Chesham & Amersham: A provisional history of the present
The Liberal Democrats won Thursday’s By-Election in Chesham and Amersham overturning by some margin the previous Tory majority.
It may have been a surprise but only because since December 2019 the presence and impact of the Liberal Democrats at national level has been close to zero. Even so at local level in England they retain pockets of residual activism and activists. One thing they have been very good at for decades is winning Parliamentary By-Elections.
Perhaps there are a few who think they do this by promoting progressive politics. Mostly they don’t. In fact they major on whatever they perceive to be the key issue in the seat- in the case of Chesham changes to planning laws that would allow more houses to be built. In short Nimbyism.
There is media talk about cracks in the Tories Blue Wall in the South. Perhaps but this is not mostly at the ideological level. The Tories remain a hollowed out party with few activists. In a national election that can be overcome by spending money, social media etc. In a By-Election that gets much less publicity its difficult. They had a serious disadvantage compared to the numbers the LibDems could put out.
Labour lost their deposit getting just 622 votes and 1.6% of the vote. According to the media it’s the worst ever Labour By-Election result which is a fairly meaningless point without context. In fact in By-Elections where anti-Tory voters see a chance to unseat a Tory candidate by voting LibDem, Labour losing its deposit is far from unheard of.
A more serious question is why it was the LibDems and not Labour who were in a position to win. In 2017 Labour came second with 20.6% of the vote. For comparison in 2019 the LibDems came second with 26.3%. Not so very different.
The difference between 2017 and 2021 is perhaps that the current Labour leader doesn’t seem keen on encouraging Labour’s still considerable activist base to be active.
What this means for Labour it is of course (as usual) too early to say- I’m an historian after all. Perhaps 2017 marked the highwater mark of Labour managing to avoid the process of decline of social-democratic parties across Europe and that has now resumed here too.
Some no doubt (one hears this from Mr Blair in his ‘rare’ interventions)think that a LibDem-Labour progressive alliance which almost happened after 1997 (John Prescott sabotaged it, Blair told the Hay Festival a few weeks back) is a way forward. A key question is exactly how ‘progressive’ it would be, remembering the 5 years the LibDems spent in coalition with the Tories up to 2015.
The answer for the left may lie mainly outside of the confines of Parliamentary politics, what the Victorians called, pressure from without. The current election for the General Secretary of Unite while not the be all and end all(there are other things than GS’s) is important in determining how the left will grapple with the post-pandemic period for example.
The current prognosis for left electoral challenges does not look great. The Northern Independence Party managed 0.8% in Hartlepool. In Chesham the Breakthrough Party got 0.5%. There may be reasons for this but this is for another post.
Others may say Labour would do better with another leader. I tend to agree. The policies might not be much better, if at all, but the current leader doesn’t appear to be very good at actually leading. Indeed they seem rather uncomfortable with it. Someone who can actually lead and is capable of doing so might be better in purely electoral terms, if that is your thing as it were.
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