A blip or a worrying sign? Tories begin inquest after surprising by-election loss

Published

3 years ago

June 18, 2021

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It’s an unwritten rule of politics that every electoral action can have an opposite – if not quite equal – reaction.

The question being asked by many Tories this morning will be whether the party’s recent relentless focus on winning new supporters in traditionally Labour-held areas in the north is starting to cost them in their strongholds in the south.

As ever, the reality is more complex.

Chesham and Amersham presented a potent mix of local and national issues that the Lib Dems were able to capitalise on.

The HS2 rail line runs through the constituency and proposed planning changes are a big concern here too.

And as the losing Tory candidate has said, the Lib Dems threw the kitchen sink, the microwave and everything else at this seat.

Tactical voting may have also been at play with Labour voters switching to the Lib Dems to ensure a government defeat.

But all that said, this trend – of traditional Tory regions in the south being eaten away by the opposition parties – was visible in May’s local election results.

David Cameron’s old Oxfordshire constituency of Whitney and the bastion of moneyed Home Counties Toryism Chipping Norton both got Labour councillors in that vote.

Meanwhile further south in Sussex, the conservative leader of Worthing Borough Council explicitly blamed the focus on levelling up in the north and prevalence of planned housing developments in the south for a loss of seats in his region.

The Lib Dems are echoing that this morning, saying that voters in places like Chesham and Amersham are fed up of being taken for granted.

Demographic change as young families move from inner London, along with chunky support for remaining in the EU in 2016 may also have played a part.

The messaging from Tory sources this morning is that this is a predictable mid-term protest vote against a party that has been in power for ten years and the seat can be retaken at a general election.

That may be right – but remember, that logic wasn’t borne out in the Hartlepool by-election where the Tories took the seat in May.

It also comes at a time when the government is polling well, in the midst of a successful vaccine rollout.

All of that means this is a more surprising result than Hartlepool.

But just because this brick has turned yellow, doesn’t mean the whole blue wall is guaranteed to come falling down.

For a start, there are genuine questions about whether there is a big enough crop of seats the Tories would realistically lose in a general election to counter their wins in the north.

What’s more, while in the north the Tories are now single-handedly taking votes from Labour, in the south the spoils of disillusioned conservative voters are more frequently being shared between a number of opposition parties.

For Labour, this is bad news.

This by-election saw the opposition vote collapse to just over 600 votes.

May’s bumper round of polling also saw good gains for the Green Party, as well as the Lib Dems.

Expect questions for Sir Keir Starmer today about why Labour is failing to win in places like Chesham and Amersham when the Lib Dems are.

The practical question for the next general election may be whether anti-Tory electoral pacts are the only way to get close to pushing Boris Johnson out of power.

Countless prime ministers have learnt the lesson of taking voters for granted the hard way.

It’s an irony not lost on Tories that the same sense of disillusionment they are trading off in the north now appears to be costing them votes in the south.

This is a stunning result for the Lib Dems and while it’s too soon to talk about the southern blue wall crumbling, it’s certainly wobbling.

Politics

UK considered using Iraq to process asylum seekers in Rwanda-type deal, leaked documents show

Published

6 hours ago

May 6, 2024

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UK considered using Iraq to process asylum seekers in Rwanda-type deal, leaked documents show

The government at one point considered using Iraq to process asylum seekers – like the Rwanda scheme – according to documents seen by Sky News.

This could have seen people sent from the UK to a country the government advises against all travel to.

The two countries already have a returns agreement – but only for people that are from Iraq.

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According to leaked correspondence between high-ranking officials, the Iraqi returns commitments were made with a “request for discretion” and no publicity.

The country was willing to move forward but did not want a formal or public agreement.

The current travel advice to Iraq on the Foreign Office website simply advises against “all travel to parts of Iraq”. However, according to the document, negotiations were fairly advanced and described in one table as “good recent progress with Iraq”.

Other government aims included enhancing cooperation with the Iranian Embassy in order to enhance returns arrangements for migrants and potential asylum seekers.

Returns agreements are also in the works for Eritrea and Ethiopia, according to documents about work undertaken by the Home Office and Foreign Office that relates to countries with the highest number of nationals arriving to the UK by small boats.

In a tranche of internal government documents seen by Sky News, even from the earliest stage of the Rwanda policy, Downing Street advisers knew there were serious problems with their proposals.

There are even private admissions that many people arriving here on small boats did so without the assistance of criminal gangs – despite their communications strategy.

Comparisons were also made to Australia’s response – to what Downing Street officials understood to be a comparable “smaller problem” than in the UK and admitted it had cost billions of Australian dollars in order for their returns processes to be fully operational.

