Let The Shite One In: Part 2.

How did it go?

Just before the election, I looked at whether smaller parties really “let the Tories in”. Please read it here. But in brief, I concluded that:

a) You can’t just compare a Tory majority to a smaller party’s vote. As a guide, unless the smaller party’s vote is more than 3 times, I’d take claims of “letting the Tories in” with a pinch of salt. In some cases, the effect of standing will be negligible.

b) Even if the Tories have been “let in”, it’s impossible for anyone to predict this happening at the time candidates are nominated. There are at least a couple of hundred seats at each election that could conceiveably be decided by a whisker, and to expect a party not to stand in all of these is disproportionate.

Even though I avoided naming parties as far as possible, most of the interest in the first article has been around Greens in Labour-Tory seats and Greens in SNP/Unionist seats.

So now the results are in, how did that go?

There were 23 seats in which the Green vote was higher than the majority. 13 of these were won by the Tories, 8 by Labour (Sheffield Hallam, Warwick and Leamington, Coventry North West, Wansbeck, Coventry South, Weaver Vale, Bedford and Dagenham and Rainham), 1 by the SNP (East Dunbartonshire) and one by the SNP’s suspended candidate Neale Hanvey in Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath.

Let’s look more closely at the Tory ones, in descending order of Green vote.

Stroud: 3840 Majority over Labour, 4954 Green votes. In 2017, Labour had a 687 majority and the Green vote was 1423. 3.5% swing to the Tories.

Chipping Barnet: 1212 Majority over Labour, 1288 Green votes. In 2017, the Tories had a 353 majority and the Green vote was 1406. 0.8% swing to the Tories.

Heywood and Middleton: 663 Majority over Labour, 1220 Green votes. In 2017, Labour had a 7617 majority and the Greens didn’t stand. 8.3% swing to the Tories.

Durham North West: 1144 Majority over Labour, 1173 Green votes. In 2017, Labour had an 8792 majority and Greens got 530. 10.4% swing to the Tories.

High Peak: 590 Majority over Labour, 1148 Green Votes. In 2017, Labour had a 2322 majority and Greens didn’t stand. 2.7% swing to the Tories.

Blyth Valley: 712 Majority over Labour, 1146 Green votes. In 2017, Labour had a 7915 majority and Greens got 918. 10.4% swing to the Tories.

Gedling: 679 Majority over Labour, 1097 Green Votes. In 2017, Labour had a 4694 majority and Greens got 515. 5.2% swing to the Tories.

Bury South: 402 Majority over Labour, 848 Green Votes. In 2017, Labour had a 5965 majority and Greens didn’t stand. 6.2% swing to the Tories. In this seat the previous Labour (then independent) MP Ivan Lewis endorsed the Tory.

Stoke on Trent Central: 670 Majority over Labour, 819 Green votes. In 2017, Labour had a 3,897 Majority and Greens got 378. 6.9% swing to the Tories.

Bury North: 105 Majority over Labour, 802 Green votes. In 2017, Labour had a 4375 majority and Greens didn’t stand. 4.7% swing to the Tories.

Carshalton and Wallington: 629 Majority over the Lib Dems, 759 Green votes. In 2017, the Lib Dems had a 1369 majority and Greens got 501 votes. A 2% swing to the Tories.

Bolton North East: 378 Majority over Labour, 689 Green votes. In 2017, Labour had a 3797 majority and Greens got 357 votes. A 4.6% swing to the Tories.

Kensington: 150 Majority over Labour, 535 Green votes. In 2017, Labour had a 20 majority and Greens got 767. A 0.2% swing to the Tories.

There’s very little pattern here. All of these seats had a swing to the Tories, but this ranged from 0.2% to 10.4%. To give you some idea, this range of swings next time, around half of Labour’s 202 seats would be vulnerable next time. If this range of swings was reversed in Labour’s favour, 120 seats would be winnable for them.

There’s little correlation between these seats and the actual performance of Greens- overall the increase in vote was marginally better than the average across the UK, but that difference can be more than fully accounted for by the Lib Dems standing down in Stroud.

Most importantly, taking my estimate that only seats where the Green vote is over 3 times the majority could possibly have “let them in”, you’ll see that only 2 seats (Bury North and Kensington) fit that bill. It can’t be ignored that in Kensington it’s highly likely that more than 150 voters would have been duped by Lib Dem claims that it was unwinnable for Labour.

It is, of course, regrettable that this can happen. But next election, when there’s the inevitable calls for parties to stand down their candidates, it’s worth remembering that in 2019 this strategy would have affected no more than 2 out of a possible 200+ constituencies. Is less than 1% success rate worth it?

As I said in my previous piece on this, the big stories are not small parties giving voters the chance to back them, there are bigger trends that need to be addressed, like the decline of the Labour movement in many communities (which I’ve written about today).

And a final reminder that under PR, all of this would be irrelevant.