Keir Starmer is on his way to Downing Street this year. The two most recent by-elections, Wellingborough and Kingswood, where Labour overturned large Tory majorities, were the continuation of an established trend. Of the ten by-elections with the biggest swings to Labour in history, five have been in the last year. The Wellingborough swing was the second largest since 1945 which, if repeated in a general election, would leave the Tories with just a handful of seats.
Those headlines, however, while highlighting the depth of visceral anger at the Tory Party, do not tell the whole story. Labour is being swept into power on a wave of disillusionment. Labour canvassers in the by-elections told the press “voters hate all of us”. Labour’s total number of votes in Wellingborough was only 107 more than it achieved in 2019 under Jeremy Corbyn, and 4,275 less than in 2017. In Kingswood, Labour’s 11,176 vote in the by-election was over 4,000 fewer even than 2019.
Read more