John Ward BY-ELECTION BLUES

BY-ELECTION BLUES: LIBDEMS WIPED OUT, RECKLESS MAJORITY SLASHED, LABOUR HALVED, TURNOUT DOWN

FARAGEr&sPurple haze over Rochester…but is this democracy, Jim?

This was, for me, the most interesting statistic from Rochester & Stroud last night:

Libdems 349

Loony    151

The loss of 95.5% of your supporters is some feat. But to poll just 198 votes more than the Monster Raving Loony Party is an unparalleled collapse.

I must also confess to having been surprised at the relatively narrow margin of victory for Mark Reckless. This was the result in 2010:

R&S2010Last night, UKip won by 2,902 votes, but the Feckless majority fell by almost 70%. In 2014, the results are as follows:

R&S20147500 from the LibDems + 10,000 from the Tories + 7000 from Labour = 24,500…a lot more than UKip got….so this wasn’t just a straight shift to UKip. Part of the answer is the turnout – 14% lower than in 2010, which also surprised me. My guess would be that the majority of abstainers were LibDems: either way, it’s clear that Farage’s Barmy Army continues to take 60% of its support from the Conservatives, and 40% from Labour…with a huge bias towards over 50s and men.

But in the midst of this gathering storm for Camerlot, Ed Miliband deemed it the right moment to fire his Shadow Attorney General Emily Thornbury for the heinous offence of taking a shot of an Enger-luuurrnd flag and writing a harmless tweet about it. It seems she had been holding the working class in contempt, which is hardly a new attitude in the Labour Party. I will keep on saying it until somebody in the Labour Party wakes up: Miliband is a millstone….a silly pc pillock from Highgate barely capable of finding his own pulse, let alone that of the People.

Does anyone out there really think that 100% of Faisal Narage’s appeal is hatred of the EU? I don’t: I may think he’s a haw-hawing twerp, but an entire generation of hitherto disenfranchised English folk think he speaks his mind and is a breath of fresh air. The pompous posturing of Cameron and the timid correctness of Miliband simply don’t connect with this Middle England, but the fact is that, on his day, Farage does.

There is big trouble ahead for the Tory Party, and a vale of tears for England. We have yet to see Ukip win a parliamentary contest from scratch in a General Election – and that is the only test that matters. But from now until May 2015, defections from the Blue Corner and events across the Channel are going to dictate much of what happens in six months time.

Yesterday at The Slog: Euro goes all out for the Bog Standard