Politics live blog - Friday 14 January
Rolling coverage of all the day's developments including reaction to the result of the Oldham East and Saddleworth byelection
10.43am: One of the most interesting features of the byelection is the vote "churning" that has been going on. According to Labour sources, some white, working-class voters who supported the Lib Dems in the past switched to Labour. But those lost voters were to some extent compensated for by the Tories in the villages outside Oldham who yesterday decided to back the Lib Dems.
My colleague Julian Glover explains the consequences of this very well in an article he's just written for Comment is free.
The problem for the Lib Dems is that this leaves them as a sort of facade, a structure that looks solid from the outside but which may lack solid support or purpose. In Oldham many long-established Lib Dem supporters must have moved to Labour, while the party's share was sustained by votes borrowed from the Conservatives. There is no reason to think these new supporters have any real commitment to the Lib Dems. Nick Clegg must now give them reasons to stay.
10.33am: The Telegraph has also put up a blog from Norman Tebbit. He says it was "a dreadful night for the Conservatives". He also complains about the "half-hearted" Tory campaign in the constituency.
Earlier (See 9.08am) I wondered who Lady Warsi was referring to when she said that rightwingers should not criticise the campaign if they did not take part themselves. Perhaps now we may have an answer.
According to Tory officials, Tebbit has not been here. But it would be unfair to hold that against him. He is 79 and he spends his time looking after his wife! , who ha s been in a wheelchair since the IRA bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984.
10.28am: The Guardian has a video of last night's election result.
It captures the moment Debbie Abrahams found out she had beaten Elwyn Watkins.
10.16am: James Kirkup has posted a blog at the Telegraph about Lady Warsi's comments about rightwing critics of the Conservative campaign. (See 9.08am)
The highlight of the post is this quote, which Kirkup attributes to a Conservative cabinet minister.
The Lib Dems are like a new girlfriend when you get into bed, you're on best behaviour, you fold your clothes properly and so on. The right are a long-standing partner, so you're not worried about leaving your towel on the floor or breaking wind under the duvet.
9.35am: Jonathan Isaby at ConservativeHome has posted 10 reflections on the Oldham East and Saddleworth result. One of them is that OES has shown that a policy area where the Conservatives seem to be particularly vulnerable.
Labour have pinpointed crime and justice issues as a vulnerability for the Conservatives. Those are the biggest political issues which Labour ran with in their literature and I would anticipate a continued onslaught on a national level over the coming months attacking "police cuts" and Ken Clarke's prisons policy.
9.17am: My colleague Michael White has filed his assessment of the result. It's a long, comprehensive piece which includes a vivid pen portrait of the Lib Dem losing candidate, Elwyn Wa! tkins.
As for Elwyn Watkins, he exuded the strengths and weaknesses of a loner, determined but solitary. Local gossip said he acted alone risking up to 200,000 of his own money in court fees too in taking Woolas to an election court without evident enthusiasm from colleagues. On the doorstep he bristled with a sense of his own virtue a man brave enough to take them on.
The two judges reported him as being a personal assistant and business adviser to Sheikh Abdullah Ali Al Hamrani in Saudi Arabia, whose business interests he imports textile plant and equipment among other things are mostly there, though he has lately lived in Germany. He turns round ailing companies.
A bachelor, he almost lost his Rochdale council seat for non-attendance in 2008, the judges noted. How much did the sheikh pay him? The Woolas fliers hinted that he had funded the Watkins election campaign in May to the tune of 200,000 an illegal donation, but not true, the judges decided. In 2008 the Sheikh paid him 19,994 for some 30 days work. In 2009 his gross earnings were 107,844 and from January to August 2010 18,076.
An exotic candidate for Oldham's red-brick terraced streets and even for the Pennine stone villages, Elwyn Watkins seems likely to resume his peripatetic business career. But his name will survive in the footnotes. He didn't win but he made political history of a kind.
9.16am: "Nothing much has really changed," Lady Warsi, the Conservative chairman, told the Today programme earlier.
Janet Daley makes a similar point in a Telegraph blog. It's only a short post, but it includes a nice metaphor about "the visible bobbing of Conservative dolphins under the water to keep the Lib Dem candidate afloat".
9.08am: Lady Warsi has been on the Today programme (see 8.14am). She said she had a message for some of her rightwing critics.
As far as the right wing of our party are concerned, I would say this to them: We had many, many MPs turning up. We had some who made much comment about the fact that we weren't fighting a strong enough campaign but, interestingly, didn't turn up to campaign. I would say to those who are critical, unless you were here, unless you were out delivering and unless you were out knocking on doors, you really don't have a right to complain about us not being vigorous enough.
Does anyone know who she might be referring to? I can think of plenty of rightwing commentators who have going on about the Tories not taking this campaign seriously, but I can't recall any Tory MPs saying this on the record.
8.47am: Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, has given his first response to the Oldham result. Like Yvette Cooper (see 8.28pm), he was quite measured in his assessment when he spoke to reporters outside his home in north London.
This a first step in a long journey for Labour ...
He also said that the voters had indicated that the government should "think again".
They said to the government 'think again on VAT, think again on the trebling of tuition fees, think again on the police cuts that are going to affect their communities'. And I think part of what it should be about in this country is listening to the voters. I think that's what David Cameron and Nick Clegg should do.
Miliband said the voters of OES were sending a message to the government. But what exactly was the message? At some byelections the debate coalesces around a particular issue. The Crewe and Nantwich byelection became a referendum on the abolition of the 10p tax rate. Norwich North was to a large extent about Labour's treatment of Ian Gibson. That didn't seem to be the case at OES. Labour campaigned hard against the cuts in police numbers (particularly in Greater Manchester), against the VAT increase and against the tuition fees incre! ase. But , as far as I could tell, no one single message seemed to resonate with the anti-government voters more strongly than any other.
8.28am: Yvette Cooper, the shadow foreign secretary, has been putting the Labour case. She said the result "reflects the anger that there is among voters about what the government is doing" and she said it disproved David Cameron's claim at PMQs this week that that Ed Miliband was a "nothing".
But, interestingly, she avoided any triumphalism. According to PoliticsHome, this is what she told Radio 5 Live.
We know we've still got a long way to go, its only 8 months after the general election, as a party we keep having to learn about the things that went wrong for the Labour party and also really stand up for people.
8.25am: Simon Hughes has been speaking for the Lib Dems this morning. The Lib Dem deputy leader looked a lot more cheerful than Warsi but that might have something to do with the fact that he was in a studio, while she was interviewed standing in the cold in a road in Uppermill, Saddleworth. This is what Hughes had to say.
We had an excellent candidate, we had people coming from around the country. The mood of the campaign was very good, and in a seat that's always been Labour, we pushed up our share of the vote.
Actually, we had the same share of the vote yesterday that Labour won with at the general election just a few months ago. So, had the Labour vote not moved, we would have brought it home. We didn't. Labour got the protest vote, they got the anti-government vote.
Hughes said that government parties have only gained seats in byelections four times since the second world war. And he said the Lib Dems would eventually benefit from being a party of government.
The Liberal Democrats now a party of government, will take our responsibilities seriously and seek to earn the respect of the British people. Nobody can ever say in future that a vot! e for us is not worth casting because we're not in government we are in government, and we're going to do that job of governing well.
Hughes said he hoped the result would encourage some Conservatives to rethink their opposition to the alternative vote. In Oldham East and Saddleworth, the Tory vote got squeezed. With AV, that would not be a problem, Hughes said, because voters would be able to rank parties in order.
8.14am: Lady Warsi, the Conservative chairman, has been on the airwaves to explain why the result wasn't that bad for her party after all.
According to PoliticsHome, this is what she said.
First of all, the turnout was low. Secondly, this is a byelection, and thirdly we started this byelection in third place.
If you look at by-elections from 2001-2005, where on average Labour lost up to 18-20% of their vote, they still went on to win the 2005 election. We fought this election robustly and strongly and with a strong candidate.
We fought this seat to turn out every possible Conservative vote in the constituency. But let's be clear about one thing we started off in third place, and finished in third place. Of course our vote share went down. If you look at the pattern of byelections when a party is in government, it is inevitable that the party that is third at the start of the byelection will have its vote squeezed.
7.57am: We got the results of the Oldham East and Saddleworth byelection a few hours ago. Labour's Debbie Abrahams held the seat, with an increased majority and an increased share of the vote. Elwyn Watkins, the Liberal Democrat candidate who was just 103 votes behind Labour at the general election, lost by more than 3,500. But his share of the vote actually went up. Here are the key figures:
Debbie Abrahams, Labour: 14,718 (42%, up 10 points since the general election)
Elwyn W! atkins, Lib Dem: 11,160 (32, up 0.32 points)
Kashif Ali, Conservative: 4,481 (13%, down 14 points)
Labour majority: 3,558
Turnout: 34,930 (48%)
I was live blogging from the count, and here is the assessment of what the results mean for the main parties that I filed as soon as the figures were announced.
For Labour: This is a good, solid win. Debbie Abrahams has got a bigger majority than Phil Woolas achieved in 1997, at the high water mark of New Labour. It's not an all-time-great historic victory, and the next general election is probably more than four years away, but nevertheless Labour are entitled to feel thrilled. It could have looked iffy for Ed Miliband. But the party ran a very professional campaign and it won handsomely.
For the Lib Dems: Funnily enough, I'm inclined to agree with Tim Farron. (See 12.50am.) This was a Dunkirk moment for the party. It was a defeat, but the fact that they did not get wiped out will make it feel to them like a victory. In fact, the Lib Dem share of the vote has actually gone up.The anti-Lib Dem swing was far less here than it is in the national polls. This doesn't mean that Nick Clegg doesn't still face monumental problems. But it does show that, with a strong local candidate, the party can hold its vote.
For the Conservatives: A dismal result. But the Conservative-led government, as Miliband wants us to call them, has just put up VAT and David Cameron made it clear that he was not really trying anyway. And they haven't held this seat since 1995. Andy Burnham was suggesting that this could provoke an anti-Cameron backlash in the party. One day, perhaps soon, there will be an anti-Cameron backlash. But not over this, I think
That was an instant verdict. But now we've got all day to pore over the results. I'll! be blog ging all morning, reporting on all the reaction to the result, as wel l as bringing you the best comment from the web.
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