The Public could not be motivated to come out to vote Reform UK.
This and other revelations about the Kingswood and Wellingborough by-elections
By Anthony Webber
Independent Political Commentator
The election results in both constituencies demonstrate that the public have lost trust and confidence in the Conservative government.
(Previous articles on this subject:
https://unitynewsnetwork.co.uk/wellingborough-by-election/
The fact that the Conservative party leadership appear to be not aware of this, or pretend to be not aware, only increases the frustration the people have with their own government. The five glib pledges of Rishi Sunak or other soundbite promises by Tory leaders back to Boris Johnson only make matters worse.
The public are fed up with being treated like school children who are expected to behave if they are offered a treat, which they never get anyway.
The problem is that the government have promised too much and delivered too little.
In fact, it is a struggle to find any area in which they have successfully delivered.
Everything seems to be a patched-up job or a botched one.
The Northern Ireland situation is a prime example- the UK is supposed to be fully out of the EU, yet a part of the UK is still not fully so.
This is a terrible position to be in because a key reason for the government’s large majority in the House of Commons is due to the 2019 General Election promise to get the UK properly out of the EU. The result, on a mission very possible, was mission failure through needless compromise with the EU.
The Conservatives have effectively been in power since 2010. In nearly fourteen years what have they achieved?
They have had ample opportunity yet have gone on from one crisis to the next.
The country and its leadership seem to have gone into reverse gear.
It seems that under their watch or even their facilitation, numerous public bodies have been taken over and been intent on changing the very fabric of our society.
Lately many Conservatives, some of whom are Ministers or who were, have acted as if they were in the opposition, rather than the party in charge.
If they don’t know they are in charge or they have lost charge, then the public’s patience becomes exhausted.
Just how many chances are the public supposed to give the government?
The Conservatives don’t seem to have any proper election policy except to say how awful the Labour party are.
This worked just in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by -election, but it is not a tenable idea for a General Election.
The public are hopping mad with the Conservatives. This is for many reasons but the costs of energy and living, caused mainly by their policies on Ukraine and Russia, have made life very difficult for the average member of the public. At these two by-elections, the public decided to give them a good kicking, which they thought they deserved.
The public voted for the Labour candidates in each seat mainly because they were perceived to be the ones most likely to win.
Not because they expect Labour to be any better. Labour have got their own problems, and the public are not idiots.
In both these by-elections their candidates achieved victory with under 46% of the vote.
Would they have got over 50% with the STV ( Single Transferable Vote) system, where the winner is the candidate who achieves over 50% of votes when voter’s other preferred candidates are taken into account?
If the Libdem candidate had been the most likely to win, then they would have gone for them., as they did at the Somerton and Frome by-election.
In Kingswood the fact that the Conservative MP resigned because the government reduced its climate change policies, had little detrimental effect except to give the Green party candidate a boost of 3.4% to 5.8%, so she saved her deposit.
The Conservatives lost 21.7%. Labour gained 11.5%. The Reform UK party achieved 10.4%, so it could be argued that if Reform had not stood, that the Conservative party would have had a better chance of holding the seat. The UKIP candidate suffered because of the subtle promotion of Reform by some mainstream media to their exclusion. However, if the low UKIP vote is added, the combined UKIP/Reform vote was 10.9%. This is important because in its heyday of the 2015 General Election, UKIP achieved 14.8% of the vote in this constituency. However, a test of how a party will perform at a General Election is how well it does at a by-election. Generally, a General Election performance is lower than that achieved at a by-election In some of the successful by-elections, UKIP achieved 27.8% at Eastleigh in 2013 and 24.7% in Stoke on Trent in 2017.
The vote share of UKIP at the 2015 General Election was 12.6%. In 2017 it had fallen to 1.8%.
These figures are important because Reform needed to perform much better at this by-election to give any hope of winning such a seat in the General Election.
What was needed was a credible 20% plus.
Reform needs to ask themselves what they are doing wrong, because there was a low turnout of 37.1%,and they clearly did not motivate the majority of the electorate who were too disillusioned with our political system to believe that Reform could bring about change.
Why is it, with the dismal track record of the government in so many areas, that electors felt that Reform UK did not offer them the sort of alternative they want?
In Wellingborough, the picture was similar, but eleven candidates compared with Kingswood’s six.
This motivated a slightly larger turnout of 38%,but down 26.3% on the General Election.
