Doing it properly for JR

John Rentoul tweeted this on 15 January and commented on my reply:

I’m sure he knows what an x-axis is and the limitations in that respect of the chart he tweeted, especially for periods when elections are spaced other than 4/5 years apart – like now. Anyway, this is possibly a slightly better way of presenting the same data for the vote share of the two main parties:

Really, it should be a histogram for each election, the data having no meaning in the intervals between elections. But joining up the data points appears to reveal a cyclic pattern of several election intervals duration.

Superimposing the percentage of the total vote which goes to parties other than the Conservatives or Labour seems to indicate the end in 2017 of what had been a very long-term trend. It was in the 1970s when the non-Labour, non-Tory share of the vote was last as low as in 2017. There were five general elections in the ten years from October 1964 to October 1974 - if there were a cycle, it was a short one. But it might be unwise to rule out a revival in Liberal Democrat and UKIP fortunes in the next few years.


Note

This is the full link to Cowling's data: drive.google.com/file/d/0B5Ik-g

The Richmond Park By-Election, 2016

The parliamentary by-election in the Richmond Park constituency held on 1 December 2016 was unusual, even for a by-election. It came about because the incumbent Conservative MP, Zac Goldsmith, had committed himself at the time of the 2015 general election, to resigning should a Tory government chose to proceed with a third runway at nearby London Heathrow. Earlier in 2016 Goldsmith had run for the Conservatives in the London Mayoral election – had he and not Sadiq Khan won, he would have resigned his seat then.

Because of the Conservative government’s Heathrow decision, in the December by-election Goldsmith stood as an Independent. Labour and the Liberal Democrats put up candidates against him but not UKIP, the Conservatives or the Green Party. In the June 2016 EU Referendum Goldsmith had supported Leave. The Liberal Democrat candidate in the by-election made it clear that she, like her party nationally post-Referendum, now supported Britain remaining in the Single Market. When the results came out, press coverage concentrated on Goldsmith’s losing his seat and the surge in the Liberal Democrat vote:

Much of the comment pointed to the high levels of Remain support locally in the Referendum earlier in the year. Anyone who attempts to look at this relationship more closely will encounter a problem: the Referendum results in London were reported at Borough level, not by parliamentary constituency. As the map below shows, the constituency (PC) of Richmond Park lies mostly in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames (LB RuT) and partly in the Royal (London) Borough of Kingston upon Thames (RB KuT). The rest of LB RuT forms the PC of Twickenham. The RB KuT, except for the wards contributing to the Richmond Park PC, forms the PC of Kingston and Surbiton. 

The Referendum results for LB RuT and RB KuT are shown below in the context of other areas in London and the UK. Both were in the top 10% of Remain favouring areas across the country, but locally KuT was only just above the average for London and RuT was not one of the top 10 London boroughs.

The prevailing opinion was that the Liberal Democrat’s by-election success could be best explained in terms of a reaction to the Referendum. That is to say, local distaste for Brexit in 2016 had replaced local endorsement of Goldsmith’s anti-Heathrow stance in 2015. And there does seem to have been a differential effect in the turnout with the anyone-but-Goldsmith voting holding up quite well.

Perhaps some insight into Goldsmith’s fall from grace can be found in his original rise to favour revealed by comparing Richmond Park to the other two constituencies mentioned above in the three consecutive general elections of 2005, 2010 and 2015:

In 2005, all three were comfortably held by the Liberal Democrats, part of a cluster of seats in south west London which they had built up in previous elections. In 2010, the Tories improved their position moderately in Kingston and Surbiton and Twickenham but made a considerable improvement in Richmond Park where their candidate, Goldsmith, was elected. In 2015, all three seats became Tory-held, some of the former Liberal Democrat voters apparently preferring Labour or Green after five years of coalition. The Conservatives would probably have done better but for the rise of UKIP.

Does the 2016 by-election herald a return to favour for the Liberal Democrats and offer prospects of regaining the other two constituencies? If there were to be by-elections in either of them soon, the answer is probably yes, given the enthusiasm in the boroughs concerned for Remain and the small Conservative majorities by comparison with Goldsmith’s in2015. However, once the UK has exercised Article 50 in March 2017, events will move on and the key issues for voters at the next general election, quite possibly three years away, are not yet obvious.

