Harry Hayfield
Green
Cavalier Gentleman (as in 17th century Cavalier)
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Post by Harry Hayfield on May 14, 2015 21:49:39 GMT
A little look at Wikipedia shows what caused the first by-election in each Parliament since 1950.
1950: Sheffield, Neepsend : Resignation to provide a seat for Solicitor General Frank Soskice
1951: Bournemouth East and Christchurch: Elevation to a hereditary peerage
1955: Mid Ulster: Disqualification
1959: Brighouse and Spenborough: Death
1964: Leyton: Life Peerage to provide seat for Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker
1966: Carmarthen: Death
1970: St. Marylebone: Life Peerage on appointment as Lord Chancellor
February 1974: Newham South: Life Peerage on appointment as Lord Chancellor
October 1974: Woolwich West: Death
1979: Manchester Central: Life Peerage
1983: Penrith and the Border: Hereditary peerage on appointment as Leader of the House of Lords
1987: Kensington: Death
1992: Newbury: Death
1997: Uxbridge: Death
2001: Ipswich: Death
2005: Cheadle: Death
2010: Oldham East and Saddleworth: Election Petition
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neilm
Non-Aligned
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Post by neilm on May 14, 2015 23:10:40 GMT
Was OE&S technically a by-election or a void election so technically still the GE? Same as with Winchester in 1997 essentially.
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on May 14, 2015 23:43:59 GMT
Yes it was a bloody byelection. Had this argument many times. Separate writ so byelection.
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on May 15, 2015 4:17:17 GMT
"Life Peerage on appointment as Lord Chancellor"
Can you imagine that these days...
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Post by LDCaerdydd on May 15, 2015 9:15:50 GMT
"Life Peerage on appointment as Lord Chancellor" Can you imagine that these days... Imagine being the agent, campaign manager, treasurer or any activist for that matter in a seat, get your MP re-elected only for them to resign two days later in exchange for a peerage.  |
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on May 15, 2015 9:28:10 GMT
I think that if we were looking for a by-election to get Balls back into the Commons, we would be best advised to leave it for a year decade or two. If you want a personal opinion .... |
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on May 15, 2015 9:29:18 GMT
I can't think of a joke about baring vs bearing :/ Will Labour really be rushing to get Balls back into the Commons? It involves 'baring', 'balls' & 'fnar fnar'. |
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Richard Allen
Banned
Four time loser in VUKPOTY finals
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Post by Richard Allen on May 15, 2015 19:53:20 GMT
"Life Peerage on appointment as Lord Chancellor" Can you imagine that these days... Imagine being the agent, campaign manager, treasurer or any activist for that matter in a seat, get your MP re-elected only for them to resign two days later in exchange for a peerage. Normally this only tended to happen in very safe seats so not too much of a hassle. Of course in 1983 The Tories came very close to losing Penrith and the Border. Whitelaw's majority at the general election was 14,421. Seven weeks later David MacLean held it with a majority of just 552. |
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Post by LDCaerdydd on May 18, 2015 8:43:35 GMT
As soon as a party starts treating a seat like that (as in 'safe') is the moment they deserve to loose it IMHO.
Back to my original point, it wasn't so much the worry of loosing it, its the fact I've done all this work, only for the MP to FO to something bigger and better and you'd have to do it all again when you were probably looking forward to nothing more than a break.
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neilm
Non-Aligned
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Post by neilm on May 20, 2015 13:27:21 GMT
Imagine being the agent, campaign manager, treasurer or any activist for that matter in a seat, get your MP re-elected only for them to resign two days later in exchange for a peerage. Normally this only tended to happen in very safe seats so not too much of a hassle. Of course in 1983 The Tories came very close to losing Penrith and the Border. Whitelaw's majority at the general election was 14,421. Seven weeks later David MacLean held it with a majority of just 552. I got into trouble over some comments I made about David McLean. Almost cut off my stint in Whitehall before it had begun. |
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neilm
Non-Aligned
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Post by neilm on May 20, 2015 13:28:46 GMT
Yes it was a bloody byelection. Had this argument many times. Separate writ so byelection. Thanks for that, I hadn't realised. |
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Merseymike
Independent
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Member is Online
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Post by Merseymike on Jun 14, 2015 15:28:49 GMT
Also it depends if your original seat was a natural seat for your party. Twiggy won a Tory safe seat - politically we are not soul mates but to give him his due he moved to Liverpool and is just about the best constituency MP you could imagine. He is a fantastic motivator too. Chris Leslie also won a safe Tory seat. But Balls has lost what has been a Labour seat for a long time and it can't be blamed on boundary changes either. It's odd. In person he is funny and sharp and he has a good back story in defeating a stammer. Yet though we saw a bit of this in the last leader selection where he had a good campaign, he isn't liked by many in the party eitoher, truth be told He isn't liked because he comes across as a bit of a bully. Stephen twig is a gentleman. I entirely agree. A bit like Cameron actually , I heartily disliked the barracking between the two in Parliament |
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Post by linders on Jun 22, 2015 14:45:28 GMT
