Politics: the Hancock effect

By Richard North - June 28, 2021

Typically, I follow a number of news stories through the day before deciding which one, if any, I will write about for my morning blogpost. I can make the decision at any time up to midnight, and occasionally later. It is a happy day, though, when I can start work early, which means that I can get to bed before three in the morning.

Sunday’s trawling exercise, however, has been especially – although not uniquely – frustrating. The headlines, quite obviously, are dominated by the Hancock resignation, with so many stories that it drives other news off the media agenda. In particular, that makes Brexit-related reports – already thin on the ground – even more scarce.

One is tempted, therefore, to take the easy way out, and join the throng commenting about Hancock. But this is something about which I can add little in the way of general observations, other than to mirror the concerns of so many that this ghastly man should have been in office for so long.

Nevertheless, there is one useful point that could be registered – as to whether the affair will affect the outcome of the Batley and Spen election this Thursday. Several pundits have complained that Johnson should have fired his health secretary and that his open support for the lame duck will have damaged him politically.

If this is the case, it is still difficult to predict precisely the electoral impact. One senses that it is unlikely to drive core Tory voters into the arms of Starmer’s Labour, much less into the Galloway camp. My guess is that, if there is an impact, it is likely to reinforce the stay-at-home vote.

It used to be that non-voters could be branded as “apathetic”, but more recently I have come to the view that constructive abstention is a valid choice – more so than spoiling the vote, as that still registers in the turnout figures.

Eventually, it may dawn on the politico-media collective that more and more people are making the deliberate choice to opt out of the political process, even if that doesn’t seem to be registering widely at the moment. But there must come a point when even the thickest of them begins to realise that the process lacks democratic legitimacy.

Worryingly, I suspect we have a long way to go before this realisation kicks in. I recall commenting on the 2011 Feltham and Heston by-election where Asian Woman activist Seema Malhotra was newly elected to the House as a notional Labour MP, with a vote of 12,639 on a turnout of 28.8 percent.

This meant that she took the seat with a “mandate” from 15.7 percent of the whole electorate. And while she has since been re-elected several times, and currently holds the seat, she struggled to gain the votes of 30 percent of the electorate in the 2019 general election. Democracy, representative or otherwise, this is not.

For all that, there can be no denying – unless you are a professional political pundit – that turnout can have a significant impact on election outcomes, especially in hotly-contested by-elections.

This we saw, very clearly, in the Hartlepool by-election in May. There, it was transparently obvious that the Tory victor didn’t win the seat in any recognisable sense. Rather, as its vote plummeted, Labour lost the seat, leaving the Tories to benefit.

Of the more recent by-elections, Chesham and Amersham, a different mechanism was at play, where disaffected Tory voters could cast their votes for the Tories, but creating a scenario where it is possible that much of the Labour vote stayed at home.

Come Thursday in Batley and Spen, we will have another test of the “stay-at-home” thesis, in which context the key figure to watch for is the one in which the media takes least interest – the turnout.

As it stands, the campaign there is getting rather messy. Labourlist is indignantly reporting that at least one Labour activist was “egged” and punched in the head by a group of voters, while a fake leaflet claiming to be supportive of Labour has been distributed.

This comes after Leadbeater was aggressively shouted at by men in the street on Friday, an event described as “disgraceful” by Starmer, who added: “George Galloway’s poisonous politics have no place in our country”.

All this adds yet another variable in an already complex mix. Some people, in response to the alleged behaviour of Galloway, may turn out to cast a sympathy vote for Labour. Others, knowing (or fearing) that Starmer could face a leadership challenge if his party loses on Friday, may also turn out to register their support. One or both could dent the “stay-at-home” effect.

On the other hand, there is some indication that Galloway is making his strongest pitch to the Muslim community on the basis of Palestine, but it is not necessarily the case that the Indian majority component of the Muslim minority is going to be as strongly influence by this issue as the smaller Kashmiri community.

This constituency in not Bradford West, where Galloway gained his famous 2012 victory. There, the largely homogenous Kashmiri community was in the majority, so Galloway could win the seat just by pitching for the ethnic vote.

By contrast, in Batley and Spen, he has to appeal to a wider constituency. This, maybe, is where the fake leaflet comes in. Pretending to be supportive of Labour, it shows Starmer taking the knee in recognition of Black Lives Matter, alongside the words “Labour supports taking the knee”.

Above the message “Supporting Labour”, we are told that the leaflet states that the Labour leadership is “proud” of its “woke credentials” and that Labour believes “the biggest threat to our precious multicultural society is whiteness”.

Under “Fighting White Privilege” at the bottom of the leaflet, it reads “Credits to the TUC’s anti-racism task force” followed by the address of the trade union federation – in a way somewhat similar to an imprint. The TUC, though, has denied having anything to do with the leaflet.

Such sentiments can hardly be calculated to attract the black vote, as the population stands at about 0.4 percent. Thus, one can only surmise that the leaflet is intended to alienate the majority white vote from Labour.

The indications are, though, that the reach of this leaflet has been slight and, with the publicity it has attracted, it may backfire on Galloway. As a result, his worst case scenario is that the core Labour vote defies expectations and turns out to vote. As to the Muslim vote, he could end up splitting it, attracting recruits mainly from the minority Kashmiri community,

Amid the uncertainly, the only thing of which we can be sure is that the predictive power of opinion polls is reduced. Currently, a poll published by Survation gives the Tories a victory with 47 percent of the vote, with Labour trailing behind in second place with 41 percent.

Interestingly, Galloway has hardly moved from the last poll, attracting a mere six percent of the vote – although that figure is unlikely to be reliable. Immigrant communities, as in other matters, are often under-represented. However, this does suggest that he is less of a threat than has been made out.

What we might expect is that, with Galloway’s shenanigans, the overall Labour vote might be less depressed than predicted. And, with what we might call the “Hancock effect” keeping the Tories at home, there is an outside chance that Labour could keep the seat.

Thus, while most of the pundits are confidently predicting a Tory victory – and they may be right – everything hangs on the turnout. In the seemingly unlikely event that the Tories do fail to take the seat, one may assume that Johnson has been politically damaged. One lives in hope.