Starmer’s Labour IN RUINS after night of dire by-elections!

Right, so it’s been more by-election misery for Labour as another 16 seats around the country that had been vacated have been decided this week and again the obvious conclusion for that is that they have been punished at the polls both for their domestic policies no different to the Tories, more misery, more austerity to come, whist at the same time still backing unequivocally the actions of Israel in the Middle East, causing global distress and disgust.
This time however, we’ve gained some insight into exactly why on the ground Labour are losing out as I have very helpfully been passed a breakdown of experiences that Green Party volunteers have discovered locally and observed on the doorstep in one of these seats and if this is a picture being replicated across other seats as these results across the board appear to imply, Labour are in a shockingly bad place right now and with even more misery to come, May’s local elections look set to be historically devastating for Starmer’s awful administration and few people will have any sympathy for him for that.
Right, so by-elections again. Following on from the bumper crop we had of them a month ago, many of which were vacated by councillors who have moved on to become MPs and so again is the case here, more vacated council seats for newly elected mostly it has to be said Labour MPs. Of the 16 seats up for grabs, 9 of them are due to councillors vacating as they’ve been elected to parliament, not all of them Labour, there’s a few Lib Dems in there too.
Of these 16 seats, Labour were only standing in 14 of them and of these one was a Scottish seat where ranked voting came into play, so different motivations influenced how people voted there a different system, but the remaining results were nothing to shout about at all and before I get onto that story of how things played out on the ground in one of those seats as written and sent to me by one of my Green Party comrades in that area and I appreciate you acknowledging my personal bias on such things ahead of that, I do think it still reflects a lot of Labour Party opinion elsewhere as well, see what you think in a moment, but first let’s look at the results as far as Labour stood elsewhere as well.
First those two seats that Labour didn’t stand in just for completion, one in Cumbria was a Lib Dem hold, gaining ground over the Tories who were the only other party standing there and the other was Llanberis in Wales, a Plaid Cymru hold over the Greens, Lib Dems and an Independent.
The Scottish seat was a Labour vacation as the councillor for Falkirk South, Euan Stainbank has become Scotland’s youngest MP for Starmer’s Labour. It’s a weird one because they use ranked choice voting rather than first past the post, so people put the candidates in preferential order and then by process of rounds of elimination they arrive at someone with more than 50% of the vote. As such, after 7 rounds of counting, Labour held it, even though on first preferences, the SNP got the most votes, the local vote still very much reflective of the General Election it has to be said, as Labour notionally gained 8% while the SNP and Tory vote collapsed. This ward certainly isn’t reflective of Scottish general election polling mood though, as an MRP poll on Scottish voting intention that came out yesterday implies that Labour would now lose 34 of their Scottish seats, with the SNP gaining 39 seats also at the expense of the Lib Dems and Tories. Labour is rumbled there despite this local result.
But the other 13 results were much more clear cut and much more typical of the kind of results we’ve seen last month and clearly getting no better this month.
We’ll start in staunch Tory country though, Windsor and Maidenhead in the ward of Sunningdale and Ascot and you can’t imagine the Tories not holding their seat here and indeed they did, their vote share perversely going up 18%, though it has to be said there was no Green candidate this time, which is likely where some 13% of that vote came from, but facing off against the Lib Dems, Labour and and Independent, Labour came last, getting little more than 3% of the vote, seeing their share collapse by 11.6%.
This scale of loss was also repeated in Stockport, a Lib Dem stronghold up for defence in Bredbury Green and Romley, where the Lib Dems gained another 7% to take 65% of the vote, standing against the Tories, Labour and the Greens, with Labour again losing over 11% of their vote share to gain just 5.5%.
Another Stockport ward, Cheadle West and Gatley was also up for grabs, also a Lib Dem defence, both of the Lib Dems from Stockport have become MPs and it was another strong hold for the Lib Dems here, although they lost 12% of their vote, they still held 45% of it and Labour nominally gained 0.5% bringing their vote share up to 20.1% here.
So, so far losing most of their vote share and that only got worse, even where they held seats.
Labour lost their seat in Rodbourne Cheney in Swindon to the Tories at that, Labour losing nearly 20% of their vote as the Tories mopped up most of that weirdly.
Keswick in Cumberland Labour held despite losing over 17% of their vote share, and a second seat in Cumberland, Wtheral, which was a Tory defence they held, despite a small loss in vote share themselves, with Labour losing over half of their own vote share though, down more than 15% to little over 12% of the vote.
Tirymynach in Ceredigion saw the Lib Dems hold that ward, they were elected unopposed last time, so Labour getting just 1.4% of the vote share there still counts as a gain, but not exactly one to holler about, and nether was holding onto their ward of Royston Palace in North Hertfordshire, now held by just 0.3% as Labour saw their vote share fall by over 12% with the Lib Dems breathing down their necks.
