WHAT LESSONS ARE THERE FROM THE WAKEFIELD PARLIAMENTARY BY-ELECTION?

 

 

WHAT LESSONS ARE THERE FROM THE WAKEFIELD PARLIAMENTARY BY-ELECTION?

 

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%. 

 

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.

 

 

English PARLIAMENTARY BY-ELECTION RESULTS 2021

 

PARLIAMENTARY BY-ELECTION RESULTS

 

In the last three Parliamentary by-elections in a row the vote for the Conservative Party has dropped but not in the way that has been suggested in the Media, which insists upon talking about majorities when there are none. 

 

In the recent by-election in Shropshire North the majority did not vote.  Nor did the majority vote in either of the previous two by-elections, with turnout below 50%.  “Turnout” does not take account of the fact that the Electoral Commission thinks that up to 25% of those that are eligible to vote are not on the electoral roll.  So really a significant majority do not vote.

 

In Shropshire North what happened was very similar to what had happened in the Chesham and Amersham By-election which is that the Liberal Democrats pursued a successful two-pronged strategy.  The first of those was to suppress the Conservative vote, which Johnson’s behaviour no doubt enormously helped them to do.  The second was to get the “Progressive” vote to coalesce around them.  This can easily be seen from the figures. 

 

In the 2019 General Election in Shropshire North, the Liberal Democrats got 5,643, Labour got 12,495 and the Greens got 1,790, giving a total Leftist vote of 19,928.  I am not sure whether the Shropshire Party who also stood would qualify as a Leftist Party.  Most of these parties which appear to be locally patriotic turn out on investigation to be Liberal Democrats in mufti.  So the total of LibDem, Labour and Green was 19,928, including the Shropshire Party that would be 21,074 vote. 

 

On the 16^th December the Liberal Democrats got 17,957, Labour got 3,686 and the Greens got 1,738.  Rejoin the EU got 58 votes.  Interestingly when the Liberal Democrats were pushing for a surge the Shropshire Party did not stand, which I think may suggest that they are simply Liberal Democrats in mufti.  The total Leftist vote therefore in the By-election was 23,439.  The total extra votes for the Left therefore in the Shropshire By-election was 2,365.

 

By contrast the numbers of voters voting Conservative dropped from 35,444 to 12,032.  This was a reduction in the total number of Conservative votes by 23,412. 

 

18,439 of whom was the reduction in turn-out of Conservative voters.  There was also 1,427 Reform, 378 UKIP, 375 Reclaim and 79 Heritage, who all might previously have been Conservative voters. 

 

It does seem clear therefore that relatively few, if any, voters actually went from the Conservatives to the Liberal Democrats.  Whereas the tactical voting was in favour of the Liberal Democrats. 

 

That leads to at least the encouraging conclusion that the numbers of deluded Left-wing voters in Shropshire North did not increase by any substantial margin, despite what the papers and BBC have tried to tell you!

 

 

 

 

 

BRECON & RADNORSHIRE BY-ELECTION – COCK-UP OR STITCH-UP?

BRECON & RADNORSHIRE BY-ELECTION – COCK-UP OR STITCH-UP?

Last week on the 1^st August there was a Parliamentary by-election, the reports of which had been very overshadowed by the national political events, like the formation of the new Boris Johnson Premiership and Cabinet.  Then almost out of the blue, as it were, we learnt that the Conservatives have lost the seat. 

There were suggestions in the Remainer Main Stream Media that Boris has already lost his bounce. A more obvious point on the facts would be one that they are not so keen to report, given their pro-Labour bias, that in fact the Labour candidate had almost lost his deposit in a Welsh constituency which had once been part of Labour’s Welsh permanent fiefdom!  The seat was Labour for many years until 1979.

A bit more enquiry reveals that the Conservative Party’s candidate had previously been the MP, but the by-election was called as a result of a Recall Petition because he had been convicted of creating fraudulent invoices and claiming fraudulently on his parliamentary expenses. 

So what on earth induced the Conservative Party to put him up again as a parliamentary candidate?  Was it incredible arrogance?  Incredible stupidity? Or some sort of devious plot?

Of course in human affairs generally it is often a mistake to discount the role of sheer mistaken stupidity.  That maybe what has happened here; perhaps coupled here with a sense of obstinate entitlement. 

There is however an alternative idea to consider. 

Let’s first look at the timeline here:-

The previous MP and recent Conservative candidate, Christopher Davies, pleaded guilty of putting in false expenses in March 2019 and in April he was sentenced.  

The Speaker launched the legal petition on the 24^th April and the petition was opened on the 9^th May and remained open for signatures until the 20^th June.  It only needed to get 5,303 signatures but in fact got 10,005 signatures.  10,005 petitioners who signed to remove him amounted to 19% of the 53,032 electors in Brecon and Radnorshire. 

 

Mr Davies was re-selected as the Conservative candidate (the re-selection process now requires not only the local party to support the candidate, but more importantly requires the National Nominating Officer of the Conservative Party to sign the candidate’s Nomination Certificate.  The National Nominating Officer of the Conservative Party is Victoria Carslake, who was of course an appointment by Theresa May). 

The close of nominations in this by-election took place on 5^th July and, as I mentioned, the election took place last week on the 1^st August. 

This timeline alone shows that this by-election can really have absolutely nothing to do with Boris Johnson.  The fact that the recently convicted fraudster Conservative candidate still managed to do so well might really show that Boris Johnson, if he had any effect on it at all, very nearly got him re-elected however unsuitable he might be as an MP!

So I return to the question of why would the Conservatives put up a candidate who has not only been recently convicted of fraud on his parliamentary expenses, but also to strong feeling locally about this, triggered this by-election? 

Another possibility, other than Conservative stupidity, might be another devious plot by Theresa May and her inner circle. 

We now know that Theresa May never sought to negotiate any form of proper Brexit.  She never suggested to the EU negotiators that we might leave with ‘No Deal’ and she never attempted to get the United Kingdom a good deal.  Her whole effort was to try and tie us up as close to the European Union as possible, which is why she went on, not only lying about what she was doing, but also signing us up to yet further EU commitments, such as the new EU Army. 

She also called her General Election not because she wanted to guarantee Brexit, but rather because she wanted to be independent of the Brexiteers and to impose her Agreement on the country. 

So I suggest that a possible scenario is that this totally unsuitable Conservative candidate was re-selected in order to lose that seat and so give Remain supporters in the House of Commons yet more clout. 

All this was going on whilst Theresa May was trying to and partly succeeding in getting huge further spending commitments which would bind the hands of her successor, which was already most likely to be Boris. 

If this is what was actually happening, then this by-election is nothing to do with Boris except in the sense that it was always set up as a trap. 

The most laughable suggestion is that this is all the fault of the Brexit Party splitting the vote.  This is of course a variant of the old line of the most cynical Establishment vote manipulators that you cannot vote for anybody else other than the Conservatives otherwise you get Labour (or vice or versa if you are a former Labour supporter). 

Whilst it is true that the Brexit Party got more than the difference between the Conservative and Liberal Democrat, it does not follow that people who voted Brexit Party would have voted for the Tory convicted fraudster.

Of course all this undemocratic nonsense relies upon the most appallingly undemocratic electoral system, the “First Past the Post” which regularly cheats large numbers of voters out of their preferred outcome.