Ministers may as well blame an unexpected furniture-based crime wave given the litany of excuses they’ve given about the pounding in the polls the voters of Tamworth and Mid-Beds gave them.
The Chairman of the Conservatives did the media rounds following the election drubbing last night. He told Sky News – no longer in Rupert’s hands – that his party “fought good campaigns”.
Which is an interesting take – especially given that the new MP for the constituency (Alistair Strathern) is the first non-Tory MP for Mid-Beds since…1931.
It didn’t get much better for him on Radio 4.
Talking of crime waves, that record makes 10 Downing Street something like a den of thieves that should be showing up on police crime data panels as ‘addresses of concern’!
Sir Keir Starmer’s centrist gamble
There are ***lots*** of parallels with what Tony Blair and colleagues did in the mid-1990s with ‘New Labour’, and what Sir Keir Starmer is doing as the current Labour leader. A browse through books published about Labour in the 1990s will bring up more than a few familiar scenarios – whether the freezing out of the far left, which in Tony Blair’s case led to the former leader of the National Union of Miners, Arthur Scargill to quit Labour and form his own political party in 1996. Note at the time, Scargill was still remembered as one of the most prominent political figures of the previous decade. An equivalent today would be Jeremy Corbyn forming his own political party and contesting elections.
It’s one that’s caused a huge amount of disquiet amongst some sections of the Labour Movement – one that has resulted in the resignation of Cllr Mairéad Healy from the Labour Group on Cambridge City Council. In the meantime, *eight* councillors quit the Labour group on Oxford City Council. Both followed Sir Keir Starmer’s comments on LBC regarding the war crimes in Israel and Gaza.
I’m not going to be commenting that catastrophe because if the global international diplomatic community cannot come up with a peaceful solution to the violence pre-dating WW2…exactly. As one person said, I’m just pro-not-killing-people – especially children and civilians. (See the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which evolved out of Eglantyne Jebb’s text for the Geneva Convention on the Rights of the Child that was ratified by the League of Nations nearly a century ago)
“What became of the Liberal Democrats?”
At the start I thought they were favourites, because they were throwing lots of activists at the seat very publicly – including several from Cambridgeshire. (Mid Beds is next door to Huntingdonshire district). Daisy Cooper MP (LibDems – St Albans) explained her reasoning to Jon Sopel.
Above – I’ll leave you to judge the exchange for yourselves.
The point at which I started taking note of Labour’s campaign in Mid-Beds was when a number of Cambridge and southern Cambridgeshire activists seemed to be spending *a lot of time* campaigning over the county border. As in, far more time than I had seen in any previous by-election. (Social media updates start to tell a story). In the final few days leading up to polling day, even in the cold rain, they were there.
Above – Cllr Dr Alexandra Bulat (Labour – Abbey Division) on Cambridgeshire County Council, up at 8.50pm in Mid-Beds over the county border
Above – Dan Greef, who stood for Labour in South Cambs in 2017, and 2019, also pounding the streets of Bedfordshire
The two of them would not have been out in the cold and rain just to annoy the LibDems. Clearly Labour’s HQ made a decision some time ago to actively contest the seat rather than give the LibDems a free hit in an informal ‘progressive alliance’. Yet back in June when it was clear there was going to be a by-election, former Cambridge City Councillor Peter Roberts said Labour had the capacity to fight two by-elections
Above – turns out former Cllr Roberts was proved right.
Smaller parties such as the Liberal Democrats and also The Greens will understandably point to the far smaller level of media coverage they get from the broadcast media – not least when compared with what are sort of Tory/UKIP/Brexit splinter parties whose representation on current affairs TV is disproportionate to the number of council seats and the number of seats in Parliament they have won.
The inevitable risk the LibDems and Greens have to manage is having their target seats swamped by a Labour tidal wave similar to what happened in 1997 – although tactical voting amplified by some newspapers (notably the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror) enabled the Liberal Democrats to more than double their seats from 20 in 1992 to 46 in 1997 – rising to 62 in 2005. Currently they have 15 MPs – having gained four by-election wins since the catastrophic results of 2019 where despite gaining over a million extra votes, they were spread so thin that they ended up with fewer seats than prior to the election being called.
“Is this the 1990s all over again?”
Following the catastrophic local election results for the Tories in 1996, this is what one reaction was.
The person answering a much younger Jon Sopel was Robin Hodgson, the then Chairman of Conservative Associations. Again, compare and judge with their national party chairman’s appearances in the media earlier.
While there are some big similarities, there are some huge differences that cannot be discounted.
- The collective experience of the pandemic – especially as the public inquiry pulls out and publishes more and more astonishing pieces of evidence
- The changing roles and influences of a number of countries in international politics – the emergence of China over the past quarter of a century for example.
- The impact of communications technology – and how governments are struggling. to regulate tech giants to adapting to previously unknown threats such as mis-and-disinformation.
Talking of all things mis-and-disinformation, one of the things that candidates and parties need to be aware of is data protection
This was picked up by a number of people following concerns raised about some leaflets delivered by the Tories in Queen Edith’s in the run up to the by-election. I styled it Tory G-D-P-R – Rumpus.
But actually the case raises serious points about what sort of information that canvassers and candidates are collecting in this information age of ours. Unless you join a political party, there are very few ways of learning how political parties collect and use data to inform their actions. I only discovered it from watching election counts from about a decade ago, seeing for the first time these two huge local party political machines (Labour and LibDems) crashing against each other.
For all of the headlines and explanations about the by-election results, the use of people’s personal information, and also the weaknesses in, and the lack of safeguards in our electoral system remain huge issues of concern – something ministers have not taken the swift and robust measures that so many have demanded. You’d almost think they stand to benefit from such a broken system – hence their inaction. I hope a future government changes this. And soon.
Anyway, come to my Great Cambridge Crash Course events. The next intro session is on Thurs 26 Oct 2023 at Rock Road Library, Cambridge, from 1.30pm.
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