Cumbria Chronic on the result of the Egremont South by-election

The Chronic has a piece about last week's the Egremont Town Council by-election, with the title

 PAPERS PLAY DOWN REFORM WIN? – The Cumbria Chronic.

Note the question mark at the end of the title.

Click on the title for a link to the article.

The Chronic has asked whether the local Cumbrian papers are unduly downplaying the result, without quite answering their own question, although they give a pretty big hint. They imply what they think when they write

"The local papers clearly view one seat on a Town Council as a “blip” rather than the first tremor of an impending earthquake.

It’s a mistake that rival political parties are almost certain to repeat."

We can reasonably infer from this that the Chronic thinks that the papers have indeed downplayed this result.

(Grammar fanatics and would be grammar students might like to note that the above first part of this blog post includes a rare example of the related words "imply" and "infer," which relate to opposite ends of the same process, both being employed correctly instead of being treated as if the latter meant exactly the same as the former.)

It is perhaps only fair to point out that there have been two Town Council by-elections in West Cumbria in the past few weeks, both of which resulted in Labour losing a seat, and the Harrington by-election for Workington Town Council in which the Conservatives gained a seat from Labour was every bit as much downplayed by the local media as the Egremont  Town Council by election in which Reform UK gained a seat from Labour.  

There is a common thread here and it's not the local papers downplaying a Reform win: it's the local papers downplaying a disappointing loss for Labour.

It's also fair to say that local council by-elections with a turnout of a quarter of the electorate or less do not have a track record of being brilliant predictors of results for a general election four years later.

There are a whole host of reasons for that. These start with the fact that there is a lot of water to go under the bridge until the next general election, likely to be held in 2029, and continue with the fact that 26% was a high turnout for a town council by-election but 60% would be a low turnout for a general election.

However, although it is possible to overestimate the significance of a local by-election, it is possible to underestimate it as well - this is more than a straw in the wind. It's more like a bale of hay, if not yet a full-size haystack.

Labour lost a seat that they had held without interruption for 35 years, and lost it badly. They ought to be worried about that. The Conservatives were getting a much better reception on the doorstep that last year and had hopes of winning the seat. We have lessons to learn too.

The Conservative result wasn't that bad in the context of how we have often performed in that ward, but the fact that voters who were unhappy with Labour chose to express this by voting for Reform rather than the Conservatives when we had called the election, publicised how to vote when the council didn't send out polling cards, and made a lot of running on a key local issue, sends a message to us that voters have not yet forgiven us for the mistakes which led to our defeat last year.

Reform UK have their own problems as the Cumbria Chronic themselves pointed out very convincingly here, and unless and until Reform can fix those problems I doubt that they can win a general election. However, they are an existential threat to the current UK political order.

Some people may welcome that. Democracy means people have the right to stand and vote for something different. 

But as a conservative with a small "c" as well as a Conservative with an upper case "C" - I am not one of them.

Until Reform UK can match their ability to spot and articulate problems - which is often spot on -  with an ability to suggest practical solutions which might actually work, they are one of Britain's problems rather than being part of any fix for those problems.