How Labour lost Runcorn
"I think it came down to the number of votes cast"
Streets left ignored for years. This is not a rhetorical flourish. It's a fact of life. Until this by-election, whole housing blocks in Runcorn town had gone long periods without a knock on the door from a local Labour activist. Canvassers in the contest just gone came home to report they had been talking to people their system said had last been approached during the days of Gordon Brown.
Unresponsive councillors elected by default in low turnout elections, some obscenely invisible to their electors - none of this has helped. In summary, that's what cost it for Labour in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election.
This apathy among Labour voters - among Labour voting estates - didn't manifest itself after the 4th July 2024. It's been a long time existing. Small, stuttering, eruptions in voter irritation are commonplace. Independent candidates. Anti-one way road candidates. Lib Dem candidates. Ukip candidates. And now Reform candidates.
Some Labour organisers remember the trauma of almost losing the Heywood and Middleton by-election to Ukip in 2014. Resolving to “never again” leave their communities behind, they drilled an all-year-round doorknocking strategy into their local parties. It kept their seats keen.
Not everyone, it seems, remembers.
Reform has the broadest possible support of any insurgency party right now. War chest, it seems, too. And it fed on that which has long been felt by the voters - "You are ignored, you don't matter to them. Show them you won't be ignored."
I write these sentiments glibly, but in truth they make up what the actual Reform campaign was. The strategy was as follows. Target those with a history of not voting, and a demographic profile to suggest they should, and work on their pride. Signed letters made their way to these voters long in advance. Personalise the letter. Humanise the voter. Whereas other campaigns with limited resources focus on the regular voters, writing off the non-voting and instead sticking to the old reliable “base”; Reform, coming from nowhere, did the opposite. When Reform activists turned up to turn them out on polling day, they had already gone and done it.
Turnout was over and above what it should have been for a by-election. Normally it’ s a touch over half of what it was in the general election. This contest was almost 80 per cent of it. Reform’s non-voters played a significant role in that.
But much, despite its defeat, can be attributed to Labour's own efforts to squeeze progressive and like-minded Conservative voters so as to "Stop Farage" too. The Lib Dems lost their deposit. The Greens did not. And according to count sampling Labour topped the poll in the Tory-leaning villages closest to Chester. And according to insiders Labour put on more votes than it had hoped. To a degree the strategy worked. But to another it did not - they lost. Reform outpolled them.
Which brings us to one other explanation for the six-vote Labour loss. Policy.
"I don't know what we did to deserve this," a former Labour voter was overheard saying in Elton. "I can't forgive it."
The winter fuel payment cut remains the most memorable decision taken by the government of the day, almost one year into high office. The decision, too, to announce welfare cuts - sans an immediate impact assessment, weeks before a by-election in which Halton Lea in Runcorn has one of the highest concentrations of PIP claimants in the country, felt like an own goal of the highest order.
That uncertainty, a concoction of anger, of swearing to never vote again, suited Reform nicely. It pushed down the base Labour turnout. And kept Reform's high.
Hello there, thank you for reading. Please do check out my results page for this year’s local elections. We’re a way off from finishing, but this is the place to go if you want the vote splits by ward. Undeniably dramatic, it has put my own forecast to shame. We’ll talk about that some other time.