Labour Slip to 4th, Tories 3rd

Generali

Not a great night for the Tories as they are narrowly beaten into 3rd. The worry for Labour must be that at the height of austerity, having put up a celeb candidate and flooded the constituency with hundreds of volunteers they barely kept their deposit in 4th.

Coalition candidates got almost 60% of votes between them. Right wing parties (UKIP + Tory) well over half.

The Lib Dem candidate is apparently only the 5th Government party candidate to win a bye-election since WW2 so congrats to him.

Moby

http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/
This is the best poll analysis site. It calls it as it is!

purch

Great for Lib/Dems. Might shut up those saying that they are now history.

Bad for both Con & Lab, although how many will vote Monster Raving Loony KIP in a General Election is open to question/debate/argument.

JonnyBravo

purch wrote: »

Bad for both Con & Lab, although how many will vote Monster Raving Loony KIP in a General Election is open to question/debate/argument.

Can I be the first to guess "argument" please?

Thrugelmir

Turnout down to 52.7%.

Apathy towards political parties is hitting all time low.

Hardly unexpected after another poor Question Time last night.

The quality of political people is dire.

BertieUK

David Cameron will liken this result to a jockey running in the Grand National holding close behind the front two leaders only to race for the line in the last four hundred yards and win the title.

Generali

It's an interesting one.

People 'don't vote' for parties like UKIP, the BNP, Lib Dems because they have 'no chance' of winning. If UKIP can start getting a lot of big 2nd places then perhaps they can make a breakthrough.

I listened to the result at work on the BBC website and Farrage was claiming that UKIP are getting a lot of people out to vote that don't normally vote as now they have a party they can support. I have no idea if it's true but it's an interesting idea.

It also might mean that UKIP isn't just going to take votes off the Tories. IIRC, Labour stood on anti-EU platforms until the mid-80s.

ash28

Generali wrote: »

It's an interesting one.

People 'don't vote' for parties like UKIP, the BNP, Lib Dems because they have 'no chance' of winning. If UKIP can start getting a lot of big 2nd places then perhaps they can make a breakthrough.

I listened to the result at work on the BBC website and Farrage was claiming that UKIP are getting a lot of people out to vote that don't normally vote as now they have a party they can support. I have no idea if it's true but it's an interesting idea.

It also might mean that UKIP isn't just going to take votes off the Tories. IIRC, Labour stood on anti-EU platforms until the mid-80s.

OH is a life long Tory voter and unless things change before 2015 he will be an ex Tory voter and will have a become a UKip voter.

He couldn't ever bring himself to vote for either Labour or the Libdems but he says he will vote for UKip.

I'm more left wing but with no particularly strong allegiances and will vote for the party I think will be the best - it doesn't matter what colour they wear. I've voted for them all at one point or another. I've never considered voting UKip - yet.

I think the person most worried by the by election results will be David Cameron - it must make his position as leader a little bit more precarious - Eastleigh was a targeted seat which he visited twice - and other big hitters visited and campaigned there too. The one smiling will be Boris.

I guess UKip took votes from all of the parties - but mainly Libdems and Tories - Labours share of the vote was virtually unchanged, Libdems and Tories down around 14% each. I would have expected the Libdem share to be down and the Tories and Labour share to be up.

I think the Conservatives thought they had neutralised UKip by promising an EU referendum and that doesn't seem to be the case.

The worry for the Conservatives must be that UKip will split the Conservative vote and leave the door open for Labour at the next General Election.

Wookster

I think this presents quite a serious problem for Cameron: how to be conservative without being toxic to centrist voters.

I really struggle to see how the Conservatives stand a chance of re-election given the inherent biases in the current boundary regime and given that the right vote is now split between UKIP and the Conservatives.

I'll bet lots of folks will be saying that the Tories need to move to the right but this is definitely wrong - all you need to do is look across the pond to see what moving farther to the right does to electoral success.

ukcarper

The actual numbers make interesting reading

2010, 2013

LibDem 24,966, 13,342

Tory 21,102 10,559

UKIP 1,933 11,571

Labour 5,153 4,088

Others 496 2,056

Turn out 53,650 41,616

michaels

Agree with Wookster, this is definitely a great result for Labour. Tories have lost twice, once in thinking the 'soft' lib dem vote would let them win more seats and again in thinking that the far right would not desert them because that would only benefit parties that they support even less than the Tories - after all if 1000 of the UK voters had plumped for the Tories instead they would have secured a anti-eu MP whereas the vote for UKIP ensured they ended up with an MP belonging to the most pro-european of parties.

And as Wookster says - if the Tories need to move away from the centre to cover UKIP they throw away enough votes in the centre to ensure that they can not beat labour.

It is a funny old world in democracy, the more votes UKIP get the more likely we are to end up integrated in to Europe by Labour after the next election.