Barnsley is no excuse to celebrate for Labour

By Luke Bozier / @lukebozier

I hate to rain on the parade, but I thought I’d try to inject a bit of balanced analysis into last night’s by-election result in Barnsley. Firstly, I think it’s great that such a talented candidate was selected and ultimately won the seat; parliament and the Labour Party will be richer with Dan Jarvis as an MP. Secondly, of course there is palpable schadenfreude pulsing through the party today at the knowledge that the Liberal Democrat vote has been quite literally obliterated; from 2nd place last year to 6th place last night, they lost their deposit and the result is a warning shot to Nick Clegg.

But let’s look a little closer at the result. If we rest on our laurels as a party now, we are bust. In order to win in 2015 we have to have a popular agenda and strong vision; we have to win off our own back not off the back of a fall in popularity of the two governing parties. Last night’s result will give a boost to the morale of the Labour Party, but it was not a Labour victory. Barnsley Central was one of the safest of all of Labour’s 355 parliamentary seats, so nothing short of a political catastrophe would have stopped Dan Jarvis or any other Labour candidate from holding the seat there in yesterday’s by-election.

So therefore the next place to look for insight is to the overall majority that Labour now has in Barnsley Central. Labour’s majority in the 2010 General Election was 11,093, and last night we saw a rise of 678 to a new majority of 11,771. The quality of Dan as a candidate as well as the overall mood of the country can explain the rise. However, Barnsley Central being the Labour stronghold that it is, one would expect Labour’s sizeable core vote there to be strengthened in reaction to the coalition’s agenda since May, and that’s what happened last night (as witnessed by an overall rise in the share of the vote going to Labour – Labour succeeded in getting its voters out). In actual fact, the total number of people voting for Labour went down from 17,487 last year to 14,724 last night.

We also have to look at the distribution of votes among other parties also. Apart from the headline-generating slip from 2nd to 6th place by the LibDems, there were some other interesting results. UKIP, Britain’s new “protest party of choice”, took 2nd place, with its share of the vote going from 4.7% to 12.19%. The Conservatives remain in third place but suffered a huge loss in confidence; last year 6,388 people voted Tory in Barnsley Central, yesterday just 1,999 hard-core Tory voters could be bothered to turn out. The BNP vote was halved, thankfully.

So what can we conclude from yesterday’s by-election? Yes the LibDems and Conservatives got a real knocking – only the most hard-core voters came out in support of the coalition government. But Labour also took a hit – our core vote has strengthened but that’s about it, and in a seat like Barnsley Central that’s not surprising – but 2,700+ people who voted Labour last year either couldn’t be bothered to come out yesterday or chose to give their vote to someone else, not a great omen.

The ultimate conclusion from Barnsley Central is that the three main parties each took a hit, to varying degrees, and despite the jubilation in the Labour Party in Westminster and around the country, we should take yesterday’s result as a warning – that we haven’t yet regained public confidence and that we can’t take the result of the next general election for granted. People are tired of punch & judy politics, and Labour has to start setting out its own agenda for being the next government in order to be taken seriously again, rather than just being the party of default opposition which does nothing but protest cuts.