The 2010 Edgbaston electoral result and by-elections

Another from November 2010 but I think most of the issues are still high in the minds of many of the same people, and for many of the same reasons.


What the Edgbaston Result Means for the Next By-Election

At the Conservative Party conference in October there was a lively discussion going on in many quarters about why the party had not done better in the election.  There was even a well attended fringe session entirely dedicated to the matter.  After five months of hand-wringing over the matter, the question of how the Tory party had not been able to capitalise properly on the unpopularity of Gordon Brown's government was still being asked.
I attended the fringe session and it was quickly evident from an observer's point of view that the majority of people in the room felt that on some level at least, the real problem was that the party leadership was out of touch with the party membership.  Numerous stories were recounted of campaign instructions being sent down from on high which seemed to have little understanding of local issues.  
The electorate had been more concerned about local issues in the 2010 election than it had been in other recent elections, and in many cases this was borne out by election results.  Many local Conservative associations had wished to reflect this in their campaigning but many seemed to feel that their local understanding had been brushed aside in favour of the centralised Cameroon vision.  One man told of extensive local opinion surveys that his group had carried out being disregarded and a central office idea of how the campaign should be conducted being imposed instead, which failed to address any of the issues their surveying had highlighted.  Many others in the room had apparently experienced the same thing.  There was a strong feeling among those present that the leadership did not trust the membership and that proper communication had broken down as a result.

Another thing which one or two people found cause to mention was the fact that the Tory party membership was far smaller than would naturally be expected for a party which had until recently been the main opposition to a very unpopular government.  This reminded me of a conversation I had had with a friend immediately after the election.  He had told me before the election of a dilemma he was facing.  His MP was very popular with her constituents and most people appeared to want to retain her.  However, as she was a Labour MP my friend knew that a vote for her would be a vote for her party as well and he desperately wanted to see a change of government.  By contrast, he did not want to vote Conservative, despite being keen on David Cameron being the next prime minister, as he had very little expectation of the local Tory candidate being as good as the incumbent MP.  In the end he decided to take a third option.  He chose to vote for the Impact Party instead.

Like me, he had read all of the campaign flyers which had been pushed through his door and he had found the three main parties' concentration on their leaders both tiresome and lacking in local relevance.  By contrast, the flyer from the Impact Party seemed to be concerned with issues which concerned him too.  Normally he would have left it at that but then the Impact Party candidate visited his office and they talked.  By this time my friend had decided, with some misgivings, to vote Tory, in order to get a change of government.  However, he found he got on well with Harry Takhar, the Impact candidate and although he knew that he had no prospect of gaining the seat, my friend ended up deciding to solve his dilemma by voting Impact, on the basis of using his vote to help prevent what he saw as a good man losing his deposit.  Since then I have met several other people who had taken exactly the same course.

Now this would be all very well if not for one thing.  Until quite recently Harry Takhar was a member of the Conservative Party.  However, his dissatisfaction with the very problems which were repeatedly brought up in the fringe session - direction and the disconnection between leadership and membership - had led him to leave the party and set up his own party in opposition.  This in turn had led to one hundred and forty six people voting for him in the election, in an electorate which was very closely fought on election night.   The seat was held by Gisela Stewart for Labour with a majority of 1274, far more than the number garnered by the Impact party but even then, the votes gained by Takhar were equal to slightly over eleven percent of this majority.  Had Takhar not contested the election, perhaps most of these votes, like that of my friend, might have gone to the Tories.  Perhaps even more pertinently, national polling had consistently been showing immigration and our relationship with Europe to be the public's biggest concerns, but these were subjects largely avoided by all three main parties in the run-up to the election.  In Edgbaston the BNP scored 1196 votes, a figure which comes close to equalling Gisela Stewart's majority.  If the Tory leadership had listened to what its grass roots members were saying and had addressed the issues which were concerning communities many of these BNP votes might have gone the way of the Tories.  Furthermore, UKIP polled 732 votes.  Thus it may be that by alienating party members and not addressing local concerns in its campaign materials the party lost Edgbaston, which analysts had identified as Labour's most 'at risk' seat.

This is why the leadership must learn to listen to its rank and file.  If information flows properly between them campaign instructions and materials can be better tailored to the need of electorates, and local issues can be targeted to generate maximum numbers of votes.  One size rarely fits all.

The general election is over of course but the issue is still just as important.  As the present case of Phil Woolas reminds us, by-elections are always a possibility and a number will occur within the space of any one parliament.  Although the Tory Party is now in a formal coalition, any by-election it can win and deny to Labour strengthens its hand in government.  Unless the leadership learns to trust its rank and file and listen to what it tells them about what the person in the street is saying, they run the risk of a resurgent Labour Party making by-election gains across the parliament which could affect the government's ability to carry out essential programmes of reform.  As a public backlash develops against spending cuts, the Conservatives need to be able to demonstrate a unified party which is ready and able to respond to the local issues of voters if it is to have any realistic chance to gaining further seats over the next few years.