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Constituency of Birmingham Northfield | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Turnout | 55.0% | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The Birmingham, Northfield by-election of 28 October 1982 was held after the death of Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Jocelyn Cadbury on 31 July 1982. The seat was gained by the Labour Party in a defeat for Margaret Thatcher's government, ironically just after opinion polls showed an upswing in Conservative support following the victorious Falklands War campaign weeks earlier.
| Party | Candidate | Votes | % | ±% | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Labour | John Spellar | 15,904 | 36.3 | −8.8 | |
| Conservative | Roger Gale | 15,615 | 35.6 | −9.8 | |
| Liberal | Stephen Ridley | 11,453 | 26.1 | +18.0 | |
| National Front | Ian Anderson | 411 | 0.9 | -0.2 | |
| Communist | Peter Sheppard | 349 | 0.8 | N/A | |
| People's Progressive Party | Ronald Taylor | 63 | 0.2 | N/A | |
| Democratic Monarchist, Public Safety, White Resident | Bill Boaks | 60 | 0.1 | N/A | |
| Majority | 289 | 0.7 | |||
| Turnout | 43,855 | 55.0 | |||
| Labour gain from Conservative | Swing | -0.51 | |||
The result gave the Labour Party its first gain in a by-election in Britain since 1971. Yet while Labour had regained the seat which it had lost in 1979, the Conservatives were reported to be delighted at only narrowly losing given that the seat had been their third most vulnerable based on the 1979 results. Norman Tebbit, then a Conservative Cabinet minister, noted his party had come "within an ace of holding one of our most marginal constituencies" and argued that the results in Northfield and the by-election held on the same day for the Peckham constituency showed that the intervention of the Alliance allowed Labour to win. [4] Writing in The Glasgow Herald , political journalist Geoffrey Parkhouse argued that winning Northfield saved Labour leader Michael Foot "from disaster", but the closeness of the result meant it was a "desperate victory" for him. He also argued that the results showed that Mrs Thatcher's Government was on course to win the next election, but that the Alliance's potential to take votes from the Conservatives could yet prevent them from gaining an overall majority. [4]
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