The Tories gained a seat in St Albans from the Lib Dems, but Labour came a distant last, again over half of their vote share fell leaving them with just under 4% of the vote and Labour held Belvedere Ward in Bexley, despite losing over 14% of their vote again, just 6% now between them and the Tories there.
The Tories took two seats off Labour elsewhere though as they lost a ward in Greenwich due to a vote share collapse of 9% and in Holme Valley on Kirklees Council, a Labour stronghold as that has been, Last of the Summer Wine Country, as despite the Tories losing 2% of their own vote, thanks to Labour losing almost 19% of theirs, they lost the seat and the Tories gained it.
And so this brings us to the last seat of the night, but the one I know the most about, as this was in Ashford in Kent, where it has to be said the result was very narrow, but the story behind it, as sent to me by local Greens, well, it’s a tale that needs to be told.
Labour lost the ward in question here, Aylesford & East Stour to the Green Party, with Labour losing just 1.2% of the vote, but the Greens gaining just under 3% meant they took it with a margin of just 0.6%, now giving the Greens nine seats on Ashford Borough Council.
The seat was vacated by a Labour Councillor, Sojan Joseph, who beat the Greens in 2023, so the Greens got this seat back essentially, but the campaign story has been passed onto me by the Deputy Leader of the Council, Steve Campkin, and it seems that Labour threw the kitchen sink at this seat to hold it and still lost. Here’s Cllr Campkin’s account:
‘Hi Damo
I Thought you’d like to know that Ashford Green Party won their ninth seat on Ashford Borough Council.
We won 8 seats in 2023 with Thom Pizzey losing to Labours Sojan Joseph, with Al Arnold (Green) and Sojan Joseph representing Aylesford and East Stour, a two seat ward.
The Greens teamed up with the Ashford Independents to take the administration from the conservatives in 2023 with Labour abstaining on the leadership vote, and Noel Ovenden (AI) was elected leader of the Council with Steve Campkin (Green) as deputy.
Sojan was elected as Ashford’s first Labour MP in the general election, with The Greens Mandy Rossi doubling her vote share to come fourth.
With Sojan stepping down, a by-election was triggered, with Labour campaigning before it was even announced. After five weeks of campaigning, Labour head office sent a team of forty activists down to knock on doors from seven in the morning. The Greens had four! Labour were knocking on every single door four or five times while the Greens were only targeting their own supporters. Mid afternoon the Greens stopped knocking as people were getting very angry and we figured Labour were doing our job for us!
At full council this evening only two Labour councillors turned up, one of them armed with 12 questions to cabinet, mostly aimed at the Greens on the cabinet, while Labour councillors were still out campaigning, seemingly under instructions from Labour head office.
At the count the Greens won with 299 votes to Labours 293, after Labour called for a recount which found a Green vote had accidentally got counted as Reform. (It’s worth mentioning here that the count staff had been working for 24 hours straight at this point and mistakes get made)
Green Party candidate Thom Pizzey was elected as the new Green Party Councillor for Aylesford and East Stour, alongside his long time friend Cllr. Al Arnold, meaning every Borough seat in the County ward of Ashford East, also held by Steve Campkin, is now Green, and the Green and Independent administration on Ashford Borough Council is now a little stronger.’
Well, isn’t that interesting! Is Labour head office now getting so panicky about local election results, that this is the scale of what they’re prepared to do to defend their seats and they still fail? Perhaps it puts all those other losses they’ve experienced in perspective, where they lost by even larger margins where perhaps they didn’t try as hard, but even when they do, they still lose?
Since the General Election in July, there have been 92 council by-elections for 94 seats. Labour have lost 17 of them, have held 34, but even where they’ve held they’ve more often than not lost vote share in the double digits and they’ve been in government for a little over 100 days. We still have what is widely expected to be a devastating budget for ordinary working class people coming at the end of the month. We have what will be a long, cold winter for many to come after and before the next set of local elections. Where people have gone back to old habits perhaps and this is why we’ve seen the Tories gaining again now in defiance at this Starmer led Labour administration, the Greens are proving there is a third way, there is a progressive change we can all make, an alternative to vote for to break the wheel, break free of the status quo that just keeps the country running for establishment interests and never ours and they are still making gains too. More people need to hear of it, the mainstream media will never tell you about it, you’ll never get accounts such as that from Cllr Campkin here anywhere else and I thank him for passing that onto me to be shared, because stories like that make a difference, make people believe change is possible and the more people that can hear stories like this, the better and the more hope for real, meaningful change and not false promises or pledges there will be.
If you missed my coverage of some equally appalling by-election results for Labour from last month, demonstrating a distinct trend now as this is, check out this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.