Batley and Spen by-election: who will win Tracy Brabin’s seat?

Labour is gearing up for another test in its former electoral heartlands as a by-election in the Yorkshire constituency of Batley and Spen looms.

The election, which takes place tomorrow, comes hot on the heels of Labour’s loss in Hartlepool, a “red wall” constituency that had been held by the party since 1974 before Conservative Jill Mortimer turned the seat blue last month.

Batley and Spen is the former constituency of Labour MP Jo Cox, who was murdered in 2016.

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Why is there a by-election?

The seat is currently held by Labour’s Tracy Brabin, who is stepping down after being elected to be West Yorkshire’s first ever metro mayor. Her new role comprises both mayoral and police crime commissioner responsibilities and cannot be carried out while sitting as an MP.

Brabin won the mayoral post during the “Super Thursday” elections in May, picking up 60.1% of the vote in a run-off with the Conservative candidate after failing to secure a majority in the first round of voting.

Runners and riders

Jo Cox’s younger sister has been chosen by Labour to contest the by-election in the constituency in which the MP was murdered five years ago. Kim Leadbetter, a personal trainer and campaigner, has described herself as “the candidate the Tories fear” after she was selected by more than 80% of Labour members.

Ryan Stephenson, chair of the West Yorkshire Conservatives, is the Tory candidate, while former Labour MP George Galloway - who lost his seat as the Respect Party MP for Bradford West in 2015 - is running for the Workers Party of Britain, founded in 2019. The far-left politician is hoping to wreck his former party’s hopes of retaining power in Batley and Spen. Writing for RT (formerly Russia Today), he said his aim is to “give the people of Britain their wish” and help get rid of the “beleaguered” Keir Starmer, whose leadership is under scrutiny after poor performances by Labour in the Hartlepool and Chesham and Amersham by-elections.

Other candidates are:

• Paul Bickerdike (Christian Peoples Alliance)
• Mike Davies (Alliance for Green Socialism)
• Jayda Fransen (independent)
• Tom Gordon (Liberal Democrats)
• Therese Hirst (English Democrats)
• Howling Laud Hope (Official Monster Raving Loony)
• Susan Laird (Heritage Party)
• Ollie Purser (Social Democratic Party)
• Corey Robinson (Yorkshire Party)
• Andrew Smith (Rejoin EU)
• Jack Thomson (UKIP)
• Jonathon Tilt (Freedom Alliance)
• Anne Marie Waters (For Britain Movement)

What were the results in the last Batley vote?

Brabin first won the seat in a by-election in October 2016, four months after Cox was killed by a far-right terrorist during the Brexit referendum campaign. The Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Green Party and UKIP did not field candidates against Brabin as a mark of respect for her murdered predecessor.

In the general election the following year, Brabin retained the seat with a 8,961 majority. But in 2019, her majority was reduced to just 3,525 votes - roughly the same size as that of Labour in Hartlepool before last month’s vote.

How has campaigning gone?

It has turned increasingly fractious, with reports that Labour activists have been “pelted with eggs and kicked in the head”, reports Sky News. Brabin said she was leafleting with Labour colleagues and campaigners in Batley on Sunday when they were “followed, verbally abused and physically assaulted” by a group of young men.

The attack follows the harassment of Labour candidate Leadbetter while on the campaign trail last week, when she was “berated” by two men in the street who accused her of supporting “LGBT indoctrination in schools”, says Metro.

Meanwhile, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) is understood to be taking legal advice over what it calls “dirty tricks”. It says fake Labour leaflets were distributed claiming the party believed “the biggest threat to our precious multicultural society is whiteness”.

Separately, the party faced internal criticism for a genuine flyer distributed to Muslim voters showing the PM with India’s nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi, along with the message: “Don’t risk a Tory MP who is not on your side.”

Navendu Mishra, the Labour MP for Stockport, said it was a “divisive” leaflet that sought to turn communities against each other. “We beat our opponents based on policies, not by dog-whistle racism,” he added.

A Yorkshire Post editorial has called for “calmness and decency” to prevail. “If there is one constituency in the country that deserves a respectfully conducted by-election given its recent tragic history, it is Batley and Spen. The fact that has not happened up to this point is deeply saddening,” said the paper.

Why does the result matter?

“There’s no doubt tensions have been rising in this race,” writes Inzamam Rashid for Sky News. “Some people described the campaigning as toxic, but come Thursday they will have to decide and for whoever wins, a divided community awaits.”

Conservatives will be keen to claim “another Labour scalp” following their success in Hartlepool, says The Times. “Bookmakers have already listed the Tories as favourites for the seat and results from the elections look ominous for Starmer,” the paper reports.

Indeed, a Survation poll for the Daily Mail earlier this month put the Conservatives six points ahead of Labour (47% to 41%), with Galloway and the Lib Dems trailing behind on 6% and 3% respectively. Boris Johnson’s approval ratings were also far ahead of Starmer’s among Batley and Spen voters: 55% to 18%.

In contrast to Hartlepool, the Tories “have been competitive in Batley and Spen in living memory - holding the seat until 1997”, says The Guardian.

But unlike Hartlepool, “which many expected to fall to the Conservatives” despite Labour’s long reign in power there, Batley and Spen is a more tightly contested constituency, the paper continues. The area’s demographic make-up is among a variety of factors that make the upcoming by-election outcome “much more unpredictable”.

One in three adults in Batley are “economically inactive - far higher than Britain’s average of 21%”, while the percentage of the local population who are of Asian heritage is more than double the UK average of 6.9%.

On the other hand, an analysis by The Times of the West Yorkshire marginal’s local election results shows a 17-point swing in favour of the Tories across the constituency’s six wards, which would be enough to give the Tories a victory, says the newspaper’s Red Box editor Patrick Maguire.

However, the announcement that not only Cox’s sister was in the running but also Galloway, the “victor of another famous by-election in nearby Bradford nine years ago”, has had the Tories “fretting”, he adds.

“Both Johnson and Starmer have a great deal at stake in Batley and Spen,” writes Mark Wallace on the i news site.

“The former wants to keep his bandwagon rolling, to prove again that 2019 was far from the high water mark of the new Conservatism,” says Wallace, chief executive of the ConservativeHome website. And “the latter is increasingly desperate to show that not just that the rot in Labour’s foundations can be stopped, but that he is the man to do it”.

If Labour were to lose the seat, “the Corbynite left or others may mount a challenge”, writes Sean O’Grady in The Independent.

But while it may be an “embarrassment”, the presence of Galloway provides Starmer with something of an “alibi”. The Labour leader will be able to claim that it “was an election in the middle of a pandemic played out on untypical issues and with a flamboyant interloper in the feisty form of ‘gorgeous’ George Galloway, star of Big Brother and Russia TV,” says O’Grady.