Corby by-election

[YL]

Louise Mensch is standing down - BBC article.

[State Comptroller Atkins]

Anyway, there's already speculation that Boris may run.

[London Man]

Would he want to run for a seat with that small a majority? Labour held this from 1997 to 2010 and they'll want to win this one. They don't and the whole Ed Miliband speculation starts all over again...

[Sibboleth]

This is... er... random. Anyways, this is a socially polarised marginal created for the 1983 election and has backed the winning party in every General Election since. Corby town is a slab of molten Motherwell placed in the middle of Northants and is a Labour fortress, while most of the rest of the constituency is as naturally Conservative as anywhere in Northants (lacking, for the most part, the footwear manufacturing past of places further west) and has grown more so with time. Area around Oundle (with its posh school) is especially Tory. Some smaller towns where both parties poll well, of course; former footwear manufacturing places (mostly) though since heavily gentrified (for want of a better word). That will probably do for now.

[bore]

Sibboleth doesn't just mean it vote like Motherwell, Corby is very Scottish ( 20% of the population was born there and another third has ancestry), so much so that it's the only town in England apart from London with two church of Scotland churches.  What I wonder though, does this culture make it more left wing than a similar, very English town? From the small amount of digging I've done it doesn't seem so, but I'm happy to be proven wrong.

Labour should really win this one though, considering the coalition's current popularity levels.

[Vasall des Midas]

What I wonder though, does this culture make it more left wing than a similar, very English town?

Well what would a "similar" English town be? To be at all "similar" it'd still have to be a very working-class place not in sync with its surrounds at all; say the rougher bits of Luton or Slough?

[bore]

What I wonder though, does this culture make it more left wing than a similar, very English town?

Well what would a "similar" English town be? To be at all "similar" it'd still have to be a very working-class place not in sync with its surrounds at all; say the rougher bits of Luton or Slough?

My definition of similar (which could be wrong, I don't know much about Corby) would be like you say working class, completely different from it surroundings, and recently industrial. Perhaps eastern Oxford as well?

[Vasall des Midas]

Eastern Oxford could have been included in my post, if I'd thought of it.

Though all of these are kinda more integrated into their surrounds than Corby, I think. In part due to being closer to London. (While working class places further north are more integrated into their surrounds due to being further away from London. If that makes sense.)

[doktorb]

Boris has dismissed speculation that he's standing.

[YL]

Sibboleth doesn't just mean it vote like Motherwell, Corby is very Scottish ( 20% of the population was born there and another third has ancestry), so much so that it's the only town in England apart from London with two church of Scotland churches.  What I wonder though, does this culture make it more left wing than a similar, very English town? From the small amount of digging I've done it doesn't seem so, but I'm happy to be proven wrong.

Labour should really win this one though, considering the coalition's current popularity levels.

Supposedly people from Corby town even have Scottish accents (though I wonder whether this just means that there's something in their accents which sounds a bit Scottish to English people) and IIRC it's even been suggested at some point (I suspect not very seriously) that the SNP might stand there.

But it should be remembered that there's a lot of this constituency outside Corby town;  otherwise Louise Mensch would never have been MP for it in the first place.  I note that a lot of the media coverage is referring to the constituency as "Corby and East Northamptonshire".

[Sibboleth]

It's more that Corby doesn't fit in well with the area it's paired for for parliamentary purposes than it not fitting in at all with its surrounds; it's on the edge of the bit of Northants that had rural industrial (and Liberal turned Labour) traditions and is less alien in some respects than all the middle class developments that started springing up all over the county in the 60s and 70s. In that context it's really only the Scottishness that's weird.

[State Comptroller Atkins]

Labour have apparently chosen Andy Sawford.

[Sibboleth]

He was selected a while ago and has been nursing the seat. From the area, which rarely hurts.

[You kip if you want to...]

Saw this on Twitter this morning. It's quite shocking she's going to be honest, if anyone was going to jump ship, I didn't think it'd be her. She had cabinet speculation brewing behind her, sure, but I guess she saw the writing on the wall with Corby being a marginal. I'll almost miss loony Louise.

Anyway, Labour gain, nothing to see here.

Some trivia from Political Scrapbook about Parliament's most self-serving freshman:

Does Dave realise how much time she spent on Twitter? Scrapbook certainly finds these statistics instructive:

22,000 — messages posted on Twitter
22 — mentions of her constituency in parliament

If we lose this, we may as well disband with immediate effect.

[YL]

Boris has dismissed speculation that he's standing.

I think that was always rather silly.  Not only is the seat too marginal for that sort of thing, but his re-election in London is too recent.  I don't think that it makes sense for someone to be both Mayor of London and an MP for any length of time, especially if the constituency is outside London, and his resignation from Henley suggests he agrees.  Even if he doesn't agree, the voters of Corby might.

[YL]

Lewis Baston's article about the constituency and the by-election on Huffington Post

[Leftbehind]

It seems our requests for a more competitive by-election were answered. With Liberal support being the bedrock for most of Labour's resurgence, yet confined to the early teens in this constituency, it'll be instructive seeing how large Labour's swing is.

[You kip if you want to...]

It seems our requests for a more competitive by-election were answered. With Liberal support being the bedrock for most of Labour's resurgence, yet confined to the early teens in this constituency, it'll be instructive seeing how large Labour's swing is.

Even then, as noted above, Corby's very polarised. I wouldn't expect a massive swing, but a decent one.

[Supersonic]

I'm rather upset, Louise Mensch was one of my most favourite MP's.

In terms of the by-election, I'm expecting a solid, not a landslide, Labour victory.

UKIP will get around 5%, the Lib Dems will probably come sixth or so. The usual.

[You kip if you want to...]

UKIP will get around 5%, the Lib Dems will probably come sixth or so. The usual.

Come on, be generous. There might only be 5 candidates.

[Leftbehind]

Ashcroft's done some polling, with the results being:

Lab 52% (+13%)
Con 37% (-5%)
Lib  7% (-8%)
Oth  4% (-1%)

If realised that'd be a half-way house between 1997 and 2001 results - certainly a signal they're on course for a comfortable majority next election.

[Sibboleth]

Insert the usual remarks about the trouble with constituency polling, etc.

[State Comptroller Atkins]

I'm just looking at a history of recent by-election polling. Ashcroft's Feltham and Heston poll was surprisingly accurate; within a couple of points of both the Labour and Tory percentages. Survation will probably release a poll at some point too. They were even more accurate in Feltham and Heston; they understated Labour and overstated the Tories each by a single point.

But yeah, quite a lot of by-election polls have been....well, pretty ghastly. Probably most notably the two polls for Glasgow East in 2008 - they both predicted an easy Labour hold.

[afleitch]

A 5 point drop in Corby during a by-election wouldn't be too problematic for the Tories.

[Supersonic]

A 5 point drop in Corby during a by-election wouldn't be too problematic for the Tories.

I agree.

In fact, the Conservative vote has held up stronger than I expected. It's definitely helpful that UKIP isn't standing.