Most electors chose to stay away in both constituencies rather than vote for one of the choices available to them.
Of those who voted, the Labour candidate was chosen as the one most likely to give the Conservatives a good kicking.
She achieved 45.9% of the vote with plus 19.4%. The Conservative candidate achieved 24.6% and she lost 37.6% of the vote.
The Reform UK party candidate achieved 13.0%. Britain First party stood and achieved 1.6%. The two combined made 14.6%.
This would not have been enough to stop the seat going to Labour, if these parties had not stood, and if all their votes had gone to the Conservatives, which is unlikely anyway.
However, this result must have been a a huge disappointment to Reform UK as their candidate had said they could be on the brink of a political earthquake.
That clearly did not happen, yet they threw a lot of effort into their campaign. In the 2015 General Election, UKIP achieved 19.6% of the vote in this constituency.
Reform had to achieve more than that, but certainly at least that, to bring about a motivating momentum towards the General Election.
Reform UK are coming across as an alternative Conservative party, rather than an alternative party.
This is perhaps the essence of their problems in that they do not have the range of policies which would attract voters from other parties.
They also have not managed to build a bridge between themselves and those in the truth and freedom movement, who are a small, but influential section of the public.
The indications are that the Conservative party is more harmed by them standing than the Labour party are.
In the First Past the Post system, that will not help either Reform UK or the Conservative party.
There is a further test to come in the Rochdale by-election on 29th February.
The Reform UK candidate was formerly the Labour MP for the constituency, but when he stood as an independent in 2017, he achieved just 1.8% of the votes.
When the Brexit party stood in 2019, they achieved 8% of the vote, so that figure must be beaten by him as Reform is the successor to them.
In the 2015 General Election, UKIP achieved 18.8% of the vote so that is a high bar to aim for.
He believes the current Labour party has become too woke. Ironically, he is likely to find agreement on that from another former Labour MP, who is standing for the Workers Party of Great Britain. There appear to be differences on the government’s Ukraine and Russia and Israel/Palestine policies, and like other candidates, they have been sent some brief questions on those subjects. More will be said on that in the very near future.
NB The two election results are in the appendices below.
Anthony Webber
Independent Political Commentator
Appendices:
Result of Kingswood:
| 2024 Kingswood by-election[24][25] | |||||
| Party | Candidate | Votes | % | ±% | |
| Labour | Damien Egan | 11,176 | 44.9 | +11.5 | |
| Conservative | Sam Bromiley | 8,675 | 34.9 | –21.3 | |
| Reform UK | Rupert Lowe | 2,578 | 10.4 | New | |
| Green | Lorraine Francis | 1,450 | 5.8 | +3.4 | |
| Liberal Democrats | Andrew Brown | 861 | 3.5 | –3.5 | |
| UKIP | Nicholas Wood | 129 | 0.5 | New | |
| Majority | 2,501 | 10.0 | N/A | ||
| Turnout | 24,869 | 37.1 | –34.4 | ||
| Registered electors | 67,103 | ||||
| Labour gain from Conservative | Swing | +16.4 | |||
Result of Wellingborough
| 2024 Wellingborough by-election | ||||||
| Party | Candidate | Votes | % | ±% | ||
| Labour | Gen Kitchen | 13,844 | 45.9 | +19.4 | ||
| Conservative | Helen Harrison | 7,408 | 24.6 | –37.6 | ||
| Reform UK | Ben Habib | 3,919 | 13.0 | New | ||
| Liberal Democrats | Ana Gunn | 1,422 | 4.7 | –3.2 | ||
| Independent | Marion Turner-Hawes | 1,115 | 3.7 | +0.2 | ||
| Green | Will Morris | 1,020 | 3.4 | –0.1 | ||
| Independent | Kev Watts | 533 | 1.8 | New | ||
| Britain First | Alex Merola | 477 | 1.6 | New | ||
| Monster Raving Loony | Nick the Flying Brick | 217 | 0.7 | New | ||
| Independent | Andre Pyne-Bailey | 172 | 0.6 | New | ||
| Independent | Ankit Love Jknpp Jay Mala Post-Mortem | 18 | 0.1 | New | ||
| Majority | 6,436 | 21.3 | N/A | |||
| Turnout | 30,145 | 38.0 | –26.3 | |||
| Registered electors | 79,376 | |||||
| Labour gain from Conservative | Swing | +28.5 | ||||
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