The week ahead: byelections and police commissioners

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/nov/11/week-ahead-byelections-commissioners

Version 0 of 1.

Willie Whitelaw once splendidly complained about Harold Wilson's attempt to win the 1970 election by boring the voters: "They are going up and down the country, stirring up apathy."

One suspects that the home secretary, Theresa May, will face the same charge on Friday when an unexpectant nation hears the results of the police and crime commissioner elections, the first to be held in Britain, and just possibly the last. Try as she might, her worthy efforts to generate interest appear only to have exposed the public's indifference.

Her cause has not been helped by what we might call the "I'm a nonentity, get me in there" factor. Instead of a band of colourful independents wanting to take control of police budget meetings, the electorate are being offered 50 shades of grey, municipal party political figures.

Similarly, turnout in three parliamentary byelections on the same day, two caused by Labour MPs standing down to stand as commissioners, and one by the departure of Louise Mensch, is not expected to be high. Not so much Super Thursday as Sleepy Thursday. The showing could be less than 20%, below the numbers for the city mayoral referendums in May.

Yet it will be an important test. Nearly 40 million adults in England and Wales outside London will have a chance to vote, albeit on average in only 8 hours 45 minutes of daylight and on what forecasters predict will be a chilly day with light rain.

These elections will matter. A convincing victory for the Labour candidate, Andy Sawford, in Corby, where Mensch stood down, is vital. It is a bellwether seat that Neil Kinnock failed to win in 1992, and Labour nearly lost in 2005. Labour victory this time would be taken as a sign that David Cameron is losing his grip on middle England.

It has been a strange quirk that all eight of the byelections since the 2010 general election have been held in Labour seats, and normally in seats that have seen large Labour majorities for decades. So Corby represents the first chance to see if Ed Miliband's brand of One Nation Labour can appeal in Tory villages and suburbs, as well as to show that the Labour campaign machine has dusted itself down after the humiliation of failing to see defeat coming at the hands of George Galloway's Respect in Bradford West in March.

Miliband was himself in the constituency on Friday and a vote in the Commons devised by Labour to oppose the planned rise in fuel duty is intended to show Labour on the side of Corby's squeezed-middle voters. Cameron is holding a regional cabinet meeting in the south-west in an attempt to campaign on the coalition's efforts to use academies to improve standards in primary schools. Miliband has instructed shadow cabinet members and MPs to take time off work on Thursday to get the vote out in Corby.

The bar has been set high by a poll commissioned by the Conservative peer Lord Ashcroft showing Labour ahead with a massive 22-point lead, on 54% to the Conservatives' 32%.

Labour does not accuse the Tory peer of some Svengali-like doctoring of voters' minds, but it does think his poll is wrong. They think the figure under-represents the likely share of the vote for the smaller parties. They also point out that his figures predict a swing of 13% in a seat noted for relatively low swings and stable votes. Only once since 1983 has either the Conservative or Labour share of the vote been outside the range of 36% to 45%.

But the Corby vote, even set alongside the byelections in Manchester Central and Cardiff South and Penarth, may prove to be of less enduring interest than the national verdict in the 41 police and crime commissioner elections.

Due to the unprecedented nature of the elections, and the boundaries, it is hard to make predictions. But the Political Betting website predicts on the basis of 2010 general election data that Labour has 12 certainties, a further five it is likely to win on the basis of a swing of 5%, and another four on the basis of a swing of 5% to 7.5%.

It suggests that if the BBC decision desk (assuming one still exists by then) calls counties such as Leicestershire, Warwickshire or Bedfordshire for Labour, then that will be a good result for the party.

At least 15 police areas are likely to vote Conservative, not surprisingly the vast bulk of them in the southern half of England. But such predictions are made fraught by the expected low turnout, the presence of independents and the fact that the Liberal Democrats for a variety of reasons, ranging from money to ideology, are not putting up candidates everywhere.

Nor can it help that many voters will probably not know they have two votes, and are using the supplementary vote, a system ironically not totally unlike the one thrown out by the country in a referendum 18 months ago.

But the Conservatives will insist that this exercise in direct local democracy should not be judged on the turnout revealed on Friday, but on whether the directly elected commissioners in future years make the police more efficient and gradually give voters a sense that the police are accountable.

On that score, the elections, and the apathy they reveal, will be the least important part of this rare British experiment in a new form of democracy.