Welcome back from the break! There were 6 principal council seats up for election last week: 4 Labour, 1 Conservative, and 1 Lib Dem defence. Labour continