Some thoughts on the Gorton and Denton by-election

[andrewducker]

A bit of context - A safe Labour seat switched to a seat where Labour came third (Greens 40%, Reform 28%, Labour 25%).

1) That wasn't as close as polls made it out to be. The polls had Green 7% above or tied with Labour, who were either 3% ahead of or tied with Reform. Instead, Greens walked it by 12%. If we're going to be stuck with making decisions about tactical voting based on the polls then we need polls that are more accurate than that!

2) This is the worst possible result for Labour. If people are going to vote tactically against Reform (which they really want to do), then you *really* want to be able to place yourself as the best alternative to beat them. And now we've had two by-elections where that wasn't the case. One in Wales, which Plaid Cymru won and one in *Manchester*, a Labour heartland, which the Greens won. This makes it look like even where Labour are historically strong they aren't going to beat Reform.

3) What does this do for the Greens in the council elections? Well, presumably it sets them up to claim that they're a strong contender to beat Reform, everywhere where Labour is currently the lead. They might be! They might not be! But it really doesn't look good for Labour any way around.

4) What does it do for the Lib Dems in the council elections? It probably locks them out from any of the Labour heartlands - they'll focus on the Conservative areas of the country. Which, frankly, appears to be their strategy anyway.

5) I have no idea who a bunch of people actually wanted to vote for. It seems likely that at least 28% wanted to vote for each of Labour, Greens, and Reform, but if the polls had shown that Labout was on 30% and Greens were on 28%, who would that extra 12% who voted for the Greens have turned out for?

6) This is a bloody stupid way to run an election system. "I'll vote for whoever has the best chance of beating the party I don't like" is such a fragile way of voting for anything. It "works" in a 2 (or 2.5) party system, as England has been stuck in for decades. It completely fails in a 5 party system (6 in Wales and Scotland).

7) What does this mean for Keir Starmer? Well, I reckon nobody else wants to be PM for the council elections. So I'm not expecting him to resign until the 8th of May.

8) What does this mean for Labour's "Tack rightward to gain votes from fascists" strategy? Your guess is as good as mine, but I really hope it's dead now.

Comments

[lilysea]

I really wish England would get rid of first past the post voting

and adopt preferential voting, where you number your candidates

1, 2, 3, 4, 5

and if your #1 candidate doesn't get elected [or if your #1 candidate gets elected with votes to spare], a fraction of the value of your vote gets passed on to your #2 candidate, and so on.

https://www.aec.gov.au/learn/files/poster-counting-hor-pref-voting.pdf

[cosmolinguist]

Re 5), the Labour vote around here has always been really soft. It can be squeezed. We saw this in the 2017 by-election-that-wasn't when Theresa May called a general election partly because a Lib Dem was about to win in Gorton.

[andrewducker]

Yes. STV or AMS would both be fine. Both used elsewhere in the UK, to very good effect.

[haggis]

I disagree on 4.

The Lib Dems had a good candidate (well liked local councillor) and can run really effective by-election campaigns (because they can target their resources better than in a GE. They *stood aside* in this election to avoid further splitting the anti-Reform vote that was already split between Labour and Greens.

[andrewducker]

That's rather my point. If we're to avoid too much vote splitting and handing the results to Reform then we're going to have to vote for the most popular party of the Left. Which is unlikely to be Lib Dems while the Greens are doing this well.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, in a different situation this could have been a Labour/Lib Dem split. Polanski came along at a very useful time for the Green Party.

[bens_dad]

I was a fan of PR* then I realised that it is incompatible with constituencies and now I am conflicted.
Yes - there are ways of making a hybrid, but fundamentally, if every constituency has the same breakdown of voters then the majority will still win all the seats, whatever voting system is used in each constituency.

Given that each party contains a range of views, I want to vote for the person not the party label (I'd go further and ban parties altogether if I thought that it was possible that that could work). However you need some way of grouping candidates together to give each group a say that reflects their support across the country ...

* Approval voting is my preference since (given that I cannot be the only elector) I think the fairest thing is for everyone to say, not who is the best candidate, but which of them are acceptable.

[skington]

Regarding point 1, at least one of my newsletters reckoned that the polls that arrived on Tuesday, predicting a narrow Green win, were giving anti-Reform voters permission to switch from Labour to Green. Given the unprecedented three-way situation, and the appetite for tactical voting, it would have been more surprising if the polls were accurate.

[bens_dad]

Which is unlikely to be Lib Dems while the Greens are doing this well.

Depends whether all constituencies are the same or not and what the people believe to be the true local feeling.

