Labour is deservedly basking in its byelection successes in Mid Bedfordshire and Tamworth. The 2019 general election results left the party with a mountain to climb if it were to achieve an overall majority. It needed a huge swing to reclaim many traditional marginals that had supported Tony Blair back in the day, or else make progress in constituencies that had never been Labour before, even at the peaks in 1945 and 1997. These byelection victories show that Labour can achieve both objectives.
Tamworth was a traditional bellwether that had shifted well to the right. Mid Bedfordshire was the archetypal home counties Conservative stronghold, which had been true blue since 1931.
Despite the larger Conservative majority and higher swing in Tamworth, the Labour gain in Mid Bedfordshire is the more mind-boggling result.
Labour has never before mounted a successful byelection assault on such a heartland Conservative seat. The only comparison is the shock Conservative byelection gain in the mining seat of Ashfield in 1977, which had a similar swing and at the time was just as incongruous.
As well as the national trends it illuminated, Mid Bedfordshire reveals Labour’s strength at campaigning. Its candidate, now an MP, Alistair Strathern and his campaign manager, Peter Kyle, ran a formidable and unconventional operation tailored to this traditional Tory seat, in the process seeing off a determined Liberal Democrat challenge.
Even Tony Blair’s Labour could not win a three-cornered byelection at Littleborough and Saddleworth in 1995, coming second on that occasion to the Liberal Democrats in a contest much more rancorous than the tetchy Lib-Lab competition in Mid Bedfordshire.
The importance of Tamworth should not be underestimated. If, as some commentators claimed, there was a lasting realignment of the electorate produced by Brexit and the 2019 general election, Tamworth should have been safe for the Conservatives even in testing times. It voted two-to-one for to leave the EU in 2016 and its demographics were extremely favourable to a Conservative realignment. It is 90% white British (compared with 74% for England and Wales), only 24% have higher qualifications (34% in England and Wales).
It is a town full of home- and car-owning families. It is in the Midlands, where the Tories have consistently improved over several elections: Staffordshire had nine Labour MPs and three Conservatives in 2005 but elected an all-Tory delegation in 2019. Tamworth’s voting patterns from 2010 to 2019 showed an accelerating pro-Tory swing, even compared with the English average. For Labour to be back in business in Tamworth, two things must be true – Labour must be enjoying a big national lead over the Conservatives, and the massive shift to the right in Midlands towns must be going into reverse.
Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire make it clear that the wrong lessons were learned from the three byelections in July – the result in Uxbridge and South Ruislip was an aberration and Selby and Ainsty was giving a more realistic picture of public opinion. The Conservatives leaned heavily on mobilising the car-owners’ vote against an alleged “war on motorists” over the summer and at conference but came a cropper in two constituencies with particularly high levels of car ownership.
Nor did saving the green belt work for the party in these elections, despite hopes that opposing Labour’s plans for more houses would rally existing homeowners to the cause. Culture wars, even in a place as conservative in its social values as Tamworth, failed. The fundamental issues of the economy and stretched public services mattered much more; for instance, Mid Bedfordshire has one of the country’s highest proportions of mortgage-holders and is suffering from a shortage of GPs.
The Conservatives have attempted to draw some comfort from the low turnout in the byelections, but the falls were not out of kilter with other recent byelections and, if anything, it makes the collapse in the Conservative vote look worse.
There is no reason to suppose that the abstainers are cheering the government on. They are more likely to be disillusioned with politics, particularly if they put their faith in Brexit in 2016 and Boris Johnson in 2019.
The byelection results are unalloyed good news for Labour. Unless there is a sharp change in the political weather, Labour is on course for a stunning electoral triumph at the next general election, a turnaround unlike anything Britain has seen since the Liberal landslide of 1906.
