14 February 2024 , 17:46
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Labour is being advised to urge people in Wellingborough to vote tactically in Thursday's by-election.
Think tank Labour Together, which plays a key role advising Keir Starmer, said the party's vote share would turn "a razor-thin margin into a fairly comfortable Labour victory" if people knew to vote tactically. Its research, which it carried out with Datapraxis, found 29% of voters want to vote tactically to keep another party out yet less than a third of these (29%) know who they should be voting tactically for because they don’t know which party came second in their constituency.
Some 60% of voters don’t even know which constituency they live in anymore post-boundary changes. The huge poll of more than 6,000 voters, carried out by YouGov, found 67% of the country want to vote against the Conservatives while just 23% want to vote against Labour.
Labour Together's modelling suggests Labour could enjoy a two percentage point bump from people who are already intending to tactically vote in Wellingborough. This would put Labour and the Conservatives neck-and-neck. But it said its polling suggests "if all voters knew they were in a two-horse Labour vs Con race, Labour’s vote share would increase by an additional seven percentage points".
Christabel Cooper, director of research at Labour Together, said: "When you look at the desire to vote tactically, Reform voters are sticky. They dislike the Conservatives as much as they are drawn to Reform. The anti-Tory coalition is much more easily united. Many Lib Dem voters are willing to vote Labour if it ejects a Tory MP from their seat. That's bad news for the Conservatives - and could make all the difference in Wellingborough."
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The Wellingborough by-election was triggered after disgraced MP Peter Bone, , who had a large majority of 18,540 in the 2019 election, was suspended from the Commons for six weeks in October after an inquiry found he had subjected a staff member to bullying and sexual misconduct.
Parliament's Independent Expert Panel ruled he had engaged in “a wilful pattern of bullying” which included "an unwanted incident of sexual misconduct, when the complainant was trapped in a room with the respondent in a hotel in Madrid”. He was sitting as an independent MP after losing the Tory whip in the wake of the findings. He was stripped of his Commons seat completely after losing a crunch recall petition, which was triggered automatically by the length of his suspension from Parliament.
Some 13.2% of constituents - 10,505 people - voted to oust him during the six-week vote, according to North Northamptonshire Council. This exceeds the 10% threshold needed for the recall to succeed.
Labour will be aiming to snatch the constituency after a series of stunning by-election victories in 2023, including in Mid-Bedfordshire where the party overturned a majority of 24,664. The party's candidate Gen Kitchen, who grew up in Northamptonshire, as their candidate. She has said residents were "frankly embarrassed by the actions of their MP" and felt abandoned by the Government.