>>So far looks like anti-war Labour
MP's lost votes compared to the last election. Not what we would have
expected.<<
And started out on a quest to crunch the vote share numbers to see what was going on.
Just a warning that this is going to be a quixotic quest for two reasons.
1) First there is a problem of cause and effect (there is a five-shilling statistical term for the problem I'm about to describe but I won't plague the list with it). The idea here is that a lot of anti-war Labour MPs, represent constituencies which were a) anti-war and b) strong Labour. This was the case in my own constituency (Holborn & St Pancras). So what you're looking at are people who tried to neutralise the protest vote by taking an anti-war position themselves but were unable to do so because voters like me knew that they could safely make an anti-Labour protest vote which would show up in the national popular share totals, without any real material risk of getting anything other than a Labour MP. This is certainly what happened in the case of Diane Abbott
2) Second, those "swing" numbers are very dodgy constructs. In the left-wing districts where anti-war MPs saw a "swing" to the Tories, for the most part what you're seeing is Labour voters staying home while the Tory voters (who had no reason to do so) voted in about the same numbers as they had previously.
3) Red Pepper and the New Statesman, sad to say, are not the force in the land that they once were. To be honest, I didn't know that RP was still going. The dominant message for antiwar types in the UK was "a vote for Labour is a vote for Blair", and that there were to be no excuses on grounds of "but my local MP is a nice bloke and he was against the war".
I think that the vote totals are too crude an instrument to pick up the sort of very refined tactical voting effects you're looking for. I think some local good-government types are planning on doing something to try and measure the impact of the anti-war vote with surveys, but we'll have to wait on that.
dd
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