Oldham by-election
One day I'm going to write a generic post by-election post labelled (insert constituency name here) that I can repost after every by-election. Until that day, here's my traditional answer to what last night's by-election tells us about the national political picture: not much.
By-election are extremely strange beasts. They take place in a single constituency that may be completely untypical of the country as a whole, they normally have no impact at all upon who will be running the country the next day, they have far greater campaigning intensity than any other election. After every by-election I post the same conclusion - if they show much the same as the national polls suggest they tell us nothing new, if they show something different it's probably to do with the unique and different circumstances of by-election. In this case the opposition party has held onto a safe seat. This is exactly what we should expect unless they are tanking in the national polls, and Labour aren't: despite Corbyn's poor ratings and the constant news stories of Labour infighting their level of support is still pootling along at around their general election share. There is no reason to expect UKIP surges either - in the last Parliament UKIP had soared from 3% to the mid-teens, so almost every by-election saw them surging, but now we are comparing their support to what they got in the 2015 general election, after their breakthrough. This is a good local result for Labour, but doesn't tell us much new.
That's not to say it's not important. By-elections have a significant effect on the political narrative and in that sense this is a very good result for Labour (or, depending on your point of view, for Jeremy Corbyn). If this by-election had gone differently it would have been part of a different narrative, it would have been all about Labour in crisis, their traditional working class support fracturing to UKIP. It would still have been over interpreting a by-election, but it would almost certainly have happened and it's been avoided. In that sense, it's an important victory.
A final note about the polling - there wasn't any (I don't know whether to be amused or depressed by the handful of comments I've seen about it being a another polling failure. Nothing to do with us mate!). By election polling used to be very rare, then in the last Parliament we were suddenly spoilt, with Survation and Ashcroft polls for most By-elections.
This time we are back to having no real evidence to go on, to relying on what commentators have been told by the campaigns, what it "feels like" on the doorstep and in vox pops and all that sort of nonsense. I suspect the collective commentariat have got carried away with what would have made an interesting narrative to report, rather than dull old "safe seat held". It's a reminder that without any proper polling By-elections can be pretty hard things to call.
