if that had led to a Tory MP for a year).
In the end, it feels that Labour turned more ex Tories in these areas than we might have predicted before the by-election, which should in turn help the Lib Dems be more focused on their GE targets.
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