Did the Green Partys decision to sit out the Batley and Spen by-election help Labour to victory?
The discovery of several highly offensive homophobic tweets written by a teenager a decade ago could have helped Labours Kim Leadbeater get past the winning post in Batley and Spen. As soon as the posts were uncovered, Ross Peltier, who is now 29, stood down as the Green candidate in the marginal constituency and was not replaced. As the party only received 692 votes at the general election, its absence from the ballot paper would not have mattered in most contests. News and analysis, direct from Westminster to your inbox Email address is invalid Thank you for subscribing! Sorry, there was a problem with your subscription. But it could have made all the difference in Batley and Spen as most of its natural supporters probably opted for Ms Leadbeater who scraped together a majority of 323. Just 104 people opted for Mike Davies who was standing as the Alliance for Green Socialism candidate. The Liberal Democrat vote fell from 2,462 (4.7 per cent) in 2019 to 1,254 (3.3 per cent), suggesting that hundreds of previous backers lent their votes to Ms Leadbetter in an effort to thwart the drive for victory by the Conservatives and George Galloway for the Workers Party. These apparent voting patterns will strengthen calls on the centre-left for a progressive alliance to defeat Tory candidates in tight contests. Equally, the Tories Ryan Stephenson, who had been the favourite throughout, could have been stymied by the presence of six fringe candidates on the right or far-right, including representatives of Ukip and the English Democrats. Three of them did not even make it into triple figures, but together they picked up 638 votes. One of the biggest losers was Jayda Fransen, who was jailed in 2018 for religiously aggravated harassment. The former deputy leader of Britain First, standing as an independent, finished 15th of the 16 candidates with 50 votes.