Labour’s Double Election Win Sees Big Swing Away from Tories

Emily Ashton
·7 min read
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

(Bloomberg) -- Keir Starmer’s UK Labour Party overturned large majorities to take two parliamentary seats from Rishi Sunak’s governing Conservative Party, handing it a major victory before nationwide elections expected this year.

Most Read from Bloomberg

Labour recorded its second-highest vote swing — 28.5 points — from the Tories in a post-war by-election to take Wellingborough, a central England seat Sunak’s party has held since 2005. It won Kingswood in the southwest with a 16.4-point swing, still well above what analysts expect Labour needs for a governing majority if replicated across the country.

Meanwhile a strong performance in both seats by Reform UK, the anti-immigration party founded by Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage, will spark worries among Tory strategists about a split in the right-wing vote.

Starmer “still looks on course to be the next prime minister,” John Curtice, a prominent psephologist and politics professor at Strathclyde University, told the BBC. Wellingborough underscored an “adverse reaction among voters” to the Tories’ record in government, he said.

It is a major blow to Sunak, whose administration has now accrued more by-election defeats in a single term of office than any government since the 1960s. The results compound a damaging week after data showed the UK slipped into recession in the second half of 2023. That undermines Sunak’s key pledge to grow the economy, and his election campaign built around persuading voters to “stick with the plan.”

“Midterm elections are always difficult for incumbent governments,” Sunak told broadcasters on Friday. Lower turnout than in some of last year’s by-elections suggested “there isn’t a huge amount of enthusiasm for the alternative in Keir Starmer and the Labour Party,” he said.

Still, it’s not just the losses to Labour that will worry Tory MPs, who have long warned that a right-wing vote split with Reform UK could pave the way for a Labour landslide in the general election. Some of Sunak’s fiercest critics had warned a poor Tory performance combined with a Reform UK surge could be the next flash point in their campaign to oust him before the general election.

Reform UK won 13% of the vote in Wellingborough, far above its by-election record — suggesting its rising support in national opinion polls is translating into votes on the ground. Its 10.4% share in Kingswood represented enough votes to narrowly hold the seat for the Tories had they all gone to Sunak’s party.

“It really is an epic morning of by-election results and puts the Conservatives in a very bad place,” Michael Thrasher, politics professor at Plymouth University, told Sky News. “Any support that Reform gets is bound to hurt the Conservatives and will be the difference between some Conservatives holding onto their seats or losing them, so they are a critical player.”

Reform UK is polling at 12% nationally according to YouGov, but was yet to produce that level in local elections or by-elections. Achieving that in Wellingborough could be a pivotal moment in British politics, and is likely to renew calls on the Tory right for Sunak to do more to counter the threat.

Farage and Reform UK leader Richard Tice have repeatedly ruled out the kind of deal the Brexit Party — Reform’s former name — cut with the Tories before the 2019 general election to stand aside in seats to try to block Labour.

“Tonight was the night Reform came of age,” Farage told GB News, the right-wing channel on which he has his own show. “It became a real political party, not a theoretical political party and both those results show that.”

Even so, some expected Reform UK to do better, and its performance was a far cry from the 19.6% achieved by the similarly anti-immigration UKIP party — when Farage was leader — in Wellingborough at the 2015 general election.

“It’s not quite as successful as UKIP was in 2015, but they’re going to be significant players,” Thrasher said.

Meanwhile the results will also come as something of a relief to Starmer, who has faced his own setbacks in recent weeks that threatened to undermine his leadership, including a U-turn on Labour’s flagship economic policy and a row over its candidate in the by-election in Rochdale, northwest England on Feb. 29.

The party withdrew support from Azhar Ali over antisemitic remarks he made last year, meaning Labour will lose a seat it has held since 2010 — though it will expect to win it back in the general election.

Starmer said he was not complacent about the general election, despite the scale of Thursday’s wins. “As every football fan knows, you don’t win the league by a good result in February,” the Labour leader, who supports Arsenal in the Premier League, told broadcasters. “We’ve got to fight as if we’re five points behind in the polls.”

In Wellingborough, Labour’s Gen Kitchen won 13,844 votes — a 45.9% share — defeating Conservative Helen Harrison who got 7,408 votes, or 24.6%. Reform UK’s Ben Habib came third with 3,919 votes.

“This shows that people are fed up, they want change, they want competency, they want pragmatism and they want politicians to under-promise and over-deliver, which is what I am hoping to do,” Kitchen said after the vote count.

The vote was triggered when veteran Conservative MP Peter Bone was suspended from the House of Commons for bullying and sexual misconduct, which he denies. His partner Harrison became the Tory candidate.

Read more: Sunak Faces Electoral Tests That Risk Encouraging Tory Plotters

In Kingswood, Labour’s Damien Egan won 11,176 votes — a 44.9% share — ahead of Conservative Sam Bromiley who got 8,675 votes, or 34.9%. Reform UK’s Rupert Lowe finished third with 2,578 votes, a 10.4% share.

That seat became vacant when former Tory energy minister Chris Skidmore quit in protest over Sunak’s watering-down of the UK’s climate policy. He had been MP since 2010, though the district traditionally moved between Labour and the Conservatives since it was created in 1974.

“In Kingswood, as across the country, 14 years of Conservative government have sucked the hope out of our country with a feeling that no matter how hard you work, you just can’t move forward,” Egan said. “With Rishi’s recession we’re left again paying more and getting less. It doesn’t have to be this way, you know it, I know it, we all know it.”

Egan faces a short spell as Kingswood’s MP because the seat will be abolished at the general election under boundary changes to reflect shifting demographics. He said he will be Labour’s candidate for neighboring Bristol North East, which will absorb some of the Kingswood district, in the UK vote.

Labour made a strong push to win because the contest was seen as a precursor to trying to oust Tory Jacob Rees-Mogg in neighboring North East Somerset — which will also absorb some of the current Kingswood district. The former Cabinet minister dismissed the significance of Labour’s win, saying by-elections are an “opportunity for people not to turn out, to protest.”

Even so, he said the Tories should learn from the result and Reform UK’s performance. “Conservative Party votes are most likely to come from people who stay at home or who voted Reform,” Rees-Mogg said. “I wouldn’t expect any deals, I think you have to win people over by argument and persuasion.”

The Tories have now lost 10 by-elections since the 2019 UK vote — including three to Labour with swings of at least 20% last year alone. That is more losses than any previous government since the 1966-70 Labour administration of Harold Wilson, which was defeated 15 times, according to the Press Association.

(Updates with comments from Sunak, Starmer and Farage from 6th paragraph.)

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

©2024 Bloomberg L.P.