In the latest twist in his uncomfortable political career Zac Holdsmith has resigned as an MP to fight a by-election in his Richmond-on-Thames constituency, supposedly in protest at the government's decision to back a new runway at Heathrow. This, he thinks, will provide a referendum for local people on the issue. He will stand as in independent.
His intention had been long trailed. It took very little time for the Conservatives to say they would not contest the seat. This leaves him as the Conservative candidate by default. It also means that the chance that there will be a pro-Heathrow candidate is incredibly low. That means his gesture is an empty folly.
If Labour was wise it would treat it as such. That's firstly because it has no hope of winning the seat.
It's secondly because if it sat the by-election out there has to be a chance that the Lib Dems will win in a poll that would then be a referendum in the government's handling of Brexit, which will have been deeply unpopular in wealthy south-west London.
So that would be one less for the government majority and a mighty blow for the man who ran a very nasty and racist campaign to be Mayor of London.
But will Labour have the sense to sit it out? I can only hope, but without expectation. Tribalism matters to Labour more than the overall political good. And that is a loss to us all.
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Sadly, exchanges I’ve had on Labour List and Twitter suggest that you are all too right. Much as some of us would like to see some form of coalition across the left, Labour seem far more interested in fighting Judean People’s Front battles with themselves and others on the left.
Sadly, I fear that’s true
Wouldn’t it be nice if the Lib Dems also stayed away and allowed a truly Green candidate to stand and expose how thin Zac Goldsmith’s green credentials are.
I would love to see Labour sitting this out and believe that if they sat out Witney (David Cameron’s old seat). The Lib Dems would have won. After Brexit we are living in extraordinary times. The only way without PR system is to have pre-election pacts but I have low confidence that Labour will sit it out.
A quick Wikipedia search (no expense spared) has the 2015 result in Richmond Park with Goldsmith getting 58% of all votes. The Lib Dems have however held the seat in the past and are easily in poll position to overtake the conservatives (though they had a -23% swing in the last election). Interestingly it has the declared candidates as Goldsmith (Ind), Olney (Lib Dem) and ANTI Corbyn (English Independence) and a One Love Party candidate name to be declared. So no Labour candidate so far!
We agree
I think – about Witney – that it would have been very unlikely that the Lib Dems would have won if Labour had stood down.
If you look at the figures, adding together the Labour and LibDem vote gives you a figure of 17,376. The Conservative vote was 17,313.
Now, of course this means that if all Labour voters had voted Lib Dem, there would have been a very slim victory for the Lib Dems, but it seems to me a wild claim that every single person who would have voted Labour (under a more left-wing leadership) otherwise would have been happy to vote Lib Dem instead. All it would take is for a couple of hundred of Labour voters to refuse to back the Lib Dem anti-Tory candidate for the plan to fail.
We just don’t know….
True, but given the large ideological split between the Lib Dems (which as a party is now slightly to the left of Clegg but still dominated by the Oranges I’d say) and Labour (now, obviously, further to the left than it’s been for a long time), I wouldn’t at all be surprised if many more than a couple of hundred of Labour voters couldn’t be persuaded to vote Lib Dem even if they were paid for it.
I completely disagree
In the real world tactical voting is commom
All I’m saying is that, assuming all previous Lib Dem voters vote Lib Dem again, only 63 of those May 2015 Labour voters would need to refuse to back the Lib Dem candidate for the Liberal-Labour alliance to fall.
So I’m assuming an extraordinarily high amount of tactical voting – just that unless virtually all of those potential voters vote tactically, it won’t work.
This is not 2015
Brexit and Heathrow have changed a great deal
Oh come on. Heathrow?! You think Heathrow has changed party political dynamics?
Brexit is a more reasonable proposal, but it doesn’t look like the facts bear out your thesis: the Tories are still ahead, Labour is still performing poorly, the Greens still scrounge around on 4% and the Lib Dems do a fairly steady 9ish per cent.
You seem to think that all of those Liberal/Labour voters in the Witney by-election would be so ‘turned on’ (in the least suggestive way possible!) that they’d coalesce around one candidate such that less than 63 of the Labour 2015 votership failed to vote Lib Dem this time around. If you think 2016 is so different from 2015 that that’s the case, I suggest you reconsider.