Democracy may be the worse form of government ... except for all the alternatives that have been tried,
but first past the post is the worst form of democracy that I know of.

[cmcmck]

I was pleased to see the MRLP come in fifth above various fscists and loonies! :o)

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, I dare say (I know I'm biased) that the Greens' messaging is extremely similar to what that era of Lib Dems, the Bollocks to Brexit era I guess I think of it now, were saying. So weird to see what Zack Polanski has made of himself! But like you say, extremely useful.

[skington]

As a once-LibDem-member I, of course, have Strong Opinions on voting systems. And the one thing that gives me pause about preferential systems is that you see a lot of people in Scotland lose their vote as transfers happen.

STV is appealing, but there's still an element of tactical voting (or tactical standing - Sinn Féin lost out at the 2020 Irish election by not standing enough candidates IIRC). Also, the problem of multi-member constituencies electing the same number of MPs overall is that some of the rural constituencies are going to get absolutely massive.

And too-broad PR, especially national PR with no minimum threshold, leads to zillions of tiny parties like in Israel.

So probably the best bet for the rUK is something like AMS, like for the Scottish Parliament, even though parties that do too well in constituencies can get more than they deserve proportionally; and there's a danger that parties will set up decoy lists.

[cosmolinguist]

Including the Tories, who lost their deposit (not that I'd expect anything else in Manchester, but we had two pieces of election literature from them, which two more than I'd ever seen in 20 decades of living here, so I'm extra pleased they did no better than ever).

[skington]

And of course none of this matters, because the only way we'll get electoral reform is when our current setup produces a minority government who needs the approval of a smaller party to govern, and one of the conditions is that they change the electoral system to something that both parties will accept. Like the LibDems tried to do with the AV referendum but cocked up.

Unless, of course, Labour realises that their goose is cooked and changes the voting system before the next election to avoid being slaughtered too much, like the French Socialists did in the early 1980s. (It did them only limited use: the French Tories promptly changed the system back.)

[calimac]

Thanks for the report: I'd known this byelection was coming up, but I'm traveling and didn't have a chance to/forgot to look up the results. Greens, huh? heh heh heh

[haggis]

I got a blue letter with a hand written envelope! So they are definitely using LD techniques!

[cosmolinguist]

Oh that's delightful to hear! (I should see if I can volunteer to do clerical for them for the council elections; addressing blue envelopes was always my favorite task).

[andrewducker]

STV gives you constituencies, they're just larger. And you can easily vote for people or parties. A Lib Dem you like, then a Green you like, then all of the Labour options, then the remaining Lib Dems, then the remaining Greens would be a perfectly reasonable ranking.

[andrewducker]

I'm mostly happy with AMS, except that I agree about the fake lists issue.

I think that my ideal would be AMS, but the local vote would be AV, and your top choice in that ranking would be used as your regional vote. That prevents the decoy effect.

[bens_dad]

IIRC the European Parliament uses STV. Maybe it was because we did not have enough MEPs* but I never felt that any of my MEPs were "mine" or that they knew anything about my town.

I worry that with PR we will lose the real sense of "constituency MP" that we have now.

* Luxembourg had six MEPs for a population that in the UK only had one.
----
Approval Voting does not produce PR with multi-party constituencies; it becomes first N past the post (though you might be able to ignore the New Labour candidate or include the centrist on the Tory list, so do a little to shape the balance within parties).

[bens_dad]

I haven't come across fake lists before. Can you point me somewhere ?

[andrewducker]

The European elections elected 73 representatives. It's not surprising that the number of people per representative was incredibly high and the size of the constituencies was massive. Assuming we keep the number of MPs, the constituencies would be ⅒ the size of those. Pick the nearest 4 current constituencies, and you'd have 4 representatives to cover that area.

And, presumably, one of those would be for a party you support, which is a lot rarer at the moment.

[andrewducker]

With AMS you have the constituency vote and then the proportional list vote to top things up. And with, for instance, the SNP vote in Scotland, they get so many seats from the constituency vote that they won't get anything from list votes.

Theoretically you could start a second party called "Almost the SNP" that SNP voters vote for on the list, giving them a big boost with underserved seats. But so far that's entirely theoretical, not something people have actually done.

[ckd]

City Council elections in Cambridge (the one in MA, USA :-) have nine seats, so any coalition that can manage to get just over 10% of the vote after transfers can elect a council member. That 10% could be geographically concentrated to some extent (there was an unofficial "East Cambridge" council member when I lived there) but could also be partially or predominantly a community of interest (students living near one of another of the college campuses, landlords, parents, etc) that the candidate appealed to.

