Conservative and BNP votes

[ewx]

There was some speculation before the election that the Conservative anti-immigrant platform might pick up votes from the BNP (one article mentioned that a similar approach in the past more or less wiped out the old National Front). I've no feel for the extent to which this actually happened or not, but something I did notice was that in Dewsbury Labour and the Conservatives both had Muslim candidates (the Labour one a member of the CRE too), and the Conservatives lost, by a smaller margin than the BNP vote in that constituency.

It seems fairly obvious that in that case the Conservatives weren't going to pick up BNP votes (and would surely have known this), whatever the case may have been elsewhere; what I'm wondering is how much they suspected in advance that it might actually cost them the seat.

Comments

[senji.livejournal.com]

It may be that they reckoned that the benefit of having a Muslim candidate was larger than the BNP vote.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

That's possible: indeed for all I know it was the national Conservative anti-immigration approach that really sunk them there and a WASP (or WAS<whatever>...) candidate would have seen an even poorer showing.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

For the Conservatives I think not of having a female muslim candidate, worst of both worlds.

[knell.livejournal.com]

I noticed while looking at the figures that there are quite a lot of constituencies which the Tories lost in by a margin smaller than the UKIP vote as well. I wonder if their anti-immigration approach might have benefitted the BNP in some constituencies - it got people thinking about immigration and they decided that if they really wanted to register an anti-immigration vote then it should be for the BNP just to make their views clear.

It would be an interesting experiment to take the UKIP and Veritas votes, combine them, and see how many extra seats the Tories would have won if (theoretically) those votes had gone to them rather than the single-issue extremists.

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

Can't think of more than about half a dozen off hand; chiefly in north and east Kent, and also Stroud in Gloucestershire. The Tories polled well enough in Essex regardless of votes falling to UKIP and others; likewise the amount of votes that UKIP et al received in Devon and Cornwall, had they reverted to the Tories, wouldn't have unshipped any of the Lib Dems in vulnerable seats.

[knell.livejournal.com]

The Electoral Commission have the results downloadable as an Excel spreadsheet, which in turn is convertible to CSV for easy Perl munging. I'll take a look at the data - I've certainly noticed a good few seats where Tory+UKIP would have been enough to win - Warwick and Leamington, for instance (where I grew up) was formerly the safest of Tory seats, went to Labour in 1997, and this time around James Plaskitt held the seat with a majority of just a couple of hundred over the Tories - and there were 920 votes for UKIP. Hove is another example of a slim majority where UKIP votes are likely to have cost the Tories the seat, as are Stourbridge, Crawley and, of course, Harlow. Then there's most of the Labour seats in Kent, as you mentioned. (Veritas don't seem to have polled enough of the vote to be statistically interesting.)

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

Dewsbury would have been an unlikely place for the Tories to win, whether their candidate was white, Muslim or a one-legged Unitarian Eskimo. Ann Taylor had built up quite a large personal vote over the years, and new MP Shahid Malik hadn't so much been parachuted in from Burnley as welcomed with open arms as possible future Cabinet material. If there were any places in that constituency that would have been likely to have had a high BNP vote, chances it would have been Thornhill (chiefly picking up votes from Labour). And even then, the Asian votes around Savile Town would have cancelled most of them out.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

You'd think that, but then the BNP have won Heckmondwike (or have the boundaries changes pushed that into Batley and Spen?) and regularly come second in Mirfield.

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

Hecky's in Batley and Spen, and when the BNP took it (with the same candidate that ran in the General Election at Dewsbury), it was from a Conservative.
You've a point with Mirfield though, and especially parts of Ravensthorpe too.

[lnr]

It's so sweet having a bunch of locals :-)

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

We Yorkies get everywhere, you know...

Hecky

[(Anonymous)]

Hecky's not in Batley and Spen. It used to be and it may be again at the next general if boundary changes are approved.