South Shields is not Eastleigh

The resignation of David Miliband as an MP means there will be a by-election in his South Shields constituency. But this will not be another famous Liberal Democrat victory, more a case of damage limitation.

Liberator has looked up the South Shields result in the 2010 general election so you don’t have to:

52.0% Labour
21.6% Conservative
14.2% Liberal Democrat
6.5% BNP
2.1% Green
3.6% Others

Labour majority 11,109
Turnout 57.7%

In short, it is a safe Labour seat and Labour will hold it. A Labour hold will not be an achievement. A Labour hold will not be news. There will be more interest in the performance of the other parties.

Liberal Democrat prospects are not good. The party’s vote in 2010 had fallen by 5% since the previous general election in 2005 and, on present form, may fall still further, with the risk of a lost deposit. There is no local government base and not a single Liberal Democrat councillor in the constituency; South Shields is in the Labour-dominated metropolitan borough of South Tyneside, which has 48 Labour councillors, 1 Conservative, 1 UKIP and 4 independents. The by-election will almost certainly be held on the same day as the local elections on 2nd May. For all these reasons, the Liberal Democrat campaign will not attract thousands of volunteers as in Eastleigh; instead, the party is more likely to play the whole thing down as it did in Barnsley Central and Rotherham.

The more observant among you may have noticed there was no UKIP candidate in 2010. That won’t be the case in this by-election. Indeed, the bookies reckon UKIP will come second, as it did in Eastleigh. This is not so much because of Eastleigh but because, once Tory voters realise the Tories have no hope of winning, they will feel safe in switching to UKIP as a protest vote.

The perception that a Labour victory is certain will, of course, have another consequence. The turnout will be abysmal.

Spectator: "Liberal Democrats are racing certainties to hold Eastleigh"

Conservative weekly The Spectator reports today that the Tories have already given up Eastleigh as a lost cause:

The good news for Nick Clegg—and the bad news for David Cameron—is that the Liberal Democrats are racing certainties to hold Eastleigh in the by-election next Thursday.

But it’s not time to open the champagne just yet. The by-election is not in the bag and money and help are still needed. Also, we may find next Friday morning that the media are not talking about a Liberal Democrat victory but instead a strong third place for UKIP.

Goodbye protesters

Let’s keep a sense of proportion. UKIP has not won any by-elections; it has not even come close.

Anyone who has been around the Liberal Democrats for more than a few years will be well aware that even winning by-elections, not just doing respectably, is no guarantee of future general election success or even of holding the seats concerned.

What has been lost is the Liberal Democrats’ role as the natural repository of the protest vote. This was not a pointless or ignoble role – at times of voter discontent, voters expressed this by voting Liberal Democrat rather than for cranks or extremists, and the party acted as a sort of safety valve.

But since one cannot logically make a protest by voting for a party that is in government, protesters must look elsewhere, and an assortment of UKIP, the Greens, Respect, the BNP and various independents is sweeping up this vote. I’m not convinced this vote will stay with any of them for very long, since it never stayed long with the Liberal Democrats. Baths and open plugholes.

What the loss of the protest vote does show is that the Liberal Democrat core vote is alarmingly small. OK, no by-election during this parliament, apart from the peculiarity of Oldham East, has been in a constituency where the party might have done well but, even so, it ought to have done better than it did.

And since a party in government cannot chase protest votes, it must chase voters committed to what it stands for. At least the loss of the opportunity to exploit passing grievances in the belief that ‘we can win everywhere’ may force the party to do what it should have done years ago, and find and cultivate a core vote.

“It’s just a flesh wound...”

On Liberal Democrat Voice, Liberal Eye likens the Liberal Democrats’ delusional excuses for yesterday’s by-election results to Monty Python’s Black Knight:

Party like it’s 1977

Yesterday’s three by-elections are a return to the sort of results the Liberals suffered in the late 1970s, during the Lib-Lab Pact and the Thorpe affair.

The third place ahead of the Tories in Middlesborough shows, as in Manchester Central last week, that effective local campaigning can limit the damage. But the lost deposits in Croydon North and Rotherham show that local campaigning is not sufficient to withstand a nationwide electoral tsunami. The 8th place in Rotherham is particularly dire, worse than anything the Liberals achieved in the late 1970s.

The Liberal Democrats, as a party of government, can no longer attract the sort of protest votes that are now benefitting UKIP and other minor parties. What these by-elections have revealed, yet again, is the party’s fundamental weakness, the lack of a core vote.

I analysed this problem in an article in Liberator 347 (August 2011). Yesterday’s by-election results, together with the continuing poor opinion poll ratings, have only confirmed this view. They also confirm that the electoral strategy invented by Richard Reeves and promoted by Nick Clegg – that the Liberal Democrats’ target vote is ‘Alarm Clock Britain’ – is complete and utter bollocks.

POSTSCRIPT (1): Simon Hughes, interviewed on Radio 4’s World at One today [zap forward to 16:17], attributes the Liberal Democrats’ dismal results to the three constituencies being “safe Labour territory” and to that old chestnut, the mid-term blues (“the two governing parties suffered, as they often do in the middle of a parliament...”).

POSTSCRIPT (2): Peter Chegwyn, Liberal agent in the 1976 Rotherham by-election, reminds me that, despite ‘mid-term blues’ and the Jeremy Thorpe scandal in full swing (Thorpe had resigned as party leader only a month before the by-election), the Liberal Party still finished 3rd and kept the National Front in 4th place. Peter was also agent in the 1981 by-election in Croydon North-West, which the Liberals famously won. He wonders how the Liberal Democrats managed to win only 3.5% of the vote in Croydon North, as more than half the constituency used to be in the old Croydon North-West.