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November 2, 2024 - 8:00am
It’s easy for Westminster politicians to ignore council by-elections. But Keir Starmer — and the next Tory leader, for that matter — should pay attention to Bilston North, a ward in the West Midlands.
Local residents have just elected their first Reform UK councillor. The Right-wing party came from nowhere to win 35% of the vote, snatching the seat from Labour — which crashed from 63% of the vote to just 25%.
Local MP — and Government minister — Pat McFadden ought to be worried that a ward right in the middle of his constituency has swung so decisively against his party. Until this week, Bilston North was solidly Labour. The same goes for the whole constituency: unlike the two other Wolverhampton seats, which were won by the Conservatives in 2019, Wolverhampton South East was immune to Boris Johnson’s charms. In fact, it’s returned a Labour MP at every general election since 1974. This is therefore not a typical Red Wall constituency, but instead a part of Labour’s heartland — or what one might call the Red Keep.
For Labour, an especially worrying feature of the Bilston North result is that the party was simultaneously squeezed by the Greens, which almost doubled their vote share from 12% to 23%. In this case the Left-Right pincer movement delivered the ward to Reform, but with only slightly different dynamics a Left-wing party might win instead.
Far from just being a local council result, Bilston North provides a microcosm of the bigger picture: multi-party politics under a first-past-the-post electoral system. When the main parties struggle to exceed 30% in the polls, let alone 40%, we should expect the unexpected — even in safe seats.
The general election provided several examples of what might go wrong for Labour in a rapidly changing electoral landscape. On 4 July, the Greens won Bristol Central. Muslim Independents — plus Jeremy Corbyn — elbowed out Labour in five further seats. George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain came within a whisker of defeating a string of high-profile Labour candidates. The five Reform MPs won in previously Conservative-held seats, but the party came very close in Labour-held seats such as Llanelli. Indeed, Reform came second in 98 seats, of which 89 are Labour-held.
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SubscribeWhen Kier Starmer hides from the British public the fact that biological weapons are being produced in a house in England, confidence in him fades fast.
Or Starmer’s new friends in the police and his old friends in the CPS could use new hate speech laws to tie up any and all challenger party candidates in investigations and attempted prosecutions. It won’t matter if anyone goes to jail, just the smear will be enough.
Can’t happen? Every single police force in the country dedicates dozens of officers to monitoring Facebook and X. We saw how comprehensive this monitoring now is when social media posts (now known to be factually correct) viewed by less than 100 friends was enough to be picked up by the police and brought to trial in less than 72 hours.
Meanwhile, Ofcom is fining broadcasters for news programmes that aren’t *sufficiently* balanced in their subjective opinion. But only when that balance is not supportive of Labour. A Labour MP being interviewed by their former Labour MP husband is totally balanced according to Ofcom. But a panel show where Labour are invited but refuse to show can now be judged illegal by Ofcom if they simply “feel” it’s not balanced.
The problem is a two-party system with no appreciable difference between them. Of course, voters will choose any other alternative. I suspect that we shall see many more similar results.
All depends on whether the new Tory leader – to be announced today, with Badenoch as favourite – can put real distance between the two main parties.
……. The right wing party. Good to see that the suffixes have been dropped. Any party that listens to the electorate will be seen as an alternative and Reform is far better that DEI Starmer…and his two tier love of minorities over the majority