WHAT HAPPENED IN LEWISHAM EAST?

Waters: emotive cadences

by Colin Liddell

The latest event in British "right-wing" politics was the Lewisham East by-election, which took place on the 14th of June. 

The former MP, a white woman by the name of Heidi Alexander, had resigned in order to join Sadiq Khan's London government in the role of deputy mayor for transport. This caused the special election.

Data on the constituency from 2011 gives us the following racial breakdown:

White 56,946
Black 26,388
Asian 8,938
Mixed 7,165
Other 2,769

Basically the constituency is half-White and half-non-White. Unfortunately it is also a safe Labour seat, so the Labour Party, when selecting its candidate, insisted on a shortlist of all women and all non-White candidates, finally choosing a Black 48-year-old woman, Janet Daby.

On the nationalist side, if we can call it that, two civic nationalist parties fielded candidates, namely UKIP and the new For Britain Party.

UKIP despite its dramatic slump in support post-Brexit and its often amusing leadership problems, still has pretensions to being a major party and thus likes to avoid anything that might smack of "extremism." They also like to signal how "non-racist" they are, which may be why they chose David Kurten, a Black, former London Assembly member, who was generally considered to be an ideal candidate for this particular constituency.

For Britain is a more "upstart" party, founded by Anne Marie Waters, a 40-year-old lesbian Irish woman, following her unexpected and suspicious defeat in one of several UKIP leadership elections. Waters is generally regarded as being a reasonably charismatic speaker, with emotive cadences not unlike the recently deceased Dolores O'Riordan out of the rock band The Cranberries.

Anne Marie Waters and Britain's
most famous political prisoner

Waters was her own party's candidate, having previously contested the seat in 2015 for UKIP when she gained 3,886 votes (9.1%).

As an "upstart" party, For Britain is more prepared to take risks. For example, it is strong of the MQ (Muslim Question), has links to Tommy Robinson and his supporters, and accepts ex-members of the BNP into its ranks. The party has also noticeably received sympathetic comments from the rock singer Morrissey. As the public controversy over Tommy Robinson's jailing coincided with the by-election campaign, you would expect For Britain to gain some support as a consequence.

So, how did our brave civic nationalist heroes do is a country where the dominant political issue remains the push for BREXIT? The short answer is not very well. With around a third of the voters turning out, Labour easily won, although with a much reduced majority (+21,123 to +5,629). The real stories of the election were: 

1. Labour apathy or disenchantment, partially caused by the Central Labour Party overriding the the wishes of the local party to force a candidate on them that fitted in with national demographic targets.
2. A surge for the Liberal Democrats, who seem to have successfully mobilised the strong anti-BREXIT feeling in London. 

As for the civic nationalist parties, their performance was just a footnote. UKIP came sixth, with a derisory 380 votes (1.7%), and For Britain came seventh with 266 votes (1.2%). The low turnout should also be noted, as this generally favours any party viewed as "extremist," like these two parties are. But in this case it didn't. Instead only underlining their relative failure.

It is hard to draw any conclusions from this election, except to note the odd absence of what is known as the "protest vote," that sector of the electorate who express their unhappiness with the main parties by voting for a third party or anti-establishment party. Both the BNP and UKIP have benefited from this in the past. 

At a time like this, when there is little real love for any of the major political parties, one would expect to see a much more robust protest vote. The fact that there isn't suggests that it is not the parties that are at fault, but that there is something wrong with British politics itself.

You don't have to look far for what that it is either, namely BREXIT. As long as the BREXIT situation remains unresolved, British politics seems fated to exist in a kind of limbo land, as I previously argued here.

Connected content:
Lewisham East parliamentary by-election: the end of civic nationalism?

Lib Dems Grow, Labour Majority Cut, UKIP Collapse in Lewisham East