Labour win Hamilton by-election

[Westfacing]

Glad to see Reform in third place - I think they had high hopes of winning this seat!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c1w343v4znxt

A result that confounds the pundits who said it was an SNP/Reform contest.

However Reform picked up around 8,000 votes. In last years GE in the corresponding Westminster seat they struggled to get past single figures.

Turnout was around 40% which the Times Radio commentator thought was good!!

Winning the seat on 31% of votes cast hammers out (agian) then need for electoral reform.

I'm not closely following UK politics, so am genuinely baffled by the appeal of Reform. I can't stand Nigel Farage, never could, which has a lot to do with it. All mouth and no trousers, as people used to say. Spent years and years criticising the EU from the inside, as he was an elected Member of the European Parliament, rarely turned up for anything, but pocketed a substantial salary, expenses and eventually an eyewateringly generous pension. Utter hypocrite.

Anyway. Are the people voting for Reform positively choosing their policies, or is a general Fuck You to the other mainstream parties, because everything seems so hopeless? If the latter, I'd be more worried, as from my understanding this mood of desperation was what led to the rise of Fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. Let's blame everything on Group X, the convenient scapegoats that many poorly educated and/or bigoted, xenophobic people already dislike and distrust and portray ourselves as the champions of the ordinary people! Let's discourage people from trying to get to grips with complex problems and accept that sometimes change for the better can't be achieved in days - it might take years. There are rarely simple answers to difficult questions, but let's pretend there are!

The motivation is the same as Brexit, it’s a fuck you to all mainstream parties in the same way that Brexit was the opportunity to give Cameron a bloody nose in 2016. Farage’s appeal is very similar to Johnson’s, it’s the “good laugh” factor.

I’m not particularly worried at the moment, the electorate understands tactical voting having used it so effectively to get the Tories out, it will likely be used again to keep Reform out.

I've just realised that Conservatives came fourth - had totally forgotten about them!

They really do seem an irrelevance right now.

This morning R4 and LBC are having very long discussions re how well Reform have done, despite coming 3rd. You’d think they’d have won! How about discussing how well Labour did?

Labour, SNP and Reform are not too far from each other. It was a close shot.

I know it was a surprise win for Labour, although close - did the pollsters get it very wrong? I can't find any polls.

I don’t think there was any polling. John Curtice predicted a win for the SNP and is very sour this morning because he got it wrong.

While I have no intention of ever voting reform I can understand while they appeal to some of the electorate. They appear to listen to voters when the Labour party does not. They've also adopted Labour's tactics of promising more than they can realistically deliver. The media helps them by publicising their more popular policies - like reinstating Winter Fuel payments and raising the threshold for stamp duty - and not really questioning where they expect to find the cash.

Byelections usually have a low turnout and 40% is reasonable for a byelection. They are often an opportunity to tell the major parties you are unhappy with them while the usual activists turn out to vote for their party.

My view is that reform did well enough to worry the major parties but that they probably wouldnt have done much better if more people had turned out to vote - as they will in a general election.

The tories did very badly but this was being billed as an SNP/reform fight so if you wanted right wing you probably voted tactically for reform to try and get rid of the SNP.

He's usually so accurate!

Labour won, but with a lower percentage of the overall votes that the previous election when Labour came second. (31% vs 33% from memory)
Reform have gone from 0 to 26% of the vote nipping on the heels of both Labour and the snp, that why it's being discussed so much.

They didn’t do well. Somehow they’ve managed to win with less votes than when they lost in 2021. They need to look at where they are losing votes to and why.

I didn’t realise it was 0 to 26%

Labour were not predicted to win, so how would you say they did?

Winning is what counts. In the General Election last year Labour did a very good job of targeting their campaigning so they ended up winning a huge majority of seats, albeit often with small majorities in the individual seats. The overall majority is what counts, and they can now push just about anything through.

I am delighted to see the SNP doing so badly. Here's hoping for a repeat of that across Scotland next year.

I'm fine with SNP not doing so well, but it is interesting that so far Labour do well due to Reform taking votes from their main competitors.

Whether they keep increasing and become an actual competitor will be another thing for them. Labour's vote share isn't that high so that movement from others to Reform is working for them for a while, unless it gets higher still.

This explains why the media are discussing a reform surge.

I just hope that Reform were very successful in getting their supporters out and that other people will learn from this that they need to vote to keep Farage et al in their cages.

It's like after the Council elections. The media were behaving as if five seats Farage were already Prime Minister. They are almost willing him to win. And today he's lost his Chairman.

That would involve admitting Labour have done something well though.

Labour didnt do particularly well though. The change of plan on winter fuel payments probably helped - but their opponents were incompetent/unpleasant and they didnt increase their vote.

They won when they weren’t expected to. Is it really so difficult to give credit where it’s due?

Exactly this. Go on @anyolddinosaur you can do it - through gritted teeth!

I heard someone on The World at One saying the Labour candidate hadn't bothered much with doing interviews but he and his campaigners did do a lot of knocking on doors and talking to potential voters. Simple common sense, surely? There seem to be huge numbers of people now who don't read a newspaper and never watch news on terrestrrial TV or listen to news on the radio. All of those news sources are to some extent regulated and provide facts, albeit often spun in a particular direction. Many voters will, however, get 'news' directly from social media, YouTube, TikTok and so on, which are completely unregulated and unverified. If you want to get to these voters, tramping the streets is probably the best way.

Nobody should be pleased with the result. Labour winning with less than a third of the vote is not good. It means nearly 70% of those that actually voted did not want Labour to win.