As I predicted on Wednesday, the Conservatives have held onto the seat of Old Bexley and Sidcup in South East London but with a massively reduced majority. The byelection which was held following the death of popular Tory MP James Brokenshire from cancer saw the Tories majority in the seat reduced from nearly 19000 at the 2019 General Election to roughly 4000 at this byelection.
Turn out was particularly poor with polling percentages dropping from nearly 70% in 2019 to about 35% at yesterdays contest. The low turnout seems at first glance to be made up of Tory voters staying at home as Labour’s vote did not just hold up but increased by 11% something that surprised me. This tells me that either Labour have a lot of postal votes or Sir Keir Starmer’s defenestration of the Corbynites is having a positive effect on the Labour Party’s image.
The Reform Party came in at third place, better than I had expected but did so on a remarkably small number of votes, 1400 or 6.9% of the vote share. However because they got more than 5% of the vote they keep their deposit, which is something quite remarkable for a relatively new political party. I suspect that Reform took some votes from those Tory inclined voters who did bother to turn out. Saving their deposit may well stand Reform in good stead when it comes to other byelections such as Shropshire North where they have a small advantage as they can play off of the sleaze scandal that saw Owen Patterson vacate his seat in the aftermath of that scandal.
Although the Greens increased their support slightly they, along with the Liberal Democrats lost their deposits with the Lib Dems losing significant support. Also losing their deposits were the rest of the undercard parties including David Kurten’s failed social conservative but now anti-vaccination party, Heritage. This party only managed to get 116 votes which is 22 votes more than the Monster Raving Loony Party got and maybe that should tell Mr Kurten something about how his particular and increasingly tin foil hat views are received by the voters. Personally I believe that Britain needs a party to represent the interests of social conservatives but it’s increasingly clear that Heritage is not that party.
Whilst it is difficult to extrapolate the future from one byelection with such a low turnout what it might show is that we now have to a large extent politics as usual back, with the governing party taking a hit at a byelection, which is the normal pattern. The massive levels of support that the Tories got during the height of the pandemic emergency seems to be ebbing away and voters are less willing to hold onto nurse for fear of finding something worse.
To conclude. It looks like the Tory voters stayed at home in protest at the party lurching to the Left and also in protest at the Tories becoming a party of high taxation, open borders and extreme green lunacy. I don’t for one minute buy into the excuse for the drop in majority given by the Tory winner which is that it was the cold weather that put people off voting. The drop in support is far too great for that to be a major factor in my view.
This is a win but still a bad result for the Tories. It’s not so bad that Boris Johnson should fear for his job but a few more byelection results like this, especially if Reform continue to do relatively well, then that situation might well change.
