Rainham Central By-Election

The Rainham Central by-election was held yesterday (3 November 2016), caused by the sad loss of Mike O'Brien to cancer, and the insistence of at least one opposition party to stand where perhaps (as some have said) it should have been uncontested. In the event, a total of six candidates stood, representing the six enduring parties that we have around Medway. Others have come and gone, but these six can be relied upon for fielding candidates in Medway – though not necessarily in all seats or all cases.

Anyway, the by-election result is now in. The solid Conservative win is no surprise, with no less than 61% of the total vote; but perhaps Labour's third-place position will have been unexpected by some – though I had a strong feeling that it might go that way.

Indeed, I well recall rubbing my hands with glee at seeing the Statement of Persons Nominated – i.e. list of candidates – when it was published. That is always the moment when I know more or less what is going to be the outcome, and when I make my (sometimes public) predictions. It is always a delight when the ever-arrogant Medway Labour end up in third place or lower, as has happened a few times in recent elections, both local and national (e.g. Rochester & Strood last year).

Here are the vote numbers, in descending order as usual...

• Jan Aldous (Con) – 1,448
• Mark Mencattelli (UKIP) – 389
• Simon Allen (Lab) – 320
• Paul Chaplin (Lib Dem) – 137
• George Meegan (Green) – 61
• Mike Russell (Eng Dem) – 14

Percentages (including changes from May 2015) are...

• Con: 61.1% (+9.9)
• UKIP: 16.4% (-5.2)
• Lab: 13.5% (-2.9)
• Lib Dem: 5.8% (+5.8)
• Green: 2.6% (-5.2)
• Eng Dem: 0.6% (+0.6)

As with the recent Strood South by-election, again we see a huge divide between the current 'big three' parties and the rest. The norm nowadays seems to be that the English Democrats have become the dependable last place party, now coming behind even the Greens(!)

Even more noticeable is the sheer size of the winner's majority – over a thousand votes more than the runner-up, and in fact a good three and a half times the votes of UKIP and more than four times the Labour candidate's vote.

There's a real message for some of the parties in there somewhere...

Establishing a New Knorm

Just for fun, looking back to the Rochester & Strood by-election just a few months ago, here's the Official Monster Raving Loony candidate's 'manicfesto' in bite-size chunks, from Hairy Knorm himself.

It should be noted that he came sixth out of a field of no fewer than thirteen candidates – so was in the upper half – which shows that many people believe that voting Loony makes more sense than opting for the Patriotic Socialist Party, Britain First, or even a fair number of Independents...

Colliers Wood By-election

I don't normally cover such events here: not even during my years of political blogging did I tend to cover local council by-elections outside of Medway. This time, though, I think there is something of value we can all learn from tonight's result.

This was already a Labour-held seat, as are all three in Colliers Wood ward on Merton Council, and this by-election saw a considerable increase in Labour's majority there. This is no great surprise: I worked nearby, some years ago, and soon grew to understand the nature of the Tooting/Earlsfield/Colliers Wood area. UPDATE: the results are now here.

It was generally tatty, run down, with even then (and I'm talking late 'sixties and early 'seventies here) a larger-than-average ethnic minority population, who tended not to be very bright. I could relate tales of how a few of my employer's other staff used to play on this ignorance and apparent lack of higher brain functions (anyone meeting me might like to prompt me with the words 'engine' and 'coke' for details) but the point was that Tooting was, even then, hardly what one might call 'ethnically English' any more.

This, on top of an area of obvious bottom-end social nature, was always going to make it much more Labour-friendly than anything else – indeed, for the reasons we know so well today, it became Labour-dependent. The welfare handouts were the bribe that ensured party loyalty then, and now.

If one looks around the area in Google Street View, it becomes glaringly obvious that the considerable majority of people captured by Google's cameras are of the 'ethnic minority' type: even the facial blurring cannot disguise that fact. I have just spent a half hour or so checking...

If one looks at the map of the Merton Council area, one sees a clear divide between the Mitcham/Tooting part of the borough and the Wimbledon/Raynes Park area, with some mixed places in between and on the fringes (e.g. Abbey, Dundonald and St Helier).

Although the picture is somewhat clouded by the likes of the Merton Park Residents members and the Merton Coalition (which seems to have let a couple of UKIP folk in through the back door, as they form only a minor part of that group), the old Mitcham/Morden and Wimbledon divide is very clear.

It is therefore no surprise to find that the largest group on the Council nowadays is Labour – though their 27 members aren't that much more than the Conservatives' 21. As there are 59 seats, this means that neither party has an overall majority, by the way.

If one treats this as an example of how ignorance and State dependency swing voting – and governance – in a particular direction, then it becomes easy to realise why government at all levels has become less truly representative of the spirit of our nation, and has (on one side) willingly embraced all that this means and (on the other side of the political divide) compelled at least partial compliance with that agenda in order to have the ability to try to gently steer us back onto a more sensible course.

