Comment: Campaign spending poses more questions than answers
New figures have revealed a seat-by-seat breakdown of election spending. It doesn’t take long to unearth some interesting results.
The Electoral Commission’s constituency-by-constituency breakdown of candidates’ spending at the general election is an intimidating spreadsheet of data. But a quick look at the marginals I followed during the campaign yields some promising nuggets.
The biggest gap of the seven seats I wrote about in great detail is in the thoroughly controversial Oldham East and Saddleworth, where Labour incumbent Phil Woolas held on by 103 votes. At least he thought he did – a rare court challenge from Elywn Watkins having rendered the result null and void, we’re now looking at a by-election early in 2011.
Watkins’ total spending was £36,246.32, compared to Woolas’ paltry £13,722. It’s a staggering discrepancy, by far the largest of the seven seats I’ve looked at. How do we interpret this? Perhaps it reveals quite how effective Woolas’ misrepresentative slurs were, helping him overcome a massive spending gap between the two. Or maybe, as Labour’s campaigners would no doubt suggest, it shows how Watkins struggled to win over voters despite his massive money advantage. From these figures alone it’s hard to be sure, although I’d lean towards the former.
In most of the seats the challenger outspent the incumbent but failed to take the seat nonetheless. In Luton South, Labour’s Gavin Shuker spent £25,716 compared to the Tories’ Nigel Huddleston’s £32,380.51. Shuker held on despite being outspent – and, more significantly, winning over voters after Margaret Moran’s expenses disgrace. In Cheltenham the spending was much closer – Liberal Democrat Martin Horwood shelled out £29,949.59 compared to Conservative Mark Coote’s £15,979.19. Horwood held on. Then we have West Worcestershire, which should on paper be true blue Tory but faced a strong challenge from the Lib Dems’ Richard Burt. Burt spent a whopping £36,781.09, but to no avail. Despite spending just £24,852.30, Harriet Baldwin romped home.
These were all constituencies where the pressure was on the incumbents to hold their seat, so perhaps it’s unsurprising the challenger usually spent more. Looking at the figures is perhaps more revealing of how party strategists prioritised seats rather than anything else. Take the three-way marginal Colne Valley, for instance, which the Conservatives’ Jason McCartney took off Labour. McCartney spent a powerful £31,413.92 in a seat which the Tories expected to win. That compares to just £19,711.82 for Debbie Abrahams, Labour’s unsuccessful candidate. There’s a twist here, though. The Lib Dems’ Nicola Turner, who came third overall, outspent McCartney with £38,823.43. Her campaign manager was extremely upbeat prior to polling day, but all that cash didn’t quite turn into results.
Wakefield, another Yorkshire seat, was the last seat I visited. It was viewed as a Tory hopeful, but an optimistic one at that. Neither the outlandish Conservative candidate Alex Story nor Labour’s Mary Creagh – who subsequently made it to the shadow Cabinet – had huge budgets, spending £18,859.02 and £19,043.20 apiece. Perhaps because of this the result mirrored the national swing, with Story doing well – but not quite well enough.
Political anoraks will pore over these figures, trying to work out in which seats the parties got it wrong or right. Even a quick look raises some interesting issues – even if we can’t quite be sure what the answers to them are.
(A quick note of qualification: the Electoral Commission’s rather complex rules distinguish between candidate spending and party spending, the latter being declared only at national level. The general rule of thumb is that if a leaflet or poster mentions a specific constituency, it counts as candidate spending rather than party spending. So these figures don’t take into account any discrepancies between the parties on the thousands of generic national leaflets which were stuffed through voters’ letterboxes during the campaign.)
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