Historic by-elections and the curious case of Tamworth

Good morning. By-elections are, primarily, a health check for political parties. Losing a by-election is a bit like finding out you have high cholesterol or low blood pressure: it doesn’t necessarily mean that your days are numbered, but it probably does mean you need to change something if you want to live a long and healthy life.

The Conservative party suffered two devastating defeats last night in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire, while the Labour party made two astonishing gains, in by-election victories that are by any standard history-making.

Swings from the Tories to Labour in excess of 20 per cent have now happened in relatively quick succession in Selby and Ainsty (23.7 per cent), Tamworth (23.9 per cent) and Mid Bedfordshire (20.5 per cent). The biggest lesson is that the opinion polls are about right: and that without some kind of change, Labour are heading to Downing Street and the Conservatives to the knacker’s yard.

Moody blues

When is a shock defeat not a shock defeat? Well, perhaps when new polling for More in Common shared with Inside Politics shows that 64 per cent of British people — wholly unsurprisingly! — think that we are in a recession. That the UK has thus far avoided one is not much use to the average household.

Then when you consider some of the stories about the UK public realm from the past week alone — that faulty aerated concrete has been found in more schools and that less serious criminal offenders in England will avoid jail time because the country’s prisons are full — it is hardly surprising that the governing party is not that popular right about now.

It’s possible that the condition of the economy and public services improve enough by the time of the next election for the Conservative party to pull off an election win that would be even more remarkable than Labour’s by-election successes last night. But it’s not particularly likely, not least because these by-election defeats will surely trigger a further bout of Tory infighting.

Somehow, Staffordshire returned

One neglected subplot of the past 13 years of Conservative government has been the extent of the Tory party’s dominance in the West Midlands in general, Staffordshire in particular, and the Tamworth constituency even more so.

I vividly remember seeing the swing from Labour to the Conservative party on election night in 2010 and thinking it must mean that the exit poll showing the Conservatives falling short of a majority must have been off — but actually it was just part of this same story. The Conservative party has done much better in Tamworth and in this part of England more broadly than it has across the UK.

This is a bit of a mystery because it is not immediately obvious why this should be the case. One explanation would be that Tamworth has become a retirement village, and that as older voters have trended towards the Conservatives, so too has the area. But actually the average age of a Tamworth resident is close to the average English one.

There is one important-ish exception: Tamworth is whiter than England as a whole, and, looking at the census stats for religion and your parents’ birthplace, clearly much more likely to be white British. But even that is a bit of a red herring, because the Conservative party has made some big strides electorally among British Hindu voters and British Jewish voters over the past 13 years.

I think part of the story is that Tamworth is just a touch likelier to have people in it who own their own homes, whether outright or because they have mortgages.

I’m aware that I’ve bored on a lot about how I think the most important lens to understand changes in the Conservative electoral coalition is about assessing who has benefited most from ultra-low interest rates. But I’m afraid I’m going to do it again: what we have here is a lot of people who have been able to get on the housing ladder because of low rates and in some cases because of Help to Buy.

What we also have, I think, is just an area that has more swing voters than most other places. So I don’t think what we saw in Tamworth is quite the same as Mid Bedfordshire, where the Conservatives did very badly in a very, very safe Tory seat. I think what we’re seeing in Tamworth and across this part of the West Midlands is a high degree of floating voters, plus many voters who gained from the age of near-zero interest rates and who are particularly exposed to the cost of living crisis as a result.

Now try this

I went to see Marin Alsop, one of my favourite living conductors, make her debut as principal guest conductor at the Philharmonia yesterday — she was very good, as you’d expect.

To my surprise, the highlight was George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”, a piece that frankly I had thought I had played so much, in concerts, in youth orchestras, on the radio, United Airlines commercials that I had grown to hate it. It’s renewed my affection for the piece, and I’ve added an excellent recording by Leonard Bernstein to the Inside Politics playlist.

Elsewhere, I’ve mostly been listening to the 10th anniversary reissue of Chvrches’ The Bones of What You Believe: the unreleased tracks are a great addition and it holds up well. (Other opinions are available: Ludovic Hunter-Tilney was lukewarm about it in his review.)

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