Searching for positives in the aftermath of Thursday’s triple byelections, the Conservative party chair, Greg Hands, pointed out that Labour had lost its deposit in Somerton and Frome. Speaking immediately after, the polling expert Sir John Curtice had a different view: this was actually bad news for the Tories. Beneath the headline results – the Tories shedding huge majorities to Labour in Selby and Ainsty, and to the Liberal Democrats in Somerton and Frome, while just clinging on in Boris Johnson’s former seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip – was a wealth of detail.
One notable factor was the way the Greens took third place – albeit a distant third – in all three seats, despite a mass of competition in fields ranging from eight candidates in Selby to 17 in Uxbridge. The Greens’ co-leader Adrian Ramsay noted that his party was the only one to increase its vote share in all three byelections, despite the way it was squeezed each time. Some of this was local. In Somerton and Frome, the party had, in Martin Dimery, a popular and well-known local candidate whose home town, Frome, had a number of Green posters visible amid the otherwise ubiquitous Lib Dem orange. Ramsay also castigated Labour for a failure “to show clear and unambiguous leadership” on policies, notably the environment, saying this hampered it in Uxbridge, where the expansion of the ultra-low emission zone was a significant factor.
With Keir Starmer’s party shifting closer to the Conservatives on several issues recently, particularly the decision to maintain the controversial two-child benefit limit if it takes power, the Greens are hopeful they can push themselves as a clearer alternative from the left. That said, even Dimery, who performed the best by far among the Greens, won just 10% of the vote, with many of his supporters telling Lib Dem canvassers they were switching their choice to help beat the Conservatives. As noted by Curtice, the results once again show how much better UK voters are getting at making tactical decisions, although this is generally seen as easier to do in a byelection, without the wider political noise of a general election. Thus, in Somerton and Frome, Labour barely campaigned and duly won 2.6% of the vote, losing its £500 deposit – this is only returned for candidates who hit 5% – but helping the Lib Dems give the Tories another bloody nose. Similarly, in Selby the Lib Dems finished sixth, behind the Yorkshire party and Reform UK, with many of their normal votes going to Labour instead. In Uxbridge, the Lib Dems took just 526 votes. Small numbers can make a big difference, as Uxbridge showed. With some Green voters seemingly less keen to lend their support to Labour, in the west London seat the Green candidate ended up with 893 votes – not a huge amount, but greater than the Conservatives’ winning margin of 495.