But Balls has lost what has been a Labour seat for a long time and it can't be blamed on boundary changes either. This is slightly misleading; it was a new seat when drawn for 2010 and had it had a long existence it's unlikely to have been a Labour banker. Still, Labour performed better in most other Yorkshire seats with small majorities, so... Sorry, but this is nonsense. There are no areas of inherent Conservative strength in the entire constituency - the best you can say is that there are a couple of wards Conservatives could win in an even year and in reality a decent year. Andrea Jenkyns will have had to scrap for every vote. The Labour local Council candidates outpolled their Conservative opponents here by almost 3500 and won every ward bar the independent win in Morley North. It's not uber-safe but it is unlikely that there has been any election since the war when Morley and Outwood was a notionally Conservative seat (perhaps with a favourable SDP split in 1983?) and I'm fairly sure it would have been in the red column in 2015 with almost any other Labour candidate. |
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jun 22, 2015 14:48:04 GMT
It's not uber-safe but it is unlikely that there has been any election since the war when Morley and Outwood was a notionally Conservative seat (perhaps with a favourable SDP split in 1983?) and I'm fairly sure it would have been in the red column in 2015 with almost any other Labour candidate. I did this calculation in another thread - conclusion was that it would have been very close in 1983, but central prediction was Labour about 1% ahead. EDIT: Ah, here you are: Interesting question about Morley and Outwood in the 1980s. I tested it for 1987. The ward boundaries don't match up but the closest match is the Leeds wards of Middleton, Morley North, Morley South, and the Wakefield wards of Ossett, Stanley and Altofts, Stanley and Wrenthorpe. Without bothering you with the working the notional 1987 election in Morley and Outwood comes to Lab 42.8, C 38.4, All 18.8. The notional 1983 figures are too close to call, probably Labour by a whisker. PS If anyone else wants to try alternative ways of estimating it to see if it comes up with the same result, they are welcome. PPS The Conservatives came close to winning it on local elections in 1992 - Labour lead of 6%. |
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Post by linders on Jun 22, 2015 15:00:38 GMT
That's very interesting David, thank you.
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Post by oldhamexile on Sept 1, 2015 21:03:43 GMT
"Life Peerage on appointment as Lord Chancellor" Can you imagine that these days... Happened in 1945 as well, when William Jowitt became Attlee's Lord Chancellor and vacated his Ashton-under-Lyne seat just a few weeks after the general election. In this instance there doesn't seem to have been any negative reaction. The biggest change from the GE was the intervention of a Liberal candidate, but even so Labour's by-election candidate Hervey Rhodes polled 54.1%, little different from Jowitt's 56.4% in July. And the by-election turnout was 70.5%. Jowitt had first been elected for Ashton (in October 1939) in one of the first unopposed wartime by-elections. |
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Sept 1, 2015 21:16:28 GMT
Jowitt had been a Liberal MP for Preston, but was made a law officer in 1929 in the Labour government. He defected to Labour and successfully sought re-election as a Labour candidate. Then in August 1931 he retained office in the National government and became a National Labour MP.
However the Tories in Preston refused to accept him, and the only other seat he could find was Combined English Universities - which had two Conservative candidates but used STV. He lost the election, but in the long term this helped him because it meant he could return to Labour without many people remembering that he had been part of the MacDonald 'betrayal' (as it had eventually turned out to be).
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Post by finsobruce on Sept 1, 2015 21:57:17 GMT
Jowitt had been a Liberal MP for Preston, but was made a law officer in 1929 in the Labour government. He defected to Labour and successfully sought re-election as a Labour candidate. Then in August 1931 he retained office in the National government and became a National Labour MP. However the Tories in Preston refused to accept him, and the only other seat he could find was Combined English Universities - which had two Conservative candidates but used STV. He lost the election, but in the long term this helped him because it meant he could return to Labour without many people remembering that he had been part of the MacDonald 'betrayal' (as it had eventually turned out to be). A man with a more interesting political history than most... |
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Post by oldhamexile on Sept 1, 2015 22:58:37 GMT
Jowitt had been a Liberal MP for Preston, but was made a law officer in 1929 in the Labour government. He defected to Labour and successfully sought re-election as a Labour candidate. Then in August 1931 he retained office in the National government and became a National Labour MP. However the Tories in Preston refused to accept him, and the only other seat he could find was Combined English Universities - which had two Conservative candidates but used STV. He lost the election, but in the long term this helped him because it meant he could return to Labour without many people remembering that he had been part of the MacDonald 'betrayal' (as it had eventually turned out to be). Yes, I can't think of other National Labourites who were allowed back. Do you think one factor in Jowitt's case might have been that potential law officers and lord chancellors were not thick on the ground in the Parliamentary Labour Party? There was Stafford Cripps obviously, who had been Jowitt's Solicitor General, but by the end of the '30s he was hors de combat, first for being too far left, later as one of Labour's 'Big Five' earmarked for a higher profile post. Various younger Labour lawyers might again have been either too far left, or as yet too junior for the Woolsack. |
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Sept 1, 2015 23:09:45 GMT
Most National Labour figures later went on to the Conservatives.
Harold Nicolson moved from New Party to National Labour to Labour, but doesn't seem to have been in the Labour Party before he joined the New Party.
Philip Snowden (who was arguably never properly 'National Labour') broke with the National government in 1932 and became an Independent. He endorsed the Liberals in the 1935 election, and Labour where there was no Liberal candidate, but without much conviction and without joining either party.
Malcolm MacDonald was reconciled with the Labour Party enough to get senior diplomatic appointments from the Attlee and Wilson governments.
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