Potential Blackpool South by-election offers chance for further Labour gain

Potential Blackpool South by-election

Good morning. Tory MP Scott Benton could, if reporting in yesterday’s Mirroris to be believed, soon be handed a suspension of longer than ten days by the parliamentary standards commission. As we have no doubt all learned by now – there have, so far, been 16 by-elections this parliament, with another later this week and two more on the 19th – a more than ten day suspension is long enough to trigger a recall petition. That in turn can trigger a by-election. Benton took Blackpool South from Labour at the 2019 general election by 3,690 votes, unseating the long-serving MP Gordon Marsden. This is to say that on current polling, the seat is eminently winnable for Labour. 

Chris Webb, who was backed by Angela Rayner and Andy Burnham, has been selected to fight Blackpool South at the next election. He’s now busy fundraising for a prospective by-election, and if you fancy gazing into his soul, you can read an op-ed he wrote for LabourList back in 2020, when he ran as an independent candidate for the national executive committee (NEC).

Benton had the Tory whip suspended in April, having been filmed offering to lobby government ministers and on behalf of gambling interests. The affair calls attention to the controversial relationship between politicians and Big Gambling, which has been a source of employment for a number of former Labour MPs, including Anna Turley, who will fight her former seat of Redcar again next year, and Michael Dugher, who was recently tipped as a potential Keir Starmer picks for the Lords. For those interested in a more historical view of the Labour Party’s complicated relationship with gambling, you could always read former Labour shadow pensions minister Gregg McClymont’s work on the subject, where he argues the issue strained the party in the pre-war period because it pulled at two different tendencies: puritanically minded ethical socialists, who opposed it, and more materialist figures who defended people’s right to choose to gamble.

Tory conference

Conservative Party conference has been rumbling on in Manchester, with Liz Truss attracting a crowd and housing minister Rachel Maclean nobly informing us that not all private renters smoke weed and are in gangs. Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones responded to yesterday’s Chancellor’s speech, saying “Jeremy Hunt had no big idea at all” and does not have a plan to “take Britain forward or to help people with housing and the cost-of-living crisis”.

We’ll have to wait until tomorrow at 11:15am for the Prime Minister’s conference missive. Insert your own train gag here.

In other Labour news…

SADIQ KHAN: The Jewish Labour Movement has hit out at Tory mayoral candidate Susan Hall for comments that London’s Jewish community were “frightened” by the Labour mayor, condemning the remarks as “dog whistle politics” (X).

COVID INQUIRY: Nick Thomas-Symonds has accused Rishi Sunak of “putting his own political concerns ahead of the interests of the country” after it was reported that the PM had failed to hand over his WhatsApps to the inquiry (Guardian).

ROGER HALLAM: The controversial co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and one of the strategists behind Just Stop Oil is set to appear at this year’s The World Transformed.

RUTHERGLEN: Polls will be open in the Rutherglen by-election on Thursday! If you can’t make it over to campaign, you can sign up to do some online campaigning here.

For the record

(Editor Tom Belger writes:) Having laughed at Susan Hall’s ‘first female Labour mayor’ gaffe in yesterday’s email, we’ve ended up with egg on our face and owe readers an apology and correction for a howler of an error. I started a sentence on how little Universal Credit is a week, and then pasted in the monthly figure as it was the only one available, without changing my copy. After 13 years of Tory austerity, of course single people under-25 don’t receive £292.11 a week.