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Coming Soon: Famous By-Elections Series 1
23 Plays14 days ago
In the coming weeks there will be new episodes on famous by-elections from around the UK. Listen in to find out more in our forthcoming series!
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Transcript
Emergence and Impact of By-Elections
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Speaker
in the shadowy corridors of power. When governments falter and leaders fall, there emerges a rare political beast, the parliamentary by-election.
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Speaker
By-elections, sudden, explosive moments when people are called to speak not in scheduled chorus, but in urgent protest or impassioned hope. They have flipped parliaments, seen new parties born, and rewritten the stories of nations.
Significant By-Election Victories and Defeats
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Fermanagh in South Tyrone, 1981. A dissident Irish Republican imprisoned for terrorism is elected as an MP from his prison cell. Dunfermline in West Fife, 2006. A Liberal Democrat gained from labor in the constituency next door to future Labor Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Crewe in Nantwich, 2008.
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Speaker
The first seat gained by the Conservatives in a by-election since 1982 and the first from Labour since 1978. Clacked in 2014, an MP resigns his seat to stand for a new party, achieving the biggest increase in the share of a vote for any party in any by-election in history.
Analyzing Political Shifts Through By-Elections
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Speaker
These are not just elections. They are political lightning strikes, snapshots of defiance, chapters of redemption, and sometimes the first tremor before a political earthquake.
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Speaker
Over the coming weeks, we journey into some of the UK's most iconic by-elections, where the stakes were high, the drama was real, and history hung in the balance. One vote can change everything.