In one document submitted to the Home Office, some of the highest-ranking officials at the time wrote that their guidance was to be “prepared to pay over the odds” to get the policy up and running. And that the initial offer from Rwanda was a “modest sum”.

Whitehall’s official spending watchdog has priced the cost of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda at £1.8m per person for the first 300 people the government deports to Kigali.

It also disclosed that since April 2022 the Home Office has paid £220m into Rwanda’s economic transformation and integration fund, which is designed to support economic growth in Rwanda, and will continue to make payments to cover asylum processing and operational costs for individuals relocated to Rwanda.

It will also pay further amounts of £50m over the next year and an additional £50m the following year.

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A government source said: “The Home Office is spending millions every day accommodating migrants in hotels – that’s not right or fair. We’re taking action to put an end to this costly and dangerous cycle. Doing nothing is not a free option – we must act if we want to stop the boats and save lives.

“The UK is continuing to work with a range of international partners to tackle global illegal migration challenges. Our Rwanda partnership is a pioneering response to the global challenge of illegal migration, and we will get flights off the ground to Rwanda in the next nine to eleven weeks.”

Politics

Bitfinex database breach ‘seems fake,’ says CTO

Published

1 day ago

May 5, 2024

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<div>Bitfinex database breach 'seems fake,' says CTO</div>

Bitfinex CTO Paolo Ardoino explained that if the hacking group was telling the truth, they would have asked for a ransom, but he “couldn’t find any request.”

Politics

Labour taking ‘Tory crown jewel’ feels like a momentum shift

Published

1 day ago

May 5, 2024

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Labour taking 'Tory crown jewel' feels like a momentum shift

It was a wafer-thin victory, but a huge win.

The symbolism of Labour taking the West Midlands mayor, a jewel in the Tory crown, could be felt in the room as Labour activists gathered in Birmingham to celebrate the win with their new mayor Richard Parker and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer.

There are moments on election journeys when the momentum shifts – and this win felt like one of them.

“We humbly asked [the voters] to put their trust and confidence in a changed Labour Party and they did. And that is a significant piece of political history that we’ve made here today,” said Sir Keir at his victory rally.

“So the message out of these elections, the last now the last stop before we go into that general election, is that the country wants change.

“I hope the prime minister is listening and gives the opportunity to the country to vote as a whole in a general election as soon as possible.”

This win gave them the boost that was missing when they won the Blackpool South by-election on a massive 26-point swing, but then failed to pick up the hundreds of council seats they were chasing.

This win, on just 1,508 votes or 0.25 per cent of the vote, was a body blow for a Conservative party that believed they could just about cling on. Ben Houchen, the Tees Valley mayor, is now the last Tory standing.

For Labour, then a moment to bookmark.

Just as Boris Johnson’s Hartlepool by-election win in 2021 was a low point for Sir Keir – he told me this week that he considered resigning over the loss because he thought it showed he was the barrier to Labour’s recovery – this too will feel devastating not just for Andy Street but for the PM too.

Labour has beaten him in a street fight. He’s bloodied with Sir Keir now emboldened.

“This was the one result we really needed,” said one senior Labour figure. “It’s been our top focus for the past week and symbolically a very important win.”

And Labour needed the boost, because, as Professor Michael Thrasher pointed out in his Sky News’ national vote share projection calculated from the local election results, Sir Keir was not picking up the sort of vote share that Tony Blair was winning in the run-up to the 1997 Labour landslide.

His latest calculation of a 35% vote share for Labour and 26% for the Tories, put Sir Keir winning a general election but short of a majority.

What the West Midlands mayoral win did for Sir Keir was to give him a clear narrative that he is coming for the Tories and will do what he needs to take them down.

It raises inevitable questions about what is next for Rishi Sunak. The prime minister had nowhere to go today, not one win to celebrate. The worst performance in council elections in 40 years, was already pretty much as bad as it gets before the loss of Andy Street. The former Conservative mayor was magnanimous towards the prime minister, saying the loss was his alone.

But colleagues will not be so generous. One former cabinet minister said this loss was “devastating”. “We’re done and there’s no appetite to move against him,” said the senior MP. Many Tories tell me they are now resigned to defeat and believe Mr Sunak and his team needed to own it, rather than the rest of the party.

The coming days might be bumpy, the mood will be stony. But Tories tell me not much will actually change for them.

For Sir Keir, he now needs to sell not the changed Labour Party, but his vision for changing the country. The West Mids mayor’s win was dazzling, but it could have so easily gone the other way. And as Mr Sunak fights to survive, Labour still has to fight hard to win.