The Labour party has achieved its largest ever byelection victory by overturning a 20,000-vote Conservative majority in Selby and Ainsty, while the Liberal Democrats have also unseated the Tories in the previously safe seat of Somerton and Frome.
However, the Conservatives managed to hold on to the Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat, previously held by Boris Johnson, by fending off a predicted Labour win by just 495 votes.
While Rishi Sunak, during a visit to Uxbridge on Friday morning, stated that the results indicated that a Labour victory in the general election was not “a done deal,” pollsters emphasized that the overall swing away from the Conservatives was a clear message from voters.
The new MP for Selby is 25-year-old Keir Mather, a former researcher for the shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, who won by 4,161 votes, representing a massive 23.7 percentage point swing from the Conservatives.
Selby and Ainsty byelection result
Mather, 25, will become the youngest MP in the Commons. In his victory speech, he stated that “thousands of votes were in Labour’s box for the first time” and declared: “In this campaign we have rewritten the rules on where Labour can win.”
The Liberal Democrats achieved a resounding victory in Somerton and Frome, in a contest triggered by the resignation of scandal-hit David Warburton. Sarah Dyke, the cabinet member for the environment on South Somerset district council, won with a majority of 11,008 votes over the Conservatives.
The Green party came in a distant third in all three byelections.
Greg Hands, the Conservative chair, stated on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the results did not necessarily spell doom for his party, given the historical trend of incumbent governments being punished in byelections, pointing to the narrow win in Uxbridge.
“We’re obviously going to listen to people, we’re going to look at some of the reasons why,” he said. ”But equally, byelections are not always a good predictor of general elections.”
However, polling expert ProfSir John Curtice, speaking on the same programme, argued that Hands was being unrealistic, and that the results indicated that the Conservatives were “in as deep an electoral hole as polling suggests.”
02:06UK byelections: Labour wins Selby and Ainsty but fails to take Boris Johnson’s former seat – video
Joining the victorious Tory candidate, Steve Tuckwell, at a cafe in Uxbridge, Sunak said: ”Westminster’s been acting like the next election is a done deal. The Labour party has been acting like it’s a done deal. The people of Uxbridge just told all of them that it’s not.”
Labour’s delight was notably tempered by its failure to take Uxbridge, with some in the party blaming the decision of the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, to extend the ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) anti-pollution scheme to outer areas of the city, including Uxbridge, the key Tory campaign in the…
2023-07-21 03:46:59
Link from www.theguardian.com
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