More about that “swing to Labour”

Let’s recap. The UK Government – meaning to say the City of London and its military/military intelligence partner/subordinate (in amalgam) – wants to install the Parliamentary Labour Party into puppeteered executive office at the next General Election. With it necessary to make it appear as if the election was “democratically mandated”, UK Government has been propagandising the British people with an extensive anti-Tory PR campaign with the aim to inspire would-have-been Tory voters to vote instead for Keir Starmer’s crew.

While it might produce a Labour government by reliance on tacit electoral pacts with the Lib Dems, or by acting to ruin the chances of the SNP, this triggering of a switch from blue to red is something that the UK Government appears unable to do – and this is a huge failure.

Here, as recently as today, is Guardian columnist, Rafael Behr, expressing concern for the Government’s problem (while at the same time handily alluding to the fact of the deliberate attempt to appeal to switchers):

Last week’s by-elections in Wellingborough and Kingswood confirm the trend: a hefty swing to Labour, amplified by Liberal Democrats voting tactically and Tory loyalists staying at home. Repeated nationwide, those conditions would bury Rishi Sunak’s party in a landslide.

It wouldn’t be an enthusiastic endorsement of Labour, which makes the party’s more committed supporters uncomfortable.

It would be easier to envisage Keir Starmer thriving in office if he surfed into No 10 on a wave of popular goodwill. Instead, he will be deposited there as jetsam from an anti-Tory tide. On the upside, low expectations are easy to surpass. Starmer is no mere passenger on the swinging pendulum. He has made himself strategically inoffensive to voters who will only switch from the Tories once reassured that Labour isn’t a cult for unpatriotic, spendthrift cranks.

While all this sort of stuff is staple fare from corporate-media, it is also typical in that it doesn’t get to the nub of the matter, or the issue that cannot be aired in public, which is how there is no tendency in current politics for there to be a real swing from the Tories to Labour.

This is a problem because the British people have to be presented with a show of a “one nation” executive – a head for the legislative branch that appeals beyond political factionalism of the older sort (for the survival of the system). The need comes from a desire to heal the fallout of the two major revelatory acts of tyranny perpetrated by UK Government in recent years under the frontage of the current Tory principals, which was the prorogation of parliament and other antics to engineer a “fake Brexit”, and deny a “no deal” exit from the EU, and then the so-called mitigation measures for a so-called “Covid-19” pandemic (the optics for which were established by the killing off of thousands of people in end-of-life care) so that folk were bamboozled into thinking that they were forbidden to depart their houses to go into the streets (for instance). Unfortunately for UK Government, as Behr himself alludes to, things are not shaping up as they were envisaged because there is an element of the electorate that refuses to participate in the game: they won’t vote Tory as usual, but – unsurprisingly – they won’t vote for Labour either.

There should be no surprises, for, as the reader will recall, the Loyal Opposition has been such a willing accomplice of the Tories these many years in the activity, stipulated above, not to mention the prosecution of a war against Russia that no one in Britain asked for, that a good deal of the electorate is evidently also equally disillusioned with it as they are with “the governing party”. The upshot has been an era, with its root in the 2019 General Election, where support has collapsed for the Tory vs Labour vs Spoiler-for-either-as-needs-be schema. The number of people voting for either main party has been consistently poor through a great string of by-elections held since 2019, so the very idea that anyone can claim that, during the course of these elections, there has been evidence of a swing from Tory to Labour is a complete nonsense.

Swing, of course, is perhaps the core tool used in a propaganda campaign accompanying this series of Starmer Project by-elections (as they have been dubbed at this site) to convince the public that Labour is on a trajectory – that cannot be resisted – towards being victorious in a General Election. One can see it evidenced on this page itself, in the quote from the piece taken from The Guardian. Being referred to there as “hefty”, the claim is that swing to Labour is a trend confirmed recently with one consisting of 16.4% out of the Kingswood by-election, and the one of 28.5% that happened at Wellingborough. Such numbers, when they can be extrapolated so that the Tories can be imagined to be set to lose seats in clutches of 50s at the main event to take place some time this year, certainly lend support to a notion of Labour as inevitably meteoric in ascendency. They are, however, a deception because of how they fail to account for differences in turnout between elections – which is crucial at this time.

For – and this can never be reiterated enough – a low turnout generated by temporary disinterest is not a guaranteed feature of a by-election. On the other hand, that votes are collapsing, as opposed to swinging from one party to another between elections, is something that can be surmised in a consistent record of low to poor turnout.

Neither Kingswood or Wellingborough disappointed in this respect, with the former seeing a turnout of 37.1% (down from 71.5% in 2019), and the latter seeing one of 38% (down from 64.3%). They also both satisfied another criterion for being archetypal Starmer Project by-elections in that their generation was suspiciously contrived (as the reader must do the research to discover).

We can also see them for what they are in terms of their being poor results for Labour saved only by the fact of more catastrophic Tory performance, and we’re going to do that now with a numbers laboratory of the type to be seen first in the FBEL article, About That “Swing To Labour”, which could be said to be the parent of this piece.

