Comparison between Christchurch and the fish-stinking North Shropshire by-election is evidence for the psyop to force Starmer as PM

The corporate-media “political expert” punditry‡ is making comparisons between last week’s implausible Lib Dem by-election win in North Shropshire and a by-election that took place in 1993 at Christchurch. The reason for doing it is to create the impression of the end of the current Tory executive branch by presenting similarity with the circumstances happening at the end of the historical one under John Major. This is further evidence that UK Government is indeed conducting a campaign, not to shift Boris Johnson from the position of leader of the Conservative Party, but to install Labour as the party in office, and Keir Starmer as Prime Minister, at the next general election. Of course, and once again, at that time corporate-media will tell the public of an outcome of their own creation, but this will be another terrible lie, for the electorate will have been severely manipulated, for several years leading to the day of the changeover, in order to alter perception and behaviour so that UK Government’s desired result is achieved.

The North Shropshire result itself was a node for manoeuvring along the way to the desired ultimate objective, because it saw a people harried by UK Government through the corporate-media (Mi7) with news of an invented Christmas Party at Number 10 Downing Street in spite of so-called lockdown restrictions, and therefore immersed in a scheme of perception where Boris Johnson and the parliamentary Tory Party were scurrilously hypocritical. As it happens, the author thinks that this psychological operation would not have been enough to have would-be Tory voters switch to another party in North Shropshire, and suspects UK Government had to execute a cheat involving postal ballot stuffing in order to guarantee the outcome it required. However, there is not enough material available to expound at length upon this exact accusation, but what can be done in this article, which again is ancillary to the Parliament’s growing legitimacy crisis in focus series being published at this site, is demonstrate the unusual nature of the North Shropshire result, and to draw attention to the fact that it should be compared, not with Christchurch, but another by-election that took place as part of a campaign in the 1990s, in exactly the same sort of manner that is being executed now for Keir Starmer, to force Tony Blair into the position of Prime Minister.

To begin, the very obvious reason why North Shropshire cannot be compared with Christchurch is because of the turnout: at the former, it was 46.2%, having fallen by at least 20 points from the previous general election in 2019.  In the latter, it was 74.2%, having decreased by only 6.5 points from the general election in 1992. What the turnout in Christchurch indicates is the sort of voter engagement that cannot be motivated in the current Fake Brexit epoch (where large portions of the electorate have recognised that they can’t be represented by any of the political parties, or ultimately that they should not surrender their sovereignty to a so-called Westminster representative). In short, it means that, these days, UK Government will find it harder to manipulate the electorate to have it produce results as per a design. The evidence of this is plain to see in the way that would-be Labour voters, amongst whom are a great deal who voted to leave the EU and are probably the most aware people in the country of being betrayed by their politicians, cannot be counted upon to even hold Labour seats in by-elections, let alone win them from the Tories.

This deficiency even evidently meant that UK Government took a decision to hold a psychological shock event in a constituency, North Shropshire, where motivating the Labour vote would be secondary to having would-be Conservative supporters switching to the Lib Dems – a party that had, only once since 1997, finished in second place in that constituency in a general election immediately behind the Tories. That the Lib Dems have been a perennial party of third place in North Shropshire is another big difference from Christchurch, and an indicator in itself of the current problem that UK Government has in manipulating voters, not just to make the Tories look weak, but to have them lose an entire general election. Most significantly, it is also an indicator of the unusualness of the result so that it should be viewed as suspect.

When this site predicted that the by-elections in Old Bexley and Sidcup, and North Shropshire could well see shock Tory defeats as part of the campaign to promote Kier Starmer, for both, it was argued that Labour could sneak wins (were the turnout to fall to sufficient enough levels, taking Tory support with it). As a matter of fact, the turnout for North Shropshire was predicted at 46%, and if Labour had then won as well, it would have been accepted at this place as an organic result reasonable by dint of being foreseen. However, the very fact of the Lib Dem win self-reflexively betrays contrivance to engineer, and again the fact that UK Government evidently had to opt to supercharge the third-placed Lib Dems to victory in North Shropshire is evidence of the fatal problem whereby it cannot these days count on stimulation to vote Labour.