After the 2015 election and until December 2016, there was only one Liberal Democrat MP in London, Tom Brake (a far from household name), in Carshalton and Wallington, the seat he has held since 1997. That constituency lies in the LB of Sutton together with the PC of Sutton and Cheam. In the Referendum LB Sutton was 28th among the London boroughs by pro-Remain ranking and one of only five of the 32 boroughs to be more pro-Leave than the UK as a whole (Table 2 above).

It seems obvious from the general election results 2005-2015 above and Brake's small majority in 2015 that the Tories would have added his scalp to their collection but for the votes taken by UKIP. If there were to be a by-election in Carshalton and Wallington in the near future, it could well be taken by the Tories. This raises the interesting point that the anti-Leave position currently adopted by the Liberal Democrats may not work for them everywhere as well as it did in Richmond Park – Labour’s problem writ small. 

A future post will look more closely at the national Liberal Democrat position post -Referendum in terms of the constituencies now held and those they might want to regain. Another will provide some further analysis of the London boroughs and the parliamentary constituencies within their boundaries.

An informal Labour / Lib Dem pact?

The by-election for the post of Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) in South Yorkshire took place on 30 October and the results received little attention in the media which have been more interested in UKIP’s progress in the two parliamentary by-elections in Clacton and Rochester & Strood. A typical report noted that Labour had won with a small majority on a low turnout. However, it’s worth looking at the results in a little more detail and comparing what happened this year with the results of the first PCC election in South Yorkshire in 2012:

Several things stand out:

• The turnout was actually higher in 2014 than in 2012 by 2,800* votes. 
• The Labour vote was only 500* votes down on 2012. 
• There was no Liberal Democrat candidate in 2014 but in 2012 there had been 10,000* Lib Dem votes. By that time the 2010 general election Lib Dem surge (“Cleggmania”) was in the distant past so these were probably long-term Lib Dem supporters. 
• The English Democrats, a right-wing party of no national significance but big in South Yorkshire, lost 14,500* votes, the Conservatives lost 2,500* votes from 2012 levels. 
• UKIP increased its votes by about 30,000*. 

But it’s not obvious what was happening underneath. Probably some erstwhile English Democrats and Conservatives moved to UKIP and the slight increase in the turnout was mostly to their benefit as well - about 20,000* votes in all. Where did the other 10,000* come from? At a guess, many came from Labour but their departure was compensated for on this occasion by the arrival of former Lib Dems.

Which raises an interesting question – what would have happened if there had been a Lib Dem PCC candidate? As a guess, something like this, which assumes (middle column) that 5,000 votes go back to the Lib Dems from Labour and 2,500 from both the Conservatives and UKIP. The numbers don’t matter too much because the key point is that almost certainly Labour would not have had more than 50% of the vote in the first round:

In these circumstances the second vote system used for PCC elections would have come into effect. Where the first preference vote had been for Conservative, Lib Dem or English Democrat and the second preference was for Labour or UKIP (with the two largest vote shares), the votes would be transferred. 

There would then have been a second count of the Labour and UKIP votes. A similar argument to that above can be used to estimate what might have happened, assuming that all the voters had expressed second preferences, which they almost certainly didn’t**. It is worth considering what might have been the best case for UKIP. They might have picked up all the Conservative and all the English Democrat votes as second preferences. If they had also acquired all the Lib Dem second votes they would have won, but more probably, as above, at least 50% of the Lib Dems would probably have gone to Labour and 2,500* might have been ‘wasted’ on the Conservatives or not expressed any second preference at all. Even if 2,500* Lib Dems had voted UKIP as second choice, the second round would have given Labour its majority. It’s therefore not surprising that in the real ballot UKIP, even when the Labour first round margin over 50% was wafer-thin, didn’t ask for a recount.

But the margin of 29 wouldn’t have existed if there had been a Lib Dem candidate in the first round. I have no idea why this was the case, but, if nothing else, this PCC by-election offers an insight into how useful an informal Labour Lib Dem pact could be in normal parliamentary elections, even though these are “first-past-the–post”. If the Lib Dems were to soft-pedal their campaigning in Northern constituencies and concentrate their resources on holding onto their existing seats, particularly in SW England where, if Labour were to do the same in return, there would almost certainly be benefits to both. It would reduce UKIP’s impact on Labour in the North and the Conservative threat to the Lib Dems in the South West.

* Rounded figures.

** For example, in the 2012 Avon & Somerset PCC election second round, only 56% of the votes cast for the eliminated candidates indicated a second preference for one or other of the two candidates remaining.