This is of course David Cameron's dilemma; and while immigration continues to flood our nation (though at a slower rate these days) and the ethnic minority population continues to have a significantly higher birth rate that the truly indigenous sector of the population, the balance will inevitably and inexorably tip ever further in Labour's direction – undeservedly and unrepresentative of the real Britain. Labour's plan all along was to exclude the Conservatives from government – or, failing that, to force them to become like Labour in order to survive politically..

In this, they have succeeded; and until a sufficiently large proportion of Britain's current (and future) population matures politically, this situation will not materially change.

Tonight's by-election result in Colliers Wood provides an alarm call to us all of the unnatural bias that has been infecting our system of governance for decades and even now continues to escalate. This is how we lose our nation, unless we wake up to what has been going on and find a way to combat it.

That isn't going to be easy, but it must be done or we lose Britain as we know it!

Eastleigh By-Election Result – 1 March 2013

By midnight, we had the turnout figure: 52·8%, which is reasonably high for a mid term by-election. Just under a quarter of all votes cast were postal votes, one source has said, while another has put it as high as two-thirds of the whole – the bulk of the Lib Dem ones apparently having been sent in before the Lord Rennard story broke in the media.

If the 66% figure turns out to be anywhere near the more accurate, this ought to explain the Yellows' victory if that is confirmed later, especially because of that timing.

Perhaps, in a way, that would be poetic justice, as the now-proven coincidental timing of the revelations should not have had an undue influence on the result anyway.

The Liberal Democrats are confident they have won, despite some seemingly odd suggestions that UKIP were running neck-and-neck with them, both overall and (on a separate occasion) in respect of postal votes alone. The size of the Lib Dem victory is all they await, plus formal confirmation of what they have apparently known since just before midnight, perhaps even earlier (though the first message saying this that I have found was timed then).

The word is that it's a big win (which fits in with my own prediction of either a narrow lead or a big one, but not a medium-size one) of "thousands rather than hundreds" as one source has put it. An update around 0130 hrs has put a nominal figure of circa 3,000 on this, though this was reduced to two thousand just twenty minutes later, presumably as a consequence of the larger UKIP score over the Conservatives (see below)..

There are indeed rumours of the Conservative candidate coming third, as a few commentators have been hinting might happen. If so, this will almost certainly turn out to be (also as others have said) an anti-'government' (as Conservative-led, and the Lib Dems also rejected) protest vote. It is the only credible explanation for UKIP coming from next to nowhere so suddenly.

That's okay: these things happen, and have done so for decades. The word at 0145 hrs is that UKIP might be around 500 votes ahead of the Conservative candidate. Later this was upped to around twice that number.

That would be a little sad if true, especially after the broadly good campaign that the Blue Team ran – though I do have reservations about the colouring of their last leaflet to look something like a UKIP one: it's not what I'd have liked if I had been standing, for example. I am sure that party people think it's all very clever and innovative, lateral thinking – but the voters are going to see it as trickery and  rather obvious attempted deception, perhaps even as a form of desperation. Wouldn't you, in their position?

It seems to have been only when that leaflet went out that the actual result shifted dramatically from what the polls have been indicating, and the Conservatives dropped from likely second place to actual third. There's a lesson in there, I strongly suspect...

Labour look like coming "a distant fourth" according to sources in Eastleigh. For decades their vote there was around 20% or so, dropping to just under half that at the 2010 General Election. Tonight's result is just as poor for them as it was in 2010, and it is even being rumoured that they have lost their deposit along with the numerous fringe parties/candidates. Perhaps Labour are becoming a fringe party themselves outside their heartlands. We should know over the next two General Elections, I think...

Meanwhile, by 0210 hrs the result is imminent, and initial percentage figures have the Lib Dems on 32%, UKIP on 28%, Conservatives at 25% and Labour on just 10%.

Anyway, at 0240 hrs, here are the full results for all fourteen (yes, 14 in the end!) candidates, with changes from last time...

1. Mike Thornton (LibDem) 13,342 (32.06%, -14.48%)
2. Diane James (UKIP) 11,571 (27.80%, +24.20%)
3. Maria Hutchings (Con) 10,559 (25.37%, -13.96%)
4. John O'Farrell (Lab) 4,088 (9.82%, +0.22%)
5. Danny Stupple (Ind) 768 (1.85%, +1.56%)
6. Dr Iain Maclennan (NHA) 392 (0.94%)
7. Ray Hall (Beer, Baccy & Crumpet) 235 (0.56%)
8. Kevin Milburn (Christian) 163 (0.39%)
9. Howling Laud Hope (Official Monster Raving Loony) 136 (0.33%)
10. Jim Duggan (Peace) 128 (0.31%)
11. David Bishop (Elvis) 72 (0.17%)
12. Michael Walters (Eng Dem) 70 (0.17%, -0.30%)
13. Daz Procter (TUSC) 62 (0.15%)
14. Colin Bex (Wessex Reg) 30 (0.07%)

(Lib Dem majority: 1,771)

Here's the BBC's video of the declaration...