Do by-election results in Britain matter?
Our model suggests they should not be dismissed as aberrations
Political superlatives were being thrown around like confetti on October 20th, after two by-election victories for Labour in safe Tory seats. In Mid Bedfordshire Labour set a new record for overturning the largest absolute majority in a by-election. In Tamworth the party bettered its huge by-election victory in the same town in 1996, just a year before Tony Blair’s landslide general-election win. Is history set to repeat itself?
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This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “Not that by the by”
Britain October 28th 2023
- The most typical place in Britain is Basildon
- Is the Windsor framework in Northern Ireland working?
- Britain must overhaul the way it approves infrastructure
- Liz Truss and Jeremy Corbyn still haunt British politics
- Do by-election results in Britain matter?
- Britain’s family-court system is overwhelmed
- The rise and fall of class dysphoria in Britain
From the October 28th 2023 edition
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British MPs vote in favour of assisted dying
A monumental social reform is closer to being realised
The slow death of a Labour buzzword
And what that says about Britain’s place in the world
Britain’s Supreme Court considers what a woman is
At last. Britons had been wondering what those 34m people who are not men might be
Can potholes fuel populism?
A new paper looks at one explanation for the rise of Reform UK
Are British voters as clueless as Labour’s intelligentsia thinks?
How the idea of false consciousness conquered the governing party