And many congratulations to Chloe Smith MP! There are seats with 5,000 + Labour majorities that we are likely to win at the general election, but a constituency like Norwich North that has such a high proportion of council estates is not automatically in that category. I would suggest that what is most significant about this by election victory is not simply that large numbers of Labour votes stayed away, but that some on the council estates started to switch to vote Conservative. We could see this from canvassing those estates. In fact, yesterday we actually met Labour canvassers using what were evidently old canvassing returns who were knocking up what they thought were Labour voters, but who we knew to be now Conservative voters. Of course not all of the 6.5% increase in the Conservative share of the vote came from council estates, but the fact that some of it did is tremendously encouraging.
The challenge for the party now is to change this widening stream of working class voters into a river.
