Byelections are only interesting if they tell us something different from the headline polls. The three being held on Thursday are a fair cross-section of England: Uxbridge, an outer London suburb; Somerton and Frome in the West Country city of Somerset; and Selby and Ainsty at the other end of the country, in provincial Yorkshire. How should we interpret their collective results?
If the results simply mirror the national polls, then Labour will win Uxbridge by a landslide and the Tories would hold the other two seats with greatly reduced majorities. That is how you directly translate today’s average polls giving Labour 46 per cent, the Tories 26 per cent and the Lib Dems 10 per cent onto the national result at the 2019 election (Tories 44, Labour 32, Lib Dems 12) in these seats. That probably won’t happen, and each departure from the national trend will tell us something maybe significant.
Somerton and Frome was a Lib Dem seat throughout the Blair years and will very likely revert to the Lib Dems this time on a massive Tory-Lib Dem swing. This isn’t just because of mechanistic “tactical voting” by Labour voters in favour of the Lib Dems. It comes from the deeply entrenched position of the Lib Dems across the provincial West Country and beyond—notably in local government—which makes a massive swing to the Lib Dems the natural reflex when the Tories are highly unpopular.
Does this mean that a hung parliament is more likely than the polls suggest at the next general election? Not necessarily. This is the Lib Dems reaching the parts that Labour rarely reaches, but only doing so because anti-Toryism is now far stronger in these sorts of seats than anti-Labourism à la Corbyn. Keir Starmer may have made the West Country safe for liberalism once again.
Selby and Ainsty may make that starkly apparent, if Labour wins or come close to winning this fairly affluent Yorkshire seat in an area that Labour has never come remotely close to winning on today’s boundaries. (Labour won the previous, less rural Selby constituency in the Blair years.) At the last election, the Tories were on 60 per cent, with Labour second but only on 25 per cent. If a Labour government were regarded by Middle England as more a threat than a welcome prospect, Labour would never bridge this gap, even in a period of acute Tory unpopularity. More likely would be third-party surge—by the Lib Dems or the Faragist populist right, whose present incarnation is Reform UK—splitting the vote and letting the Tories back in.
But as the deeply cynical Tory prime minister Lord Salisbury used to say, the problem with elections is that “when the great oracle speaks, no one is sure what the great oracle said.” The most enigmatic of the three byelections may be Uxbridge.
It would be astonishing if Labour did not win Uxbridge easily, but if the Labour majority isn’t astonishing that too might convey a message. The proposed extension to outer London, by the Labour mayor of London, of the Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) charging zone for higher-emission vehicles is controversial. In a cost of living crisis, the Ulez is for many voters an additional cost, whatever they think of the green benefits. But will being anti-Ulez translate into a smaller Labour swing in Uxbridge and, if so, might that also apply in the next general election? Over to the oracle.
However, never fear. Whatever the oracle says about these byelections, there are more to come. In particular, in the autumn, there is likely to be a byelection in Rutherglen, southeast of Glasgow, which will be a huge battle between Labour and the SNP. And we are still waiting for Nadine Dorries to resign in mid-Bedfordshire. There is still a long way to go until the next general election.