So, for UK Government, the North Shropshire result tells of a scheme in a cocked-eyed state where Boris Johnson’s Tory party might have been weakened, but with the by-election having no further contribution to make than that: it doesn’t make the Labour party look like it will romp home at a general election. To compensate, in great contortions of gaslighting, this is why the comparisons with Christchurch are being made.

However, it is more suitable to compare with the 1992 Dudley West by-election, of which its Wikipedia entry interestingly states the following:

 This was the first significant sign of the changed political climate following the election of Tony Blair as Labour leader, which would eventually lead to Labour’s 1997 general election victory.

Like North Shropshire, Dudley West was a high-swing election to dislodge an MP of the incumbent executive branch’s colour – but it was a direct competition between Labour and the Conservatives, and could send the message that the North Shropshire by-election cannot. Like its modern counterpart, the Dudley West by-election had a very unusually high swing, which also makes it stick out like a sore thumb. When we start to analyse why this could be, we have to consider that it was indeed a psychological shock event meant to direct perceptions and alter attitudes about the future of the Labour Party under Tony Blair versus the Tory Party under John Major.  At that time, given the blanket naivety of the British public, all that was probably required to do this job was the rabid anti-Tory propaganda that Mi7 produced basically non-stop during the tenure of John Major as Prime Minister: a man portrayed routinely as a pea-eating and Y-front underpants-wearing bore. This was, of course, before everything changed in Britain when Parliament captured itself for the preservation of continued alignment with the EU, so that now, as we can readily imagine, it has become necessary for UK Government to stuff the ballot boxes with postal votes at North Shropshire in order to have it “participate” in any grand scheme as required.

As mentioned before, the Dudley West and North Shropshire are both results that are out of place and worthy of suspicion, and this becomes clear when looking at a table of by-elections ranked in order of highest swing.

In the previous FBEL article on this subject matter, that very much accompanies this one, it was explained that given the inevitable low turnout, the swing to the Lib Dems at North Shropshire would have to be a high as possible. Lo and behold, it came in as being the 7th largest in any by-election at least since the 1960s (if not before that, the author is not sure about what entire period the data in the table below is from). As far as its being a contest between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives is concerned, it is second only to the famous Christchurch by-election, with which it has already been said that comparisons should not be made.

Now, the two tables reproduced above actually form a contiguous set of data that has been split in two to help show the oddity of the North Shropshire result. The first table shows by-election results with a swing of 26% and above. The second shows results with a swing of 25.9% and below.

It should be noted that in the lower (second) table, 6 out of 11 by-elections suffer falls in turnout so that it drops by 20% or more – this includes the Chesham and Amersham election of 2021. This establishes what should be considered as a more common signature of a by-election involving swings at the lower end of this scale. Additionally, of these large turnout drops, 5 instances arrive at a turnout of around 50%. There are four sub 50% turnout elections.

For the upper table, which contains the top 16 results (including two that cannot be understood in terms of context and data, but have not been omitted), there are also four instances when the turnout is sub 50%. Two of these are the 2003 and 2004 Lib Dem versus Labour contests (one in which Labour holds), where the turnout was verging on 50% in the previous general election.  Now, it perhaps should be considered quite possible that when a constituency that generally has a low turnout turns from one party to another, this will indeed involve a large swing, because of it being a matter of the same consistent-voter type of people (as opposed to those that routinely don’t vote) deciding to cast their vote differently. It is interesting to note that Wikipedia entry for one of these by-elections, the Brent East one, where Labour was defeated by the Lib Dems, says of it “commentators linked the result to anger from traditional voters over the Iraq War, as well as the private sector’s involvement in public services”.

We will return momentarily to the other two instances when turnout falls by more than 20%, North Shropshire, and Dudley West in 1992, but first we must discuss the by-elections in this upper table where turnout is just above 50% and has fallen by an amount that is closer to 15% than 10%.

Turnout generally falls at by-elections, and one has to make a distinction about what is to be understood as natural, and what can be explained by specific extenuating circumstances. Where there is a turnout in the range of 50 to 60, and it has come about by a small drop (compared with the previous election), then there is an explanation for a higher swing as just discussed. However, it will be noted that the by-elections with turnouts just above 50% (in the upper table), after decreases closer to 15%, are all three of them special cases. They are the election of George Galloway in Bradford West, and the two UKIP MPs in Clacton and Rochester and Strood. What happened at these was the coming in of a new challenger who was directly competing for votes from the incumbent – and indeed, had also been the incumbent in the cases of the contests involving UKIP. Expectation at the by-election in all cases would have been of the inevitability of the winner, and a sense of there being no-contest would surely have affected the turnouts. The high swings would be explained by the straight-forward switching of vote.

Even with the outliers rationalised, all in all, it can be said of the very high swing results in the upper table that what is common to them can be reckoned as being a reasonable to good turnout, with a natural explanation for why it might have dropped more than usual, or an understanding that it would remain low from being low.

The two odd results in this table, then, are the North Shropshire and Dudley West ones, and as well as seeing very large turnout drops to sub 50% levels (so that they would look more at home in the lower table), they share a crucial characteristic which has already been discussed. As also already discussed, it is within the bounds of reason to explain the Dudley West result solely as being a result of the aggressive propaganda campaign mounted by UK Government against the incumbent Tory executive branch – but not so the North Shropshire result. The reader who was alive and conscious to remember the total disarray and carnage that was caused to the John Major executive branch, coming straight off the back of years of the anti-Thatcher propaganda, will know that UK Government has thus far been playing pat-a-cake with Boris Johnson. We should surmise this will not be down to intention, but to the loss of power that state propaganda has in a population that is by orders of magnitude much more savvy than a 1990s media audience.

In short, the swing at North Shropshire is suspiciously too high.

On the night of the North Shropshire by-election, following the Independent’s live updates, the author’s interest was piqued by this:

Sources suggest they [the Lib Dems] have done better than expected in the postal vote – most of which actually came in before the Downing Street Christmas party revelations.

This was reported at 1.14am on the Friday morning as the count was ensuing, and it is to be considered against the earlier Guardian/Observer reporting on an internal Lib Dem poll which was disclosed as follows:

According to internal polling based on postal votes, party insiders say the Lib Dem vote has risen from 32% to 38% in the past fortnight, while the Tory vote has fallen from 52% to 44%.

An alteration† was acknowledged by The Guardian at the foot of the article where it appeared online, and obviously an effort to sweep it under the carpet would be certain to hurriedly follow an implication that there was illegal foreknowledge of the content of postal votes ahead of a count.

Even so, when it is revealed during the count that it looks like there are more postal ballots for the Lib Dems than expected, it is reasonable to take this to mean in relation to expectation formed by the previous postal-vote based polling, meaning that this was potentially a revelation of a fact that postal votes for the Lib Dems outstripped ones for the Tories.

Now, it is with some frustration that the author cannot find the breakdown for the voting where a number is given for the amount of postal votes cast. It is a number that one should usually be able to find – indeed, in the past the author has found it on official documents created by the council overseeing the election. This time, there is nothing to be discovered. There is no reporting of the number in the corporate-media, and the number cannot be seen on the Declaration of Result North Shropshire pdf produced by Shropshire Council. The author has written to the council asking for the information, and has not received an answer. What needs to be discovered is to what extent the victory for the Lib Dems was dependent on postal ballots. What is implied in the data that we can process is that the strong probability of the Lib Dems having won the postal ballot vote – and when this fact is at the centre  of such an outrageous win, that is so eminently useful in the UK Government’s purpose of forcing the election of Keir Starmer as Prime Minister (in theory, at least), then the election result should be viewed with enormous suspicion.

Of course, none of this gets into how the new Lib Dem MP is yet another charlatan, elected by a tiny minority, claiming to represent in Parliament, nor indeed how this event is fully relevant to the forcing of Keir Starmer beyond the comparisons being made with Christchurch – all of which is to be dealt with in the next episode in the Parliament’s growing legitimacy crisis in focus series.

‡ For instance:

North Shropshire by-election: Leave voters lose faith in Johnson’s ethics and competence, (John Curtice) (link)

Echo of John Major’s Christchurch by-election defeat carries history lesson for embattled Boris Johnson (link)

† It now says this:

According to canvassing data on postal voters, party insiders say the Lib Dem vote has risen from 32% to 38% in the past fortnight, while the Tory vote has fallen from 52% to 44%.