Tory voters switching to Reform cost the Conservatives the by-election seats of Mid Bedfordshire and Tamworth, data suggest, as the amount of votes picked up by Richard Tice’s centre-Right party was bigger than the Labour majority in either constituency. The Telegraph has the story.
This means that if Reform voters had either stayed at home or chosen to back the Tories, Labour could have been denied one or both of its victories.
Reform won 1,373 votes (5.4%) in Tamworth and 1,487 (3.7%) in Mid Bedfordshire, while the Labour majorities in the two seats were 1,316 and 1,192 respectively.
In a post on Twitter, Mr. Tice, wrote: “Twice in the same night have Reform ensured [that the] Tories lost their seat with this by-election result.
“This despite a huge squeeze – pressure from Tories to voters, saying ‘do not vote Reform’.”
On Thursday, the Conservatives released a Facebook advert targeted at Tamworth residents which read: “Reform can’t win. Every vote for them makes a Labour victory more likely.”
Luke Tryl, the U.K. Director of the More In Common think tank, said: “The Tories will have a new worry after tonight – the emergence of a split on the Right, which saw the Reform U.K. vote larger than the Labour majority in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire.
“It suggests that Rishi Sunak may now be losing support on two fronts – on the Left to Labour and the Liberal Democrats, and on the Right to Reform U.K.
“Expect to see more hand wringing on splits on the Right in the weeks to come.”
It came as turnout plummeted in both by-elections, with 40,720 votes cast in Mid Bedfordshire, down by 29.6% on the 2019 general election, while 25,586 ballots in Tamworth represented a decrease of 28.4%.
Senior Tory figures were quick to note that many of their own voters had appeared to stay at home, as Labour actually increased its share of the vote in Tamworth, from 10,908 to 11,719.
Lord Hayward, a Tory peer and election expert, told the Telegraph: “They’ve not voted for the Government, but turnout is down and down markedly. My assessment would be that normally a by-election is viewed as a protest vote. In this case, it’s a protest ‘non-vote’.
“They’re just sitting on their hands. There’s no question, it’s a very good result for Labour. In Tamworth there was always the latent Labour support, but it’s non-voters that win the day, basically.
“Under these circumstances, people are not voting, or if they do vote, they are voting against the Government because of the events of the last two years – exhaustion with the saga of 2020, 2021 and 2022. So what you have to do is prove you’re competent, and hope that works.”
Worth reading in full.
Could it be that voters are sick of a not-so-Conservative Party that pushes forward with ruinous policies like Net Zero, brings in endless illiberal measures like the Online Safety Bill, has failed utterly to stop illegal immigration while legal migration has hit record levels, shows no sign of being able to control public spending or manage the public finances having massively over-reacted to a flu-like virus, gives no indication of opposing the creeping global health totalitarianism represented by the WHO’s new pandemic treaty and has never seen a pleasure it didn’t want to ban or a liberty it didn’t want to curtail for ‘safety’ reasons?
Is it any wonder voters who care about freedom and the future of the country are looking elsewhere?
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So Toby thinks the 2020 U.S. election was definitely, absolutely NOT fraudulent. Pathetic. The 2020 election was stolen in just 6 swing states. It wasn’t stolen by high tech hacking of voting machines. It wasn’t stolen because of vote harvesting. It was stolen by good old fashioned fraud in the main counting centres in those 6 swing states. To cite just two as examples: In Atlanta, Georgia, Trump was well ahead on election night. Over the next few days the percentage of votes counted never seemed to rise but the number of votes counted did. In other words new ballots were added out of nowhere. Once Biden had overtaken Trump by a few thousand votes the counting miraculously ended. The very same thing happened in Pennsylvania except on a much larger scale. Trump ahead by 700,000 votes on election night, counting suddenly halted…over the next few days the percentage of votes counted hardly changed but the NUMBER of votes did.
A very low tech form of voter fraud but highly effective when you have a compliant and biased Mainstream Media unwilling to properly investigate and report and even more effective when the leader of the Free Speech Union decides to believe the “findings” of a one sided book.
Toby Young, you should take note of Mark Steyn’s take on what happened in 2020. The fraud was very low tech, very traditional, new votes appearing out of nowhere, a relatively low number of votes affected nationally but highly concentrated in just six swing states and enough to steal the election. It’s clear you didn’t follow the events of the 2020 election and the few days following it. Had you done so you would have seen the pattern.
Final nail in the coffin for Toby’s theory that this was a straight election: The Bellweather Counties list. https://www.wsj.com/articles/bellwether-counties-nearly-wiped-out-by-2020-election-11605272400
Toby has probably drunk the establishment press line that Trump lost all his court cases and so assumes there was no evidence supporting him. This is a typical and classic form of reshaping of the truth Toby should be aware by now that the establishment press indulges in on a wholesale basis. He should know by now they LIE ALL THE TIME. Trump didn’t lose his court cases, most of them were thrown out for a “lack of standing.” They were not heard.
To have standing it has to be shown that a plaintiff suffered an actual injury caused by the other party that can actually be addressed by the court. So the lawsuits were never heard and yes it was a technicality. The technicality being the courts didn’t have any power to do anything about it and other than that there is no measurable injury that could be recompensed to Trump. The lesson then is that there is no clear mechanism by which a stolen election can be redressed after the fact – at least not in the form of the legal route taken by Trump. It must not be allowed to happen at the time.
I would say both were used.
The vote fraud was 40 mn. Database votes are easy to flip – as an admin you erase all the logs. They were flipping votes in real time, even the fake news feeds were showing the flips. Mules were used pace DeSouza – 5 million in his movie, just in 5 states. They were used everywhere.
Biden the criminal won 600 out of 3000 counties. Max votes – 40 million or so. Vote fraud – 40 million. Old and New techniques.
The self-satisfied arrogance of Marianna Spring´s smug mugshot is fairly typical of most in education and communications (broadcasting) nowadays: young, without life-experience, ill-educated but opinionated – and a feeling of entitlement.
I’m not sure that’s entirely fair. It might just be an optical effect derived from the bottom half of her face (below the eyes) being from a head proportionately approximately twice the size of the top half of her face.
A 28 year old arseling who is the arbiter of reality?
Who TF is Sping? And Why TF would I care?
Bitter and twisted suits Nick. Hilarious, keep it up.
Toby’s TDS is a tad tedious. Instead of a straw-man like the Dominion voting machine contend with the evidence that 2020 was A/ indisputably RIGGED and B/ almost indisputably STOLEN.
That means to deal with the reasoned critiques in say Mollie Hemingway’s ‘Rigged’ or ‘2000 Mules’ or Navarro’s ‘6 key deceptions‘.
Still no time stamps aaargh
Toby needs to read better books about the US election system. Start with Margo Cleveland’s latest.
Why was US 2000, 2004, and 2016 elections all “rigged”, say the Democrats and their leaders very loudly and continuously, but with voting restrictions in states and counties across the country mostly removed by Democrats “because of the pandemic”, now suddenly “perfect”? How can so many institutions in USA now appear to be corrupt, yet the voting system is pristine?
Given opportunity to cheat, given the stakes, of course there will be cheating.