A deep-dive into the Chester by-election
Billed principally as the first electoral “test” for the new Prime Minister, the by-election in City of Chester on 1 December was undoubtedly of significance. Its result offers us the most substantive evidence so far of how the turmoil of recent months has affected the electoral prospects of the major parties. Greg Cook, Helm Associate and formerly Labour’s head of political strategy, examines the detail…
Main Points of the Result
This is Labour’s highest ever share of the vote in City of Chester, beating the 56.8 per cent in 2017 and 53.0 per cent in 1997.
It is by some distance the Conservatives’ worst ever share of the vote, their previous worst being 33.1 per cent in 2001.
Labour’s share increased by 11.1 percentage points, the highest of this parliament, beating the 8.1 point increase in Wakefield and from a higher starting point (49.6 per cent compared with 39.8 per cent).
The Conservative share fell by 16.1 points, less than in the three seats which they lost to the Liberal Democrats, but also less than in Wakefield (-17.6 points from 47.3 per cent). In comparison their share fell 13.1 percentage points in Old Bexley & Sidcup exactly a year ago from a much higher starting point of 64.5 per cent.
The net swing of 13.6 per cent compares with 12.7 per cent in Wakefield and 10.2 per cent in Old Bexley & Sidcup.
The swing (specifically the changes in each party’s share of the vote) in City of Chester alongside the Scottish poll published yesterday would, applied nationally, bring a Labour overall majority of 40 (Lab 345, Con 212, SNP 40, LD 29, PC 3, Oths 21).
Taking raw votes, Labour retained 63.9 per cent (17,309/27,082) of its 2019 vote and the Conservatives 30.3 per cent. The comparative figures in Wakefield were 73.5 per cent and 38.7 per cent, a difference attributable to the much greater decline in turnout in City of Chester (72 to 41 per cent as against 64 to 39 per cent).
The Lib Dems’ share increased by 1.5 points having fallen in every other by-election of this parliament apart from the three seats which they have gained.
City of Chester
This is a constituency which is quite hard to compare with any other. It has a number of features which are important to its electoral behaviour and typical of Labour’s best-performing areas – its highly affluent professional middle class electorate, its academic and student community, its location in the North West region and specifically on the fringes of Merseyside – but nowhere else really matches the nature of this constituency and its electoral history. City of Chester was held by the Conservatives in both the 1945 and 1966 Labour landslides by several thousand vote majorities; the administrative and cultural centre and cathedral city of Cheshire with its well-deserved reputation as the most reliable Tory county in the north of England and effectively owned by the Duke of Westminster as an outpost of the establishment. Despite its location adjoining the industrial centres of the Dee and the Mersey it had and has only a small working class population, most of that living in the 1950s Blacon estate outside the city itself.
It was during Labour’s heavy election defeats of the 1980s and 1992 as Tory support among educated professionals and public sector workers relatively declined that Chester emerged as a marginal, and it was duly gained in 1997 and held until 2010. It is though in the last three elections that it has established itself as one of the places where, to adapt the crude metaphor, Labour has kept its trunks on while the tide of its support has gone out.
Chester parliamentary elections since 1992
In 2015 it was, along with its Merseyside neighbour Wirral West, one of the ten seats which Labour gained from the Tories (while losing eight in the other direction) of which four were in London and three in the North West. In 2017 it was one of the seats where Labour’s vote was higher than in 1997 probably mainly due to its student population, and in 2019 the Tory share of the vote actually fell by 2.2 points.
This is not though a seat which has undergone huge social and demographic change or where the Tory vote has collapsed. They retain a significant level of support not just in the rural fringes of the constituency but in the wealthy neighbourhoods of Broughton, Handbridge Park and Upton within the city itself which still elect Tory councillors. But the centre of the city and the commuter neighbourhoods around the railway line to Liverpool are now Labour strongholds while the working class areas of Blacon and Lache have not undergone any Red Wall-type erosion but retain the loyalty to Labour which characterises this part of the North West region.
Assessing the significance of the by-election result
Labour’s current lead in the polls exceeds 20 points with the Tories averaging barely 25 per cent which represents exactly the sort of collapse of support which was required to suggest that the next election might be truly competitive. But abnormal shifts of this sort, emerging over a very short period and driven by short-term political events obviously need to be treated with caution; the gap between stated voting intention and actual vote choice is likely to be wider than usual.
Real elections thus give an opportunity to assess the extent to which the polls are simply reflecting the social unacceptability of the Tory party in the wake of their behaviour over the last few months and how much that is translating into additional support for other parties. The percentage of 2019 Tory voters claiming to have directly switched to Labour has roughly doubled since the time of the Wakefield by-election so that ought to show itself when they actually have a chance to vote, and in an election where they know that the government will not change as a result. Some polls are also showing a measurable level of support for Reform as a haven for some disaffected Tories, so again is there any real evidence for that?
All in all the result in City of Chester is a step up for Labour compared with Wakefield, with a larger increase in its vote share and a bigger swing from the Tories. On the Tory side although their vote share fell less than in Wakefield this was clearly a worse result. It represented a net loss of almost half of their support which is roughly what the polls are suggesting, and qualitatively in Chester their 2019 supporters would have been more resilient core voters, without the soft underbelly of switchers from Labour which were more prevalent in Wakefield. The slight uptick of Lib Dem support in Chester is probably made up of disgruntled Tories for whom Labour is persona non grata. The Reform candidate received a higher share of the vote than the Brexit Party in 2019 but none of the minor parties made any real showing. The very sharp decline in turnout however, in what is a high participation constituency, is probably of more significance.
Nevertheless on paper this result looks a bit more like the Wakefield result than it looks unlike it. It does not look like evidence of a new ball park. While comparison with the mid-1990s is of limited use, that period of 25-30 point Labour leads in the polls brought with it record-breaking by-election swings of more than 20 per cent. That said we are here hampered by the limitations of Chester as an indicator of wider trends. In a seat where Labour has recently performed relatively well the scope for dramatic improvement is obviously less.
The next by-election, in Stretford & Urmston, will unfortunately not be able to tell us much more. Although an urban, partly inner-city, seat, its political history is not dissimilar to that of City of Chester and is another where Labour peaked in 2017 rather than in 1997. There at least we have a benchmark against which to measure any more recent change in the form of the 63.8 per cent of the vote which Labour took in the May local elections. But the likelihood is that the by-election will, in the absence of many Tory voters to provide potential switchers to Labour, simply replicate that May result. West Lancashire, which will follow next year and is being misleadingly claimed by some to a “Red Wall” seat, was held by the Tories during the 1980s and comprises the solid Labour stronghold of Skelmersdale along with a number of commuter towns and villages whose politics are heavily influenced by their location on the fringes of Merseyside. The Tories may find it harder to hold on to their vote in West Lancashire than in Chester especially as there may be independents available to switch to.
We may have to wait until the May elections to know how the Tories are truly faring in the swathes non-metropolitan Britain where Labour has lost most support over the last 15 years and where, logically, a big shift in the polls might be exaggerated. What the City of Chester by-election does confirm is that we are now in a period when the Tories are out of bounds to all but their most loyal supporters and will find it hard to win any election, certainly any by-election. It is likely indeed that they will trail in the polls right up until whenever the election is held. We may not know whether the polls can be believed and that they represent real voting intention rather than just the Tories’ short-term cancellation until the votes in that election are counted.