Lessons from Wakefield byelection. Big parties are in trouble.
Sun 11:56 am +01:00, 3 Jul 2022WHAT LESSONS ARE THERE FROM THE WAKEFIELD PARLIAMENTARY BY-ELECTION?
Although our vote of 135 votes sounds unimpressive, it is worth bearing in mind that we did beat UKIP who had 124 votes, who seemed, from what we could see, to have done a lot more canvassing and had an active media presence. We also beat a few others of the long list of candidates.
Our cost per vote was a bit more expensive than we are used to at £17.94, but it is worth comparing that with the Britain First candidate, Ashlea Simon, who with her 311 votes, according to what they have said over the internet, Britain First paid over £96.46 per vote! (Rumour has it that this might actually have been even worse at £160 per vote!).
The Reform Party and the Liberal Democrats may have spent even more per vote, as both of those may have spent the full allowance of £100,000 to get 513 and 508 respectively!
Both of those parties suffered dramatic losses in the numbers of people voting for them. In the 2019 General Election the Brexit Party (now called Reform), got 2,725 votes and the Lib Dems got 1,772 votes.
The only winner of the day, in terms of increasing their number of votes, was the Yorkshire Party (Lib Dems in mufti) who went from 868 votes in 2019 to 1,182 votes in this By-election.
The interesting fact about the Labour and Conservative vote is that Labour is not on track to rebuild its “Red Wall” at all, contrary to what the Mainstream Media has been saying.
The Labour vote went from 17,925 in 2019 to 13,166 in this recent By-election. That is a drop of 4,759 votes when the Conservatives had not only put up last time a tokenist Pakistani Muslim candidate, who turned out to be a homosexual paedophile and alcoholic. Also this time they had put up another Pakistani Muslim in a constituency where there are relatively few Pakistani Muslims but is not far from Bradford or Rotherham and therefore white working class voters are aware of what has been going on there.
From their candidate selection you would almost think that the Conservatives wanted to lose that seat. Maybe they actually did because of course the Conservatives need Labour to exist so that they can continue to say on the doorstep that people cannot vote for what they really support because they might let Labour in!
The Conservatives were duly punished with a drop of their vote from 2019 of 21,283 down to 8,241.
That dramatic drop and the decline in the percentage of people voting actually suggests that the majority of those who voted Conservative in 2019 did not go back to Labour and Labour may have permanently lost them.
Whilst this did not give us much comfort in this By-election what it does suggest is that the “Red Wall” voters are still very much up for grabs if any one patriotic party can break free of the pack. I remain of the view that it is English nationalism which will surge when that time comes.
We are of course entering very choppy economic waters and it maybe that will wake people up and make the electoral system more fluid than it has been since the War.
Therese Hirst stood in the Wakefield Parliamentary By-election for the English Democrats. We did a full Royal Mail leaflet drop and some further leafleting and canvassing. The turnout was poor, at just short of 40%.
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