THE TORIES have crashed with their twin by-elections disasters. They lost Kingswood, where Labour needed an 11-point swing and also lost Wellingborough, where an 18-point swing was required for the seat to change hands.
In fact at Kingswood, the swing was 16.4%, while at Wellingborough, the swing was 28.5%, as the Tories were hung out to dry with the second highest swing from Conservative to Labour in any post-war by-election.
Labour have now made four by-election gains from the Conservatives in this parliament.
The Tory Party is on the rocks. It’s share of the vote fell by a massive 37.6 points in Wellingborough, the biggest drop the party has ever suffered in a by-election.
Meanwhile, the right wing anti-EU, anti-immigration Reform UK party had its best by-election performances by far – winning 13% in Wellingborough and 10% in Kingswood.
According to the polls, most of the Reform Party’s support is coming from the Conservatives. For every voter who has switched since 2019 from Conservative to Labour, there is another one that has switched to Reform UK.
The Tories will now swing further to the right, to attract more of the anti-immigrant vote, while Labour leader Starmer, who opposes strikes, and is 100 per cent behind the anti-union laws, gets ready for a Labour government that will jail strikers who break anti-union laws.
These were by-elections where voters’ discontent with the Conservatives was seemingly not matched in equal measure by any enthusiasm for Labour.
In both Kingswood and Wellingborough, the increase in Labour’s share of the vote was half the fall in Conservative support, underlining how many discontented Tories are going further to the right.
In fact, Labour’s ten-point majority in Kingswood is less than it enjoyed in the seat at each of the 1997, 2001, and 2005 elections, though in Wellingborough, the party was on a par with what it achieved when it won the seat in 1997 and 2001.
But apart from the gains and losses, there was yet another message from the ballot boxes. Voters are not rushing to go to the polls.
Turnout was down in Kingswood by 34 points compared with 2019, the fourth biggest drop since the last general election. Although the drop in Wellingborough was, at 26 points, somewhat less, the 38% turnout was very different from the near 70% turnout recorded when the constituency last had a by-election in 1969.
On average, turnout has fallen in all by-elections since 2019 by 28.1 points. This is slightly more than the previous record of 27.8 points in by-elections in the 1997-2001 parliament. That was followed by a record low turnout of 59% in the 2001 general election.
Starmer, after the by-election, said Labour has ‘more work to do’ after the electorate inflicted two by-election defeats on the Conservatives.
The party overturned majorities of 11,220 in Kingswood and 18,540 in Wellingborough, where the 28.5% swing was the second biggest from the Tories to Labour in any post-war by-election.
Starmer said he was ‘proud’ of the results, but did not ‘want to get into the warm bath of saying: “Job done”.’
Sunak said ‘midterm’ polls were ‘always difficult’ for governments.
The turnout in Kingswood was 37% of registered voters, while in Wellingborough it was 38% – both around half the figure in 2019, but close to the average for by-elections in this Parliament.
Bone had held the constituency since 2005, increasing his majority since then to turn it into a safe Tory seat.
With the Tories now rejected by the vast majority of workers in the UK, now is the time for the trade unions to take action to smash the anti-union laws and expropriate the bosses and the bankers.
The TUC must now be made by workers to call a General Strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government and socialism.
This is the only forward. With capitalism heading for the rocks and taking the working class with it, the only future is to go forward to socialism! The working class must take the power and expropriate the bosses and bankers!
