On the Batley and Spen by-election...
How did Labour hold on to a seat with *that* level of Galloway strength? I'm just as baffled as you are.
Unfortunately, no ward-by-ward data of the By-election result exists. But this is how the seat voted in May’s local elections and give us a pretty good idea of where party support is distributed. Cleckheaton sticks out here as a site of Lib Dem local strength but this doesn’t translate to Westminster in any way - for general elections it tends to lean somewhat more Conservative. I’ve also added the official 2011 Census figures for ethnicity and religion to each ward (data from Kirklees Council). Labour’s vote in the seat is anchored in the historically textile industry-dominated Batley, which has a large Asian and muslim population. Batley is unique among West Yorkshire urban areas for being home to a sizeable Indian Gujarati muslim population, setting it aside from the much wider prevalence of British-Pakistani communities in the surrounding areas. The Tory vote is anchored in the much whiter, relatively more affluent Spenborough valley. It’s socio-economically a very different kind of Tory vote to the one in say, Hartlepool, where Labour faced a catastrophic defeat. This is a traditional marginal, not a “red wall” heartland. That may well have something to do with why the outcome was so different this time.
Then, there’s the voting history of the seat in the last 6 years.
What we can see here is that the Tory vote in B&S has a reasonably high floor but a rather low ceiling - and that the existence of a significant 3rd party right wing vote has struggled to transfer to them. On the assumption of symmetrical turnout partisanship between 2019 and 2021, one would be forgiven for assuming that Galloway’s vote took 7 points off Labour, 2 points off the Tories and wholly swallowed the ex-UKIP Heavy Woollen District Independents vote. However, that’s probably not the real story.
This is a “nowcast” of what the seat ought to vote like in the current national environment, without spoiler parties, adjusted by demography and geography, and it lines up with what we saw happen in Hartlepool and my gut intuition. And yet, it didn’t happen. Going off this notional hypothetical result, one would arrive at the conclusion that Galloway took more would-be-Tory votes than he peeled off Labour. While I don’t think that’s directly true, he certainly took enough of them to deprive them of victory. In essence, right wing candidates have gone down from totalling 51% of the vote in 2019, to barely 37% today. The combined voteshare of Galloway and Leadbeater totals 57%, which is very similar to the seat’s high point Labour share of 56% in 2017 (incidentally, 2017 was also the Tories’ best performance - 39%). George Galloway clearly entered the race with the sole intention of peeling off enough Asian voters - while banking on right wing independents coalescing behind the Tories - to ensure that the seat would be lost by Labour and precipitate a fatal crisis for Starmer’s leadership. He appears to have been a victim of his own success, however. It seems likely now that he (a) turned out a lot of low-propensity disaffected Asian voters who almost certainly didn’t back either party in 2019, (b) did a lot better with pro-Brexit white voters than he intended to and (c) polarised the environment in a direction that obscured the ordinary Lab-Con fight and gave Leadbeater an opening to appeal to Tory-inclined swing voters - though Leadbeater’s personal relationships and connections with Spenborough helped her in this regard too. When journalists talked of Labour optimism at the prospects of “their vote holding up”, I didn’t think it would be enough. My initial assessment was that Labour would need their 43% of the vote to hold up, for Galloway to completely tank *and* for a swing to come to them from other parties to win. For them to lose a significant number of votes, for Galloway to do ridiculously well and *still* win borders on arithmetic insanity. I thought it could well hold up (especially in a context where the two-party squeeze confined Galloway’s support to single digits), but I failed to foresee an environment where Galloway surged *and* the Tories failed to pick up any new votes whatsoever - and evidently, so did much of our punditry. Unfortunately, demographic exit polling wasn’t done in this seat but it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if it were the case that Asians made up a significantly larger share of the electorate (25-30%) than they did of the population as a whole (20%).
These various quirks make this election next to useless for discerning national trends. With a margin of just 323, the Tory failure to win what should have been an absolute lay-up can be pinned on a thousand different things. The most commonsense explanations appear to be the Hancock scandal and a subpar GOTV operation (pitted against the doorstep behemoth that Labour assembled for this election). There won’t be a Galloway at the next general election, and Labour won’t be able to throw everything at it. That said, the failure of the Tories to break through (in fact, slightly go backwards) is extremely ominous for them. At least *some* of the Galloway vote will return to Labour at the next GE, while much less will shift to the Tories. They’ll need to be able to turn out their lower-propensity right wing independents and pro-Brexit types in order to stand a chance.
Had *this* particular electorate turned out in the same manner with the same leanings in a scenario where Galloway wasn’t running, Labour would have won by a more resounding margin than even 2019. However, this electorate only shaped up to be the way it was because of Galloway’s campaign, so it’s a moot thought exercise. But this outcome is remarkable all the same. Downright bizarre and weird, even.