THE LibDems are hailing their by-election victory in the Conservative heartland seat of Chesham and Amersham last week as a sign they are poised to challenge the Conservatives for dominance in England.
Party leader Ed Davey said the result would send a shockwave through British politics and that if it was replicated across the “blue wall” of traditionally Conservative constituencies across the south-east of England, dozens of Conservative seats could fall to the LibDems.
There was heady and excited talk of the LibDems regaining the position of being the second-largest opposition party in the House of Commons, which they had lost to the SNP in the General Election of 2015 when voters punished the party for going into coalition with the Conservatives. It was a humiliating defeat, seeing the LibDems lose all but eight of the 57 seats they had held. Even then party leader Nick Clegg failed to hold on to his own seat in Sheffield Hallam.
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There’s no doubt that the result in Chesham and Amersham was a remarkable victory for the LibDems, but it’s unlikely to represent the seismic shift in the political landscape they would have us believe. Not that this should be a surprise. This is, after all, the same party that wants us to believe that Willie Rennie and Alex Cole-Hamilton (below) are political heavyweights, which is as grounded in reality as the claim that the UK entry in Eurovision has a serious chance of winning. The only people who can tout that line while keeping a straight face are representatives of the frothier end of the British nationalist media.
In last week’s by-election, the LibDems overturned a Conservative majority of 16,000 and achieved a swing of 25% to take more than half of all votes cast. They beat the Conservative candidate by 8000 votes, taking a seat which had been Tory since 1974.
However, there have been previous stunning by-election victories for the LibDems which have not translated into victories at subsequent General Elections. In 1993 at a by-election in Christchurch they overturned a Conservative majority of 23,000 and achieved a record swing of 38.6% to take the seat with a majority of more than 16,000, winning more than 62% of all votes cast.
However,the LibDems failed to hold the constituency in the following General Election in 1997. The Tories took the seat back even though the Conservatives overall performed poorly in this election, which is remembered mainly for Tony Blair’s landslide victory for the Labour Party and huge losses for the Conservatives. Christchurch has been held by the Conservatives ever since.
Likewise, the LibDems seized Richmond with a huge swing in the by-election of 2016, only for the seat to return to the Conservatives in the General Election the following year.
Unless we see a persistent pattern of Conservative losses to the LibDems over the coming months, it’s more likely than not that, for all the excited chatter, Chesham and Amersham will prove to be a spectacular flash in the pan like Christchurch in 1993 rather than a harbinger of significant and lasting change in an English political landscape dominated by the Conservatives.
In fact, this by-election result may prove to be more significant for the future of the Labour Party than that of the LibDems. Labour picked up a mere 622 votes and lost their deposit. Keir Starmer’s party wasn’t just squeezed as anti-Tory voters switched to the LibDems as the best option to give the Conservatives an electoral bloody nose – it was utterly pulverised.
The humiliating total of 622 was reportedly smaller than the size of the membership of the local Labour constituency association, meaning that Labour couldn’t even motivate all of their own members to vote for their candidate. That’s like applying for a job and your own mother not just refusing to give you a character reference, but also writing to the company and advising it to give the job to the other guy.
IN Scotland we often look askance at the results of English elections, shaking our heads in incomprehension. It’s a sign that in terms of voting patterns at least, Scotland and England are already quite independent of one another.
Our problem is that whereas for voters in England the results of Scottish elections have as much interest and relevance as the null points that the four LibDem MSPs would win at the Eurovision Song Contest, the outcome of elections in England has a huge and significant effect on Scotland.
It’s thanks to voters in England that we have Brexit. It’s thanks to voters in England that we have Boris Johnson as Prime Minister and are forced to pay attention to Michael Gove. It’s clear now that Labour are still nowhere close to re-establishing themselves as a credible opposition to the Conservatives in England, despite the manifest failures of a Conservative Party led by serial liars and mired in one scandal after another. Indeed the Labour Party in England gives every sign of going down the same toilet that flushed away the Labour Party in Scotland.
Scotland cannot rely on Labour or the LibDems to save us from decades of Conservative rule. The UK is facing a future in which the right-wing English nationalism of the Tories becomes entrenched.
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Independence is our only plausible and realistic escape route. It’s understandable that we cannot have a second independence referendum as we face a new wave of virus infections due to the pandemic, depriving us of the face to face contacts and local grassroots activism which are vital to the success of the independence campaign in a country whose media is overwhelmingly opposed to independence and controlled outwith Scotland.
However, it’s nevertheless vital we start to get the groundwork prepared and ready. In that context, the appointment of SNP heavyweight Mike Russell as political director of the party HQ independence unit is to be welcomed. It is the first sign from a government which has only been in office for a few weeks that it is serious about preparing for an independence referendum within the term of this parliament.
The stakes are high and we need to get this right. Hopefully we can look forward to some concrete independence policy announcements soon, then perhaps we can put the divisions and disputes of the past couple of years behind us and concentrate on securing Scotland’s independence.
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