At a crossroads: The Conservatives’ by-election disaster heralds changing winds

The Conservatives’ by-election disaster heralds changing winds, says David Bean in this article from My Countryside, the Countryside Alliance's membership magazine.

This edition of My Countryside (published in November 2023) reaches you in the aftermath of what the political scientist and elections expert Prof. Sir John Curtis called “one of the worst by-election nights that any government has had to endure.” Not only did the Conservative Party lose two seats – Tamworth, which it held since 2010, and Mid Bedfordshire, which Labour had never previously won – but it did so on swings upwards of 20 percent. Tamworth delivered the second-highest swing from the Conservatives to Labour since World War II.  

By-elections rarely favour incumbent governments and the circumstances that led to these were scarcely auspicious. Turnouts plummeted by nearly 30 percent in each constituency and the new MPs, Sarah Edwards and Alistair Strathern, may well have mountains to climb to hold on to their slim majorities at the next general election. While the Conservatives held on in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, most agree this was because of local opposition to the expansion of ULEZ (Ultra Low Emission Zone) being imposed by the Labour Mayor of London.  

These results, across very different constituencies, would suggest the stirring of a changing political wind. The Electoral Calculus Poll of Polls for October predicts the next election as producing a Labour majority of 182, with the Conservatives slumping to 149 seats; it rates Labour’s chances at 98 percent of being the largest party and 93 percent of winning a majority. Labour may need a bigger swing than Tony Blair secured in 1997 but on current trends it is Rishi Sunak who faces the greater challenge. Labour’s other October by-election win, in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, suggests it could ease its path to power still further by breaking the Scottish Nationalist Party’s stranglehold on Scottish seats.  

Politics seems to oscillate not only between the two leading parties, but also between longer periods of close elections and of landslides. Since 2019 the ‘tight’ period experienced from 2010, which as in previous cycles many wrongly assumed was permanent, has come to an end as its earlier equivalents did in 1945 and 1979. Thumping majorities and wild swings are firmly back on the agenda.  

What a Labour government would mean for rural Britain remains unclear. The party maintains its totemic hostility towards hunting and has yet to rehabilitate its position on shooting, which its Welsh Government ministers have explicitly said they oppose. The Countryside Alliance remains apolitical and will continue to engage with leaders and politicians of all political stripes. All the signs are that we face a very different political landscape after the next election and, whatever the outcome, the Alliance will continue to fight to ensure the rural voice is heard.