By-elections are circuses of democracy, it’s time to give them up
By-elections may capture the national imagination, but they do more harm than good, writes Will Cooling
This has been a banner week for by-election fans. Not only do the voters of Kingswood and Wellingborough both go to the polls today, but Labour has spent all week desperately trying to limit the damage caused by its candidate in the forthcoming Rochdale by-election being caught repeating antisemitic conspiracies about the October 7 attacks on Israel.
Like most political nerds I long have had a soft spot for by-elections, watching the whole circus of national politics temporarily descend on an unsuspecting constituency. But I worry they actually do our democracy more harm than good.
After all, acquiring national prominence doesn’t mean they actually reflect the national mood. We saw this last summer when Rishi Sunak was led astray by the Tories successfully retaining Uxbridge and South Ruislip after campaigning against extending London’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone. Sunak’s sudden lurch against green investment did nothing for his popularity and has set back numerous key infrastructure projects.
It’s not just that by-elections are focused in one part of the country that can make them unrepresentative, but also the lower than usual turnout. It is far from rare for less than a third of voters to vote in by-elections. This fact has historically been exploited by the Liberal Democrats to achieve shock results through sheer organisational muscle, successes that arguably deformed the party by encouraging them to treat politics as constituency-by-constituency trench warfare rather than building a coherent platform that they could deliver on in government.
But by-elections can enable worse things than Liberal opportunism; they provide an inviting platform for extremists that struggle to break through in general elections. Indeed, a key reason why Labour hesitated when faced with the prospect of not contesting Rochdale was the fear that they would be paving the way for George Galloway to win.
Labour ultimately felt that was a risk they would have to take, but we should ask whether it was a choice they should ever have faced. After all Rochdale is only having a by-election because Tony Lloyd, the highly respected local MP, died of cancer. Is it right that the death of a MP should deny their party a seat it won fair and square at the last general election? The question is even more acute when it comes to the question of terminal illnesses, with arguments over opposition parties ramping up campaigning whilst the incumbent slowly dies far from unheard of.
It’s worth noting that British politics has already made a decisive step against the morbidly glib idea that “where there’s death, there’s opportunity”. Whereas the IRA assassinating Ian Gow in 1990 allowed the Liberal Democrats to win his Eastbourne constituency in the resulting by-election, the murders of Jo Cox and David Amess saw their party’s chosen candidate be given a clear run by the other major parties. It surely would not be unreasonable to take this precedent further by allowing parties to co-opt replacements as they do in the devolved assemblies. You could even still give voters a say in who their new MP was to be, by holding an open primary between the leading candidates selected by the local party.
Such a mechanism would not just better honour the memory of politicians who die, it would allow for politicians who are struggling for personal or professional reasons to stand aside without feeling like they are letting their party down.
Perhaps most importantly, it would better incentivise political parties to police their own MPs if full by-elections were only called when parties were found to have helped misbehaving incumbents resist investigation or hide their wrongdoing. That would give them a self-interested reason to maintain robust complaints processes.
Until 1926, an MP had to contest a by-election upon being made a minister. Today such an idea seems ridiculous. Hopefully, it won’t take another hundred years for us to consider the very idea of by-elections similarly antiquated.