There were some local party-like organizations with slates of candidates (generally a YIMBY/NIMBY split), but no national parties since the city is, to put it mildly, extremely Democratically aligned. (2024 presidential results: 50,661 total votes of which 43,690 were for Harris/Walz and only 4,159 were for Trump/Vance.)

[danieldwilliam]

Mostly because Alba are fudds.

There was some talk at the begining of Alba that their strategy should be to be the Almost SNP Party and game the list system.

[andrewducker]

Yeah. They positioned themselves far enough to the Right that they put off most people who were currently voting for the SNP. It turns out the "Like the SNP, but Christian Right" doesn't pull in that many voters.

[danieldwilliam]

I prefer STV but I would be happy with AV+ also known as the Jenkins Method.

Constituency vote using AV. List vote in regions using AMS. I'd be tempted to add a layer on top for a small national top-up but I wouldn't insist on it.

[danieldwilliam]

There are not that many members of the Christian Right in Scotland.

I could see a space for a more socially conservative but a more radically pro-independence party. There are plenty of socially conservative votes and there are plenty of voters who want a pro-independence party that is not taking an approach of creeping Home Rule. I could see a party that added a third leg to that of being the List Spoof Party picking up enough seats to be viable.

But Alba seemed not to be those people.

[andrewducker]

Checking recent polls, 19% of Reform would vote for Independence, so there's definitely space there.

Only 1% of Conservatives though, so not much chance there.

[danieldwilliam]

And there are plenty of social conservative voters - or voters who do have weak valance for social issues - in the Labour Party, SNP and even the Greens.

[andrewducker]

Yes, but if they're already voting for the Greens or SNP then it doesn't sound like they're desperate to be pulled off in some other direction.

Although if a very competent Conservative Independence party springs up then some might make the leap. I'm not sure that Alba were actively incompetent though. Just not appealing enough to pull many people in.

[danieldwilliam]

Yeah - I mean this is a niche case where pro-independence voters who happen to be socially conservative or agnostic were minded to game the system a bit in order to gain 2 or 3 extra seats.

From what I've heard of Alba's internal processes I would describe them as actively incompentent as an organisation despite the fact that at least some of their MSPs were competent.

[andrewducker]

Aaah. I hadn't heard about their internal processes.

I wonder if they were nearly as bad as Your Party.

[danieldwilliam]

I follow James Kelly's blog about Scottish election polling. Or rather I follow James Kelly's blog for the posts about Scottish election polling I get the insight into leaving the SNP for Alba and then being expelled from Alba and rejoining the SNP for free.

Having read his fairly in depth analysis about Alba's disciplinary process and then watching Chris McEleny being suspended from the party and suggestions that the party's financial difficulties are due to fraud I think they would aspire to being as bad as Your Party.

(Although I did find myself agreeing with Jeremy Corbyn a few nights ago then reminded myself of Michael Howard "Are you thinking what we're thinking."

[andrewducker]

I regularly agree with something Jeremy Corbyn has said. But also regularly disagree with things he's said. And don't think he'd be good at running the country. Just better than anyone in the Conservative Party.

[andrewducker]

Oh, and yes, possibly less competent than Your Party in every way except for not looking like a bunch of infighting weirdos.

[danieldwilliam]

His job should always have been to sit on the backbenches and heckle.

[danieldwilliam]

On the scope of not looking like a bunch of infighting weirdos between Alba and Your Party I reckon it would go to the judges and be decided on points.

[andrewducker]

I'm intrigued, because I've heard a lot about Your Party, how one of them jumped the gun on collecting dues, then refused to hand them over, and it was all very public.

Whereas with Alba I heard very little about what they were up to internally.

Clearly I was reading the wrong newspapers.

[andrewducker]

He was pretty good at that.

[danieldwilliam]

He was and I think it's an important job. Not every MP has to be a potential government minister. Some can be campaigners on a important but niche issues. Some can do the job of pointing out the moral compromises that government entails. Some are policy wonks or great local representatives or procedural Parliamentarians. Some add to the gaiety of the nation (Gyles Brandreth I am looking at you sir.)

[danieldwilliam]

I don't recommend reading James Kelly's blog on his experiences with Alba. I've read it so you don't have to. But that was my window into the world of Alba operations. I was amazed but not impressed.

[andrewducker]

I shall happily take your word for it!

[andrewducker]

Absolutely.

Or, in a different voting system we'd have different parties applying that pressure on each other.