| schema:text
| - Following Labour’s by-election victories in Wellingborough and Kingswood, we’ve seen a number of people stating that yesterday saw the second biggest by-election vote swing since World War Two.
Speaking on BBC Breakfast this morning, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer made a similar claim, saying: “These were huge swings to Labour, the Wellingborough one was the second biggest swing in a by-election since the Second World War.”
These claims relate specifically to by-elections won by Labour. It is true that Wellingborough saw the second largest post-war by-election swing in favour of the Labour party, and one of the largest by-election swings seen overall in the post-war period, but a number of other by-elections in that period have seen higher swings to other parties.
Vote ‘swing’ is a way of measuring the change in voter support between two parties, and is usually expressed as a positive or negative percentage point change calculated from the change in each party’s percentage share of the vote from one election to the next.
Yesterday’s by-election in Wellingborough saw a 28.5% swing from the Conservatives to Labour. The only post-war by-election to see a higher swing to the Labour party was the 1994 Dudley by-election, which saw a 29.1% swing from the Conservatives to Labour.
According to the House of Commons Library, the highest post-war by-election swing to any party took place in Bermondsey in 1983, when the vote swung from Labour to the Liberal party by 44%.
More recently, the 2014 by-election in Clacton saw a 41% swing from the Conservatives to UKIP—though it’s worth noting that this by-election was triggered by then-sitting MP Douglas Carswell resigning his seat in order to stand as a UKIP candidate, having defected from the Conservative party.
During this Parliament alone, larger swings than that seen in Wellingborough have been recorded in by-elections in North Shropshire, Tiverton and Honiton and also Somerset and Frome, with swings from the Conservatives to the Liberal Democrats of 34%, 30% and 29% respectively.
The Conservative to Labour swing seen in Wellingborough is also larger than any swing in the other direction in by-elections since World War Two. The largest Labour to Conservative by-election swing took place in Walsall North in 1976, where there was a 23% swing to the Conservatives. This followed a by-election triggered by the resignation of John Stonehouse from Parliament. He had been sitting as an English National Party MP after resigning from the Labour party while facing a number of criminal charges, and having attempted to fake his own death.
Image courtesy of Elliott Stallion
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)