AHC: Nigel Farage and George Galloway the front runners in a by-election.
- Thread starter Nofix
- Start date
Uhura's Mazda
Banned
It's difficult to get them to stand in the same place, let alone both be front-runners.
You see, both are 'celebrity' politicians, so if they get a relatively small voteshare, the papers and Twitter are going to be full of 'lol nigel farridge got 10 persent ukips finnished'. That's a bad look for their parties, and it means that neither is going to stand in a seat which doesn't have a capacity for them to do well.
So which seats does Galloway target? Primarily left/Labour-leaning ones with large ethnic minority populations. And ideally ones in which he can convince one or more of the local mosques to endorse him without endorsing him, as it were. So Bethnal Green & Bow and Bradford West were two of the seats with the largest Muslim populations in the country.
Farage, meanwhile, has until recently targeted plush, Tory-voting constituencies with relatively low ethnic minority populations (because once your neighbour is an immigrant, you don't feel like they're a threat - unless they play loud music on a Friday night, of course) like South Thanet. This only changed after the 2015 general election, when he said he wanted to fight a Labour seat in order to prove himself, or pander to RedKIP or whatever - and then in the next Labour-held by-election, he didn't even talk about standing himself, so he may have bottled it.
So you'd need a very specific type of seat for them both to stand, and that would have to be post-2015: you need a large Muslim population in a Labour seat which nevertheless has a lot of underlying ethnic tensions. And that's before you even start thinking about whether each would break 15-20%.
Alternatively, you could have Farage standing for London Mayor, but A) that doesn't seem like his style, and B) UKIP don't do well in London [THANDE BREAKS OUT 2004 ASSEMBLY ELECTION MAP] so he probably wouldn't risk it even if he wanted the job.
You see, both are 'celebrity' politicians, so if they get a relatively small voteshare, the papers and Twitter are going to be full of 'lol nigel farridge got 10 persent ukips finnished'. That's a bad look for their parties, and it means that neither is going to stand in a seat which doesn't have a capacity for them to do well.
So which seats does Galloway target? Primarily left/Labour-leaning ones with large ethnic minority populations. And ideally ones in which he can convince one or more of the local mosques to endorse him without endorsing him, as it were. So Bethnal Green & Bow and Bradford West were two of the seats with the largest Muslim populations in the country.
Farage, meanwhile, has until recently targeted plush, Tory-voting constituencies with relatively low ethnic minority populations (because once your neighbour is an immigrant, you don't feel like they're a threat - unless they play loud music on a Friday night, of course) like South Thanet. This only changed after the 2015 general election, when he said he wanted to fight a Labour seat in order to prove himself, or pander to RedKIP or whatever - and then in the next Labour-held by-election, he didn't even talk about standing himself, so he may have bottled it.
So you'd need a very specific type of seat for them both to stand, and that would have to be post-2015: you need a large Muslim population in a Labour seat which nevertheless has a lot of underlying ethnic tensions. And that's before you even start thinking about whether each would break 15-20%.
Alternatively, you could have Farage standing for London Mayor, but A) that doesn't seem like his style, and B) UKIP don't do well in London [THANDE BREAKS OUT 2004 ASSEMBLY ELECTION MAP] so he probably wouldn't risk it even if he wanted the job.
Given how hard it is for anyone to get elected without the support of either the Labour or Conservative Party I think the main problem would be having them be the two front runners, as any constituency where both of them are likely to run is likely to face a major challenge from one of the main parties. The easiest way to get past this is to have them backed by the two main parties. This is possible for Galloway if you can prevent him leaving Labour (no Iraq War for instance), but getting the Tories to back Farage seems completley out of the question, given that he's the person they can point to and say "at least we aren't as bad as him".
One possible scenario might be for Galloway to run in a Labour/Tory marginal under a Labour ticket, whilst Farage takes the opportunity to boost his publicity by personally running against him as the UKIP candidate. The Tories position their candidate as the sensible middle-ground between the two, but a few days before the election their candidate dies or is implicated in a scandal so heinous as to utterly destroy their credibility (most likely involving paedophilia). Come election day, with a large section of the Tory vote either switching to UKIP or not voting, the result is a Galloway win followed closely by Nigel Farage.
One possible scenario might be for Galloway to run in a Labour/Tory marginal under a Labour ticket, whilst Farage takes the opportunity to boost his publicity by personally running against him as the UKIP candidate. The Tories position their candidate as the sensible middle-ground between the two, but a few days before the election their candidate dies or is implicated in a scandal so heinous as to utterly destroy their credibility (most likely involving paedophilia). Come election day, with a large section of the Tory vote either switching to UKIP or not voting, the result is a Galloway win followed closely by Nigel Farage.
Uhura's Mazda
Banned
If Galloway was still in Labour, he'd still be MP for one of the successor seats to Glasgow Kelvin (Central, North and North West) until the SNP surge of 2015, so that badly limits his opportunities to stand in by-elections. Maybe he'd be able to stand in by-elections if he'd been deselected after the Boundary changes which came in in 2005, but in that case he wouldn't be in Labour anymore, anyway.
But even if we say that he's defeated by an SNPer in 2015, you'd still need to get him in a position to be a Labour candidate. The best way to do that is to minimise butterflies and have Corbyn or someone on the hard left become leader in 2015 (and this is over a decade after the PoD, so not particularly likely). And then that leader would have to arrange it for this aging catherine wheel of shit to be parachuted in to a Labour seat in a by-election. That's not as easy as it sounds, because Labour candidates in by-elections are usually selected by the local Party, and in the only by-election we've had since Corbyn became Leader IOTL - Oldham West and Royton, which had one of the most left-leaning MPs in the Party until his unfortunate demise - the Corbynite candidate from out of town got zero votes by the local selectorate, who chose instead a local, Labour-right bloke. But even if the situation is such that the selection is not done by the CLP, that leaves it to the NEC - not the Leader - and it's hard to see how a Labour NEC would develop to prefer to parachute a lefty rebel like George Galloway over, say, Douglas Alexander.
So for Galloway to stand in a by-election for Labour, it would have to - at a bare minimum - happen after alt-Corbyn has packed the NEC with his own people the next time they're elected, which doesn't seem very likely.
But the case of Oldham West is probably not the best one.There was a former MP who was left wing who tried to win the nomination and did badly, but there was also another left wing councillor who was local who did a bit better, taking votes away from him. More importantly,Labour party rules mean that you cannot vote on MP nominations until you have been a member for 6 months. So the new membership intake did not get a vote.
So maybe if Galloway remained a Labour MP he could be nominated in the right constituency beyond 2016, but I agree the difficulty is finding a constituency were he could win and Farage also could.
Unless a seat becomes vacant before Ukip become an electoral force, and Galloway runs to win the seat, but Farage does it for the publicity, knowing he probably wont win. Maybe a scandal involving an ethnic minority community in that constituency could get him to do that?
In any case, he probably would not win, not only because of demographic factors, but also because of how a lot of the time before the rise of Ukip there vote in Labour areas was squeezed by the BNP, who were really like a working class Ukip at that point.
Uhura's Mazda
Banned
I'm pretty sure the local lefty got something like five votes against A LOT for Jim, so it still stands. I hadn't considered the effects 6-month rule, though. Still, Chris Williamson was the unofficial favourite of the Corbynburo all the way through.
Everything else you say is on the money, but I thought Farage had exclusively targetted Tory seats up till now?