As promised on Friday here is my assessment of the performance of the minor parties.

We’ve heard a lot both in the media and on the various socials since last Thursday about how the main Westminster parties fared during the by-elections in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Somerton and Frome and the Selby and Ainsty constituencies. Whilst it’s correct to focus to a certain extent to the champions in these political fights, it is also a good idea to look at what is going on with the undercard, the minor or challenger parties.

None of these elections were breakthroughs for Reform, Reclaim or the Social Democratic Parties and some of them did better than I might have expected, especially those with less public name recognition. However none of them managed to get the required 5%+ of votes needed to save their election deposit, although this was also the case for the Labour candidate in Somerton and Frome who also lost their deposit.

Reform, which didn’t stand in Uxbridge and Ruislip, did the best out of the two contests that they took part in. They came fourth in Somerton and Frome with 1332 votes or 3.7% of the 44.8% of those who turned out and fifth in Selby and Ainsty gaining 1303 votes or 3.4% of the turned out vote. In this tranche of by-elections Reform’s was the best performance out of all the challenger parties.

The Reclaim Party led by Lawrence Fox who stood in the Uxbridge and Ruislip constituency managed to come fourth in this contest but with only 714 votes equalling 2.3% of the 46% of the electorate that bothered to turn out. I suspect that what may have happened here is that as ULEZ is such a hot button issue in this area those who were concerned about it, decided that they would vote for what they saw as the best chance of countering it, which in this case was the Conservative candidate. Although Mr Fox’s party was fighting a similar battle against ULEZ, not enough voters appeared to believe that Reclaim had enough credibility to be a repository for their votes when so much was at stake. Labour would have, as usual, made things worse for the residents in this constituency and therefore it was vital that Labour were beaten. This election was very close and maybe those who perceived that it was going to be a close contest decided that it was better to vote for the Tories rather than for Reclaim and thereby waste a vote? However I have to say something very positive about Reclaim’s performance in Uxbridge and Ruislip and that is that they managed to beat the Liberal Democrats into fifth place. Lawrence Fox might have lost his deposit in this election but at least he’s managed to beat a representative of the Janus-faced Lib Dems.

Out of all the challenger parties that have been a part of this recent series of by-elections the Social Democratic Party is the oldest with its current incarnation dating back to 1992. This party has a long history of gaining council seats in places like South Wales and the North and also losing them and then gaining others. The SDP currently has two seats on Leeds City Council.

In these series of by-elections the SDP for the first time since reformation stood candidates in two Parliamentary constituency contests. They had candidates in Selby and Ainsty and in Uxbridge and Ruislip. Neither of these two candidates managed to get more than 1% if the vote with 0.9% or 314 votes in Selby and Ainsty being their best. Personally I’m pretty disappointed in this result because I like the SDP’s viewpoint of being slightly to the Left on the economy and a bit more to the right than the Tories are on social and cultural issues. However to be fair to them as this is the first time they’ve fought two concurrent parliamentary seats in by-elections that are so high profile that the contests attracted a large number of candidates, some of them novelty ones, then I’ll cut them a bit of slack. They’ve got some good people working for this party such as Cllr Wayne Dixon who has had his profile raised recently by the effective manner in which he challenged West Yorkshire Mayor Tracy Brabin on matters surrounding anti-social behaviour. It will be interesting to see how the SDP perform in other contests and at the General Election.

Some of the minor parties that have made a lot of noise on social media could not translate that online support into real world votes and in particular I’m thinking of the Heritage Party. This party’s activists are loud and proud online but are almost completely irrelevant in the political real world. I used to think that Heritage might have been a sensible repository for the votes of social conservatives but Heritage’s descent into various forms of tin foil hattery such as opposition to 5G mobile communications and water fluoridation has done for them especially amongst those of us who understand the radio frequency spectrum and are aware of the history of water fluoridation. Unfortunately although some of their policies, such as those regarding immigration and energy security are good ones, they have sadly become the nutters on the ballot paper. This party only stood in the Selby and Ainsty constituency in this current crop of by-elections and managed to garner ten less votes than the Monster Raving Loony Party which to be frank is a pretty awful position for a party that claims to represent Britain’s social conservatives to be in.

On the whole the minor and challenger parties performed pretty poorly in these three by-elections. None of them managed to save their deposits and only Reclaim can claim to have had any impact on the results for the Westminster parties by pushing the Lib Dems into fifth place.

The reasons as I see if for this series of failures to do better are manifold. In the Uxbridge and Ruislip case people didn’t want to risk letting in Labour so held their noses and voted Tory because the Tory candidate promised to stand up for local residents against Greater London’s Mayor Sadiq ‘Saracen’ Khan. Name recognition or lack of it could be somewhat to blame for the poor performance of these challenger parties and it is notable that the minor party with the most support in the two contests they fought was Reform. Voters know of the Reform Party because they are familiar with its previous incarnation of the Brexit Party and that may have helped them get their vote numbers to go over four figures.

But apart from name recognition and poor public awareness of what these parties stand for, what has caused the most problems in my opinion is the lack of a ground game. Too many of these alternative candidates, with the exception here of the SDP, look all too much like they have been parachuted in and have little or no real connection with the areas they want to represent. Few of these parties have any sort of local branch structure where support for them in an area can be grown or where potential local campaigns can be run from or where politics can be become both a social activity as well as a cause.

As much as I despise the two faced, untrustworthy, illiberal and undemocratic Liberal Democrat party I have to admit that they’ve really got a handle on local ground games when it comes to politics. This party doesn’t just appear at election time and be completely invisible the rest of the time. What the Lib Dems do is engage in stuff like leafleting outside of election time, local data gathering to work out what will make voters turn out and vote for them and getting involved in the sort of community campaigns (such as the cleaning up and repair of playgrounds) that not only are genuinely popular with local people but which also paints the party in a good light. I always find it amazing that people will vote for the Lib Dems despite their long history of sex and other scandals but this happens because the Lib Dems make a credible fist of focusing on the issues that are of immediate importance to voters. People will ignore the existence of sleazy individuals within the Lib Dems provided that they can be confident that if granted power then they would repair the potholes.

Maybe the way for these minor and challenger parties to gain more political influence and maybe even Parliamentary seats (a difficult task in itself under FPTP) is to establish both local branch structures and more effective ground games. I believe that the challenger parties need to do this in order to become more credible in the eyes of the voter. You also need as a political party to give people a reason to vote for you if you are standing for election and I don’t think that on the whole they did this. Sure they attracted those voters who wanted to vote against the political class but they didn’t give enough of a positive reason to allow more voters to trust these parties with the votes. Unless the challenger parties improve their local ground games, do better on the name recognition front and give people positive reasons to vote for them then these parties are destined to always remain rooted in the undercard of British politics.