What is the meaning of the Peterborough by-election?

This week, to mark the end of the academic year and therefore Public Policy and the Past’s annual summer hibernation, we thought we’d do something different. So steel yourself for a full week of blogging – each at only half the length we normally attempt, running to only a thousand rather than two thousand words, but hopefully illuminating nonetheless.

It’s been an absolutely terrible year for British politics, which appears now to be in vertiginous decline. Its ranks are dissolving into nothing more than a chaotic rabble. That’s a paradox, because the nation as a whole really does not seem to be exhibiting the same deep amber or red warning signals. So it’s time to take stock. Why does the organised party system in the United Kingdom look to be under such threat? Is the threat real? What are the deeper roots of the crisis, if indeed there are any.

Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at how the traditionally ‘smaller’ British parties are doing, having cast our eye last month over what May’s local and European elections told us about the Conservatives, Labour and the apparently resurgent Liberal Democrats. Then on Wednesday, we’ll examine the likely balance of forces if there is a General Election this year – specifically, the very strange prospect of a Labour government being elected even as its popularity falls off a cliff.

On Thursday, this blog will examine Labour’s recent report on land policy, all the more pressing since they appear to be on the verge of power. We’ll round it all off on Friday with a survey of recent public policy successes, not just to end the year on a slightly more optimistic note, but to highlight again the odd sensation of watching politicians struggle so tragi-comically while the country at large keeps its act together. 

First, and today: what does the recent Peterborough by-election tell us about the parties’ relative standings? Labour’s narrow victory has launched all sorts of not-so-hot takes, usually from partisans whose utterly naked self-interest and boring tribalism make their one-eyed claims all the harder to take. One small part of the kingdom has been to the polls yet again – and with the voter recall of Chris Davies, the Conservative MP for Brecon and Radnorshire, another seat will be up soon too. Can a by-election tell us anything about national standings?

Peterborough might just tell us nothing at all. On one level, it’s important to note that all the hot takery in the world might mean… zilch. We once thought that the Conservatives’ February 2017 victory in Copeland showed that the Tories were on the march, likely to seize Labour seats deep into red territory. Well, it didn’t work out like that, did it?

Let’s go further back, too. Eastleigh in 2013 told the Liberal Democrats that they might be able to hang on to quite a few seats, despite the deep unpopularity of their coalition with the Conservatives among many of their voters. That turned out to be, well, optimistic. Labour’s narrow hold of Darlington in 1983 convinced the party to keep Michael Foot. He then led that party to electoral catastrophe just three months later. Keep in mind that single data points do not make for a conclusive equation.

The by-election told us that the polls are right. One intriguing and comforting point that leaps out from the Peterborough result is that it to some extent confirms the national polling picture. The Brexit Party have hit the low- to mid-20s in many of those surveys: here they got 29 per cent. That party just failed to grab the seat from Labour. It’s not listed as a Brexit Party gain on what is perhaps still the most famous seat predictor, Electoral Calculus – even though that site projects nearly 200 Brexit Party gains.

The polls are also telling us that support for the Conservatives and Labour alike is falling like a stone. That’s exactly what happened in Peterborough. Labour’s vote fell by 17.2 per cent (the fifth worst byelection vote fall for that party in forty years), while the Conservative vote went down by 25.5 per cent. So, very roughly speaking and in the real world where British political polling has a mediocre record, pollsters should be cheered: they don’t seem to be doing too badly.

This win told us that although Labour are suffering, the Conservatives are in an even deeper hole. Labour’s candidate Lisa Forbes (above) got returned to Parliament not because she was particularly popular, but because her party’s vote share fell less than did the Conservatives’. Put very crudely, Labour were more successful in staunching their bleeding to the Liberal Democrats than the Conservatives were to the Brexit Party. Had just a few more Labour voters decided to give the revived and Remain-focused Liberal Democrats a chance, Labour would have lost this seat. And that tells us exactly what the European elections did: Labour’s coalition is falling to bits, but the Conservatives’ alliance with the voters could be completely disintegrating.

The vote totals hinted that there is still life in the ‘old’ parties. Some voting surveys are suggesting that Labour and the Conservatives have shed half their vote since the last General Election. That isn’t quite what we saw here, since although the Tories’ vote did crater on that scale, Labour’s didn’t. Labour seems still to be holding on among minority communities and in diverse areas, a fact that caught our eye too in the European election results. That fact caused quite a lot of unpleasant racist dog whistling from the Brexit Party immediately after this byelection, and a not-so-whispered campaign against the legitimacy of this election focusing on the postal vote. Far be it for us to suggest that Nigel Farage and his supporters would do better to have a think about why non-white Britons loathe them so much.

Meanwhile, one of the main reasons the Brexit Party did not win this seat was that even though it clearly became a two-horse race, the Conservative vote actually held up better than expected against a classic protest vote ‘squeeze’. Mr Farage simply couldn’t persuade enough Conservatives to back his new upstart party – which ended up at about the same nearly-nearly threshold that United Kingdom Independence Party used to bang its head right up against. Close, but no cigar.

So Peterborough confirms lots of things that have been more and more obvious in recent months. It’s only one result, but it makes the polls look as if they are in the right ball park. It demonstrates that the Big Two of red and blue are astonishingly unpopular given that they are supposed to be the main and traditional homes for left- and right-leaning voters. But they are still just about able to block the advance of new entrants such as the Brexit Party. They have the data. They know where their voters are. They have money and machinery. But their dominance is creaking and cracking alarmingly, and they know it. For the rest of the week, we’ll try to suggest why that might be – and why it matters.