In Richmond, yes
It is obvious to me (and others it seems) that Corbyn should/could offer the hand of friendship to the other parties (or elements thereof) to bring together a more progressive cross party coalition against the Tories.
Had he done so I think he would have thrown and exposed the PLP members for what they are and also have got some form of cross-party base from which to lead.
This would have been showing some real leadership and may have also reduced the impact of the PLP who have not come to terms with him.
Labour? Sod ’em.
As for Zac Goldsmith – he owes his position to the fact that his father was nothing but an asset stripper who made his money from liquidating the wealth of many perfectly viable British firms which enriched him and the shareholders but ultimately began the destruction of our manufacturing base leading to the malfunctioning country we know today.
It seems to be obvious to many but not to those making the running in the Labour party, who still pine for the good old days when it was either Tory or Labour. To paraphrase Conor Pope in a Twitter exchange, its ‘obvious’ that we’ve just got to get all those Tory voters to vote Labour. As though at some point lots of those voting Tory will see the error of their ways, persuaded by the cogent arguments of todays Labour leadership. Hand of friendship? More like a two fingered gesture…
As for Zac Goldsmith – I’ll not hold all the sins of his father against him, and he was a truly nasty piece of work as you say. However, having tried to give him the benefit of the doubt over the years given his apparent green sympathies, Ive concluded that he is as rotten as his father, just in a different way. The Mayoral campaign said it all
PS Hot Press. So McDonnell thinks Goldsmith is a man of principle..! And LabourList and its commentators seem to be more sympathetic to not standing in Richmond. We’ll see.
“As though at some point lots of those voting Tory will see the error of their ways”
I hate to break it to you, but convincing voters who previously voted for the other major party is a huge part of a successful election campaign.
A couple of statistics: 14% of Conservative 1992 voters voted Labour in 1997. At approximately 2 million people, that contributed half of the popular vote lead Labour had in the 1997 election. So very important.
And in 2010, the Conservatives managed to get 11% of 2005 Labour voters on side. This, again, was about half of the Tories’ vote lead over Labour in the 2010 election.
There are three important things a party can do in order to win an election. (1) get out the base (2) bring in new new voters and (3) convince other voters to vote for you this time. 3 is most important followed by 1 and then 2.
Corbyn fails on all of those. Conservative voters still overwhelmingly intend to vote Conservative, Jeremy Corbyn is unpopular among previous non voters (-6 net rating compared with May’s +6, according to Survation’s latest), and while the 2015 Labour vote is looking more confident about Corbyn than a few months ago, his polling among this group is still terrible.
“Labour? Sod ’em.”
Is that you, Jeremy?
I think we might actually be in agreement. Persuading those who have voted for other parties, typically Labour vs Tory usually happens by moving to the ‘centre-ground’. Whatever that is. Not by moving to the further extremes of left-right. The assumption of the Corbyn team seems to be that current Tory voters will realise how wrong they are and discover an attraction for Corbynite politics. I think that might just be flawed.
However, in todays febrile, nationalistic atmosphere, not all the usual assumptions will still be valid. The Tories adopting UKIPs further right policies does not seem to have put people off … yet. Their claim to be representing the interests of the working man has not been seen through yet
No, it’s definitely ME. I assure you.
Anyway, got to go ‘cos I’m meeting Shami Chakrabarti for dinner….oh sod it……..I can’t even get this right!!!!!!!
This from the Guardian; maybe Labour will not field a candidate?
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/oct/26/labour-frontbenchers-urge-party-not-to-contest-richmond-park-byelection
I suspect they will be ignored…..
The hard line will come into play
Who do you consider the hard line in this context?
I gave no idea
The problem many of us still have is seeing the Liberals as a party of the left after their performance in the coalition. Their vote collapsed for a reason. The electorate does however have virtually no memory, so who knows.
Im interested to see the outpourings against the LibDems from Conor Pope on Twitter and Labour List – which makes me think that some people in Labour at least are worried that their ideological purist line might be under threat.. At the same time, the responses and comments make me think that there are a lot of Labour folk who are much more sympathetic, and see the bigger picture as being about weakening and getting rid of the current government.