When the said article was written, the Starmer Project was in its early days, and by-elections more or less saw Labour retaining seats. At what is now quite a developed stage, we have had four by-elections in a row, since October 2023, where Labour have gained the seat from the Tories, so it’s clear that things have lately been arranged to create the impression of quickening in the pregnancy to birth a Labour executive.

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So, for this numbers lab to be pertinent, we set a benchmark as follows:

Tory: 60% – or 42v; Labour: 30% – or 21v; Others: 10% – or 7v. (Turnout is 70%).

A new result with a straight switch (with 18% † of their vote moving from Tories and Others to Labour), without loss of turnout, would give us this:

Tory: 49% (34v); Labour: 43% (30v).

The swing, in a very real sense, is 12%.

Calling that Scenario Set 3 (to be developed in a moment), in another Scenario Set (4), consider the following benchmark:

Tory: 50% – or 35v; Labour: 40% – or 28v; Others: 10% – or 7v. (Again, turnout is 70%).

A new result, without loss of turnout, using the 18% switching figure, would be:

Tory: 41% (29v); Labour: 50% (35v).

Swing is 9.5%.

As it happens, the 2019 Kingswood and Wellingborough results both resemble the Scenario Set 3 benchmark, so we’re going to proceed in this laboratory using that one only. The point of the other benchmark was to show that is perfectly possible for Labour to overcome a Tory-held seat with a reasonably sized switch of vote directly to it.

To expand Scenario Set 3, then:

Scenario 3.i: A new result, with low Labour failure (losing 25% of its previous vote), and high Tory failure (losing 70%). The result is:

Tory: 37% (13v); Labour: 46% (16v); turnout is 35%. Swing is 19.5%

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Now, these percentages that here have been discovered actually are such that it can be said of the Kingswood by-election, by dint of rough comparison (please look up the result), that Labour had a poor performance at the first notch in the scale (but in fact, slightly worse than a low failure).

At the Wellingborough by-election (turnout, 38%), the Tories did indeed lose ~70% of its old vote (77% to be precise). The extra 7% accounted for 2,000(+) votes (which, if it had been counted, would have given them 32% of the share of votes).

Labour, on the other hand, gained 0.8% of its 2019 vote, and in doing so received 45.9% of the vote share. Unintuitive as it might be, this looks like an indicator of a poor performance by Labour – so what is going on? Well, it is clear that the huge swing (9 points more than the benchmark’s 19.5%) is entirely down to the worse than high failure Tory result. This strand of triumphalism one sees in the corporate-media political punditry on behalf of the Labour Party can therefore be rejected. Votes have been purged from the system rather than been attached to Labour – which then becomes an illegitimate winner because 62% – much more than half – of the electorate has not consented to the election. This is not what UK Government wants.

What we can say that Labour did do worthy of being called success, however, was overcoming a deficit after it came to the by-election with a smaller percentage in the prior election than in the benchmark. It was a gap that represented 3.5% of vote share (in 2019), and what Labour had to make up to reach parity, so to speak. So, it is possible that import could be made of it from a maths model point of view where it signifies how Labour virtually increased the number of its voters. But in the end, in real terms, at Wellingborough, only 107 more people voted for Labour in 2024 than did in 2019.

This is not the stuff of champions.

And there’s more to it than a single issue of UK Government impotency, as we can see when we read the conclusion to Rafael Behr’s Guardian piece:

Politics in anticipation of the next election is marked by a weird combination of stasis and crisis; turbulent stagnation; fragmentation channelled through a broken electoral system so it looks like stability, defined as temporary respite from chaos.

It is hardly surprising if most people tune out. Nor should it come as a surprise if, when they tune in again, there is only one message that cuts through – one line that can be safely deployed in any pub in any constituency. It is the imperative that keeps a lid on all the volatility simmering below the surface of British politics: first, get the Tories out.

What this appears to claim is that the energy of the electorate, active or passive, voting or not, is concentrated on the same goal: the expulsion of the Tories from office. This is the mission that any discontent in the populace should not be allowed to foil – because… well… the Tories are the root cause of the unhappiness (creating the shattering of the cosmopolitist consensus, as they did, with their Brexit popularism, [as the Westminster Bubble convention would have the situation perceived]).

Well, there couldn’t be an explanation of the times that is more wrong – and it is merely more of the same anti-incumbent campaigning for the Starmer Project, appealing as always to the false political paradigm where blanket socialism across the board is disguised with meaningless appellations of left and right. Sure, the crisis in politics for the likes of a Guardian columnist who writes to contain real divergence from Smiley Faced Fascism would indeed be restricted to explaining in terms of an anomaly in the system about to be cured. But in actual fact, with the system being purged of consent, it’s increasingly not the case that people see UK Government as an inevitability, nor that they rely on someone to come along in a minute who is better than the last Prime Minister in terms of preserving Rules Based Order (NWO) mores – or indeed think that things should be that way. That the End of the (psychotic) Ideology is a possibility – that the Writing is on the Wall – this is the idea, the zeitgeist, that is the cause of broken consent-for-tyranny, Government-by-hoax politics, and it is the real crisis that won’t be broached for a talking point by the punditry or the politicians (for fear of conceding power).

† The reason for the selection of all the constants is explained in About That “Swing To Labour.