ok, so I am going to try and make some sense of the fun that is my home constituency of Bradford West. Currently a Labour seat held by Naz Shah, but has previously voted for Galloways Respect in a by-election. My starting point is that I don’t think last times GE result will be a particulary good starting point.
Looking at the votes in the last Locals we have:
Independents 12,379I think they were all affiliated with the Bradfrod Independent Group and won four of the wards easily with far smaller but not insignificant votes in the out of the city wards of Thornton & Allerton and Clayton & Fairweather Green where they came third close behind the Conservatives. I would imagine their vote was mainly from the Allerton and Fairweather green ends of these wards respectively.
Labour 8347, Winning T&A and C&FG
Greens 3143 mostly from Heaton Ward where they were second, they were 5th just behind my wife in T&A
Cons 2362Lib Dem 567 from two wards. We probably would have snagged a few hundred more with paper candidates in the other four wards so perhaps a local election ‘base’ of about 1000
Total about 27000
for comparison at the last GE the votes were
Independant 90
Labour 33736
Greens 813
Con 6717
Lib Dem 1349
Brexit 1556ie about 4400, meaning there are some 17000 GE voters to find homes for.In past times we could probably assume most of these would go to Labour and Con, and be enough to give a comfortable Labour victory, and though that is still the likely outcome things are a bit more complicated.
Starting at the easy end, I imagine we (LD) will pick up a few more votes - how many will largely depend on national mood and profile of the party, and whether it will be enough to lift us into deposit saving levels remains to be seen.
The Greens are a bit more tricky - most of their LE vote was in one ward, and may be to an extent personal to that candidate who had worked it a few years so they might slip back a little. However I would be surprised if the didn't easily come above 5% unlike last time.
I imagine most of the old Brexit Party vote will go to Reform, along with a fair few of the GE only voters who in the past would have voted conservative. They might also take some of the LE Con vote as well as there was no Reform option in May and things are even worse for the Cons and better for Reform than then. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Reform finish ahead.
For the Conservatives the factors are more or less the mirror image of that, and t is entirely possible things will get even worse for them over the next three weeks.
Which brings us to the independents, and in particular why didn't they get their act together and support a single candidate? One possibility is that they include one or more spoiler candidates intended to split the Indy vote deliberately to make things safer for Labour. I'm not sure even I am that cynical, but you never know. Alternatively they may all think they have a chance to be swept in on an Indy tide and no one was prepared to leave it to another with the likely outcome of mutual destruction.
Muhammed Ali Islam is the BIG affiliated independent who tool 4000 votes in Manningham in the locals. As noted in the Bradford local thread he has stood twice previously on a more or less 'younger people in the ward have been ill served by the traditional family leaders deciding who the (Labour) winner will be way of doing things' platform. He is not just someone who has fallen out with the Labour party over Gaza. As such I am not surprised that he wouldn't want to stand down as part of some sort of deal. I have seen a few banners for him, mainly in Manningham.
I know nothing of the other two candidates so what follows is largely speculation. I haven't bothered to trawl through old SOPNs to see if they crop up there.
I have seen no posters or banners for Umar Ghafoor. Others have suggested he has been a Labour candidate in the past so I guess he would be the most likely 'spoiler'.
There are a lot of banners about the place for the final Indy, Akeel Hussain. My first impression was that they were using the BIG branding, but on closer inspection that is just down to the use of green and red. Now whilst Hussain is not an uncommon name, it is also true that the Hussain family have a long history of influence and power in Bradford West, with a number of councillors and the current MP for Bradford East having been the Labour candidate who lost out to Galloway in the 2012 by-election. If Akeel is connected to them it may well be a genuine attempt to reaffirm that influence. This is just the sort of thing that M Ali Islam was concerned about so would further explain the inability of those two opposing camps to come together.
