The best thing about this UK by-election result to a non-UK-person like myself...

http://stabbers.muon.posiweb.net/stabbers/html/rainbow.htm

i'm quite impressed by Sarah Teather's age (29)

Sarah Teather becomes the youngest MP in the house (at the same age as me, there's still time yet ;))

the reason there were quite so many candidates this time probably had something to do with their not being a by-election for 19 months (is this a record? have all of our MPs suddenly become fitness freaks or summat? i'm sure they used to drop like flies), although at the last general election in Oxford East we had 9...

indeed. we had literally 100s of leaflets through our door the last few days, it's been ridiculous - mind you according to the guardian today the lib dems alone printed a million leaflets for 60,000 voters, which i find a little implausible.

this may have something to do with the fact that the LDs were formed in 1988 - since which year there have only been three general elections - as a merger of the Liberal Party, which had the tradition in the more isolated rural areas which were less overwhelmingly Tory than rural "middle England", and the SDP, which was a breakaway of Labour centrists when the Labour Party swung to the hard-left in the early 80s and therefore had the stronger base in areas like Brent East. but I think it has even more to do with the great homogenisation of Britain and the erosion of locally-specific employment, the crushing of the trade unions *and* the power of the landowners, which eats away at the historic Labour and Tory support bases, merges them effectively into each other and makes tribalistic voting "because we always have round here" or "because my father did and my father before him" seem outmoded even to those who used to do it (my favourite description of social change in Britain is the line - either Martin Jacques or Peter Kellner - that we've changed from being a "people like us don't" society to a "well, why shouldn't I?" society).

meanwhile a new generation has emerged who would simply never vote tribalistically like that; it's just completely out of their experience. much of the old "automatic voting" has sadly given way to apathy and abstension, but it also opens the door for a rootless, non-geographically-based, multi-faceted party like the Lib Dems to thrive; they reflect the tone of this era very well precisely because they have no clear "heartland".