The North Shropshire By-Election of December 2021: A Mega Anti-Government Protest Vote
It is customary for voting members of the British public to register their unhappiness with the ruling political party at a by-election. On 16 December 2021, voters in North Shropshire did just that and, in doing so, surpassed all expectations of how they would actually cast their votes. A 22,949-vote Conservative majority at the December 2019 General Election, with a 67.9 per cent turnout, was transformed into a 5,925-vote Liberal Democratic majority, with a 46.28 per cent turn out (38,110 votes). This was the result of a 34 per cent swing of the vote in favour of the Lib Dems. But the by-election need not have happened. Owen Patterson, local MP for 24 years, could have stayed in post if only he had quietly served out a thirty-day suspension from the House of Commons for a breach of lobbying rules. An ill-conceived campaign by party colleagues to defy his suspension backfired and led instead to his speedy and forced resignation from Parliament on 5 November 2021.
On election day, Helen Morgan, a chartered accountant, parish councillor, and 2019 parliamentary candidate (when she won 5,643 votes to Patterson’s 35,444), picked up 17,957 votes and was declared the winner. In her victory speech, she confirmed that “the people of North Shropshire have spoken on behalf of the British people”. Conservative candidate Dr. Neil Shastri-Hurst, a barrister and former Army doctor from Birmingham, was relegated to second place, receiving 12,032 votes, while the Labour candidate, Ben Wood, a political adviser to the Labour Party, came a distant third with 3,686. The Conservative candidate’s links with Shropshire were somewhat tenuous when compared with those of his closest opponents, being related to temporary work placements at an NHS hospital and an Army barracks in the county. The ballot box result was remarkable in more ways than one. The constituents of North Shropshire, an ultra-safe Tory seat with staunchly pro-Brexit sentiments, had not only rejected the Conservative Party but had even voted for a pro-Remain party instead.
Shropshire itself is a most underrated county, often considered a backwater, and its many natural charms are frequently overlooked by fellow British citizens. North Shropshire lies north of Shrewsbury, west of Newcastle-under-Lyme, south of Cheshire, and to the east of Wales. It is an archetypal “blue” constituency, having voted Conservative ever since its present boundaries were defined in 1983. The original, and larger, constituency existed between 1832 and 1885 and was then split into the four constituencies of Ludlow, Newport, Oswestry, and Wellington, which eventually rejoined in a smaller version of the original.
The sprawling, and mainly rural, constituency of North Shropshire is the third largest in the West Midlands and home to an 83,258-strong electorate (as of 2019). It includes the five small market towns (listed in order of reducing size) of Oswestry, Market Drayton, Whitchurch, Wem and Ellesmere. Local issues are important to disillusioned Conservative voters in North Shropshire, even as concerns about parliamentary sleaze, Partygate, Covid, the state of the economy, and immigration may have dominated this by-election. Local farmers seem unhappy with the government’s agricultural and trade policies and its lack of support for pig farming. A paucity of rail links with the national railway network, numerous pot-holed roads, a pressing need to upgrade the A5 between Shrewsbury and Oswestry to a dual carriageway, long waits for ambulances, the closure of ambulance stations in Oswestry, Market Drayton, and Whitchurch, and plans to reconfigure the hospitals at Shrewsbury and Telford are among the issues of greatest concern to the people of North Shropshire, all manifestations of problems with the delivery of public services. The lack of progress on many fronts locally may have added to voter disillusionment with the Conservatives.
While Boris Johnson has accepted personal responsibility for his party’s disastrous performance in North Shropshire, the results can be seen as a failure of endorsement of his policies as leader and may translate into a leadership challenge from backbench Conservative MPs. The Conservatives have been wounded by the Liberal Democrats at by-elections before. Diana Maddock won the 29 July 1993 by-election in Christchurch, Dorset, another safe Tory seat, converting a Conservative majority of over 23,000 into a Liberal Democrat majority of over 16,000. This was a protest vote against the 1993 Budget extension of VAT to domestic fuel. What should have been a wake-up call for Prime Minister John Major was not acted upon, and instead paved the way to a massive Labour victory in the 1997 General Election. To take another example further back in time, the by-election in Orpington, Kent, on 14 March 1952, saw the Liberal candidate, Eric Lubbock, win the seat with a 7,855-vote majority, in a protest vote by “Orpington man” against a public sector pay freeze.
By-elections reflect a government’s popularity and serve as a barometer of public opinion. By-election results may be a response to unpopular policy decisions or other actions taken by governments that reflect poorly on their public standing. It remains to be seen how the government will respond on this occasion. Nonetheless, the North Shropshire by-election result has shaken the Conservative Party and has reminded politicians that just a few weeks can be a long time in politics. Back in October 2021, who could have predicted an orange transition in the unfailingly blue county of Shropshire, and so soon after?
Ashis Banerjee