Norwich North – Heroes and Zeroes
Posted Under: Elections,Green Party,Labour,Tories
Heroes
The Tories: Flying high in the polls on the back of Labour’s most crushing defeat in almost a century at the European Elections, it is unsurprising that the Tories came out on top in the Norwich North by-election, overturning a majority of over 5,000 to take the seat from Labour. Gaining close to 40% of the vote, the Conservative Party seems nigh unstoppable at the moment. In Norwich North they faced an unknown candidate from an unpopular party who had swine flu. With no real challenge to their powers, they are the Superman of this election. The General Election is theirs to lose, but it would have to be a very big lump of kryptonite indeed.
UKIP: UKIP does fantastically well at European Elections. It’s disproportionately ignored in Parliamentary Elections. But surviving Kilroy, a dark force that has destroyed daytime television viewers across the country, to prove they are not utterly irrelevant one trick ponies by taking almost 12% in Norwich North, UKIP come out as unlikely heroes. Like a geeky kid being bitten by a radioactive spider, this bunch of old white men have managed, against all odds, to hit the big time.
The Greens: The Green vote is up 7 percentage points in Norwich North. Although just short of the 10% mark, they tripled their vote and made the second largest percentage gain of all the parties. They were never likely to win in Norwich North, but with their impressive gains in the County Council elections, the Greens are, very slowly, but very surely, making real progress and Norwich South looks to be within their grasp at the General Election next year. It won’t be easy. But like an orphan with no powers, standing up to a city full of villains on a seemingly impossible caped-crusade for justice, the Greens might just be able to do it.
Zeroes
Labour: No one likes them. They’ve got no friends. They lost Norwich North because they badly misjudged the reaction to the expenses scandal. In an effort to appear as though they were doing something, they forced one of their most popular MPs to step down. Many analyists hypothesised that if Ian Gibson had chosen to stand as an independent, he would have won. But, as widely predicted, Labour lost the seat they’d held since 1997 and with their vote down 26 percentage points, it was a crushing defeat. Between two unpopular wars, economic collapse, a raft of scandals and a Prime Minister with the charisma of a cardboard box, they will lose the next General Election.
Liberal Democrats: Sometimes I forget we have a third party in this country. Largely because I can never be sure, one election to the next, what it is they stand for. With the Tories and Labour battling over the centre ground, there’s no room for the Lib Dems, even though they came out relatively cleanly from the expenses scandal. There are many favourable factors they should be capitalising on, but with their vote down over 2 percentage points in this election, they’re clearly not doing it. That’s why, in Norwich North and, I suspect, in many parts of the country, they earn their status as zeroes. Not because they’re the fat ginger kid with spots and glasses who always wets himself in class. But because they’re the quiet one sat in the corner who never puts his hand up.
Craig Murray: The former ambassador to Uzbekistan, who took a stand against human rights abuses and war, wanted to put an honest man in parliament. The voters thought an honest man in parliament was a laughable idea and he got 953 votes.
BNP: Nick Griffin’s old party, the Nazi National Front, which spawned the illegitimate friendly-fascist sprog that is the BNP, once described Norwich as the ‘last white city in England’. 941 people in Norwich North wanted to see it kept that way. The rest ignored the BNP’s message of hate. Whilst the BNP has made disturbing gains in the North and in parts of London, in Nelson’s county they are about as effective as a fleet of French and Spanish ships at Trafalgar. The BNP are the emos of the class. In some places they find their crowd and spread their negativity. In Norwich North they sit alone in the corner cutting themselves.
Alternative analysis from Jim Jay
Reader Comments
You forgot the Libertarians, much touted on the web, with their fresh-faced (some would say pre-pubescent) candidate…
…who got 36 votes. Oh well, there you got mises.org.
I considered including them, but it would have been a one word analysis.
The Libertarians: Pwned!
UKIP got a bigger increase in the vote than the Greens sadly – although the greens did more than triple their vote which I think would normally be regarded as good.
Did they? Oops, I’ll correct. Cheers for pointing that our Jim.
Jim, you are a psephology fiend.
I meant to say cheers for pointing that out Jim. Instead I ended up sounding like a Yorkshireman.
To be honest it is not surprising that UKIP are doin well. On the question of Europe – their raison detre – the three major parties are all atoddwiht vast swathes of the electorate who rightly regard the EU as an affront to democracy. This isn’t to say I don’t think UKIP are a bunch of wankers.
I don’t believe the majority of UKIP voters choose the party because they consider the EU an affront to democracy. I think they do so for more specious nationalistic reasons. Now of course there is an argument for linking national sovereignty with democratic accountability, as many NO2EU supporters have. But I can’t see those arguments being chief amongst UKIP’s support.
In my view the biggest losers here are the Lib Dems. Labour, well, they’re obviously in meltdown, but we knew that.
The Lib Dems though have had a year to profit at the expense of Labour and they’ve botched it. I really think they could have beaten Labour and become the opposition to the Tories after the next general if they’d played their cards right, seems unlikely now though.
Besides Labour, which as you point out were always going down, the Lib Dems probably are the biggest losers here. However, I don’t think it was ever likely that they could overtake Labour to become the opposition. Remember when the Tories were in meltdown six years ago. Hague was gone, Iain Duncan Smith was on his way out, the Tories had lost two elections, they’d backed the war so on the greatest issue of the day they had no means to criticise Labour and they had no credible project of their own. At the time, the Lib Dems were predicting they could take the heads of several prominent Tories and eclipse them to become Labour’s opposition. Even in the darkest days for the Conservative Party, they never came close. Perhaps with proportional representation they might have done, but as things stand, we essentially have a two party system and it will always be between Labour and the Tories. Cameron will win a couple of elections and then the Tories will be where they were in 1997 and Labour will be getting ready to form the next government. Let’s just hope the next generation of Labour leaders are prepared to take the party back to its roots.