The February by-elections show voters dislike Tories AND Labour

both big parties are widely despised and hated

George Galloway, the new MP for Rochdale

In February, there were three by-elections. Let's look at these to see what voters think of politicians.

The Kingswood and Wellingborough by-elections

On the 15th of February there were two by-elections. Both were in Conservative-held seats, and Labour won both of them.

The Kingswood by-election is particularly notable in that if you add up the Tory and Reform vote, it surpasses Labour. Of course, if Reform hadn't stood, not all their votes would've gone to the Tories, but much of it would.

Amusingly, if the Tories had backed the Alternative Vote in 2011, and it had won, they'd now be in a position to pick up lower preferences from Reform voters.

In Wellingborough, the drop in Tory vote share was even worse, a whopping 37.6%:

Averaging out these swings, and putting them into Electoral Calculus, we get Labour winning 570 seats and the Tories down to 11 at the next general election.

The conclusion I draw from this is that the Tories are really unpopular and will probably lose a lot of seats.

The Rochdale by-election

The Rochdale by-election happened on the 29th of February. Workers' Party leader George Galloway won:

Labour were unpopular due to Starmer's pro-Israel stance on Gaza. Many British people disapprove of Israel's actions, which have been characterised as genocide, and many Muslim voters in particular feel strongly enough about the issue to change how they vote. Overall, British public opinion is more pro-Palestine than pro-Israel, particularly among Labour supporters:

Labour did look a certainty to win the next general election. They are still very likely to win, but it no longer looks a certainty. Starmer may yet snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

And even if Starmer does win, he is building up trouble for himself in the future: there are bound to be times in the next parliament when things are going badly, and at those times he will not have a reserve of loyalty or good-will from Labour members and voters to draw on.

Summary

I am reminded of the last time there was a UK-wide election using a roughly proportional system, the European election in May 2019:

Labour got less than 14% of the votes, a disaster only topped by the Tories, who couldn't even get 9% and suffered the worst defeat in the history of their party. Between the two of them, they got less than a quarter of the total vote.

And thus we lay bare why both Labour and Tories support FPTP -- they both know they are widely despised, even hated, and under any remotely fair voting system they would both be swept into the dustbin as they so richly deserve.

Unfortunately, reforming Westminster is well-nigh impossible. People have been talking about changing the voting system to STV for over 100 years -- it was almost done in 1917 -- but this has never happened and is unlikely to when the two big dinosaur parties know democracy would destroy them.

Since Westminster is unreformable, the solution for Scotland must be to remove ourselves from Westminster control and rule ourselves.