Tory ambitions in Oldham East by-election

Obviously we won't know until Monday if there will be a by-election in Oldham East and Saddleworth, but it seems as if the Tories fancy their chances and are already looking to steal the seat away from both Labour and the Lib Dems. 

Baroness Warsi - whose job title appears to be Party Chairman with special responsibility for relentlessly attacking the opposition - has come out and said that the Conservatives will field a candidate and will not stand aside for the Lib Dems. 

The Lib Dem candidate who brought the action against Labour's Phil Woolas, Elwyn Watkins, lost by only 103 votes. The Conservative Party candidate, Kashif Ali, was a further 2310 votes back. See the table below:

So do the Tories really have a shot at winning this seat?

First impressions would be yes, because in May this election was a three horse race, and it is conceivable that if Ali stands again and runs a good campaign he could take 1000 votes from Watkins and 1000 from Labour and win. 

But on closer inspection there is much for the Tories to be wary of here. The swing towards the Conservative candidate was a huge +8.7 per cent at the last election. He would have to not only maintain this but improve on it to win.

Much of that swing was at the expense of Phil Woolas, the Labour candidate and a former Home Office minister, who suffered a -10.7 per cent swing. He will (almost certainly) not be standing again in the by-election. Instead there will be a new Labour candidate, who will distance themselves from Woolas and the previous government. 

They will also benefit hugely from Labour being out of power and in opposition. There is no groundswell of anti-Labour - and perhaps as importantly, anti-Brown - sentiment like there was in May. Expect the new candidate to be very much part of Ed Miliband's 'new generation'.

The issue is complicated by the Lib Dems' poll ratings, which have crashed since the election in May from around 27 per cent to a paltry 11 per cent. This suggests that the Lib Dems will do very badly. It would obviously be premature to write them off, but I think that Elwyn Watkins will struggle to achieve 31.6 per cent of the vote again. This, of course, means that there are disaffected Lib Dem voters that can be targeted by Labour and the Conservatives. 

So what are their chances? The national political issues clearly favour Labour in opposition, and looking at the results in neighbouring constituencies I think Ed Miliband has every reason to be confident. This is a seat that will be receptive to Labour's messages about cuts and the government attacking the poor. Oldham East and Saddleworth is at the eastern edge of a belt of solidly Labour seats stretching over from Manchester to Liverpool, and just to the west of a block of solid Labour seats in the Midlands and Yorkshire. Phil Woolas has been the Labour MP there since the seats' inception in 1997. 

The seat was created in 1997 by merging an Oldham constituency, which had a strong Labour past, with Saddleworth, which since its creation in 1983 had been both Tory (12 years) and Lib Dem (2 years). Since 1997, the Conservatives have never polled higher than the 26.4 per cent Ali achieved in May. 

Furthermore, the collapse in Lib Dem support is because of the coalition. It is reasonable to suggest that the 11 per cent of people still supporting the Lib Dems are happy with the coalition and positive towards the Conservatives. Even so, they will likely vote Lib Dem in this by-election. If local politics mirrors national politics then the 16 per cent of Lib Dem voters who have lost faith in the party nationally will not likely vote Conservative, as it is the alliance with that party which has caused them to become disillusioned. Lib Dem voters are likely, if they move, to move towards Labour. 

So looking at the local history of the seat and its surrounding area, the likely effects of the collapse in Lib Dem support, and how receptive the locals will likely be to the Labour message of government cuts, it will be hard for the Tories to win this seat. It is Labour's seat to lose. 

As an interesting final point, it is not hard to see why Woolas felt that campaigning on immigration and alleging his opponent was soft on Islamic extremism could prove a successful tactic. In 2001 the seat gained notoriety when the BNP candidate Michael Treacy won over 5,000 votes, an 11.2 per cent share. Despite being right-wing, the BNP tend to do well in Labour areas rather than Conservative ones, which again points to the difficulty the Tories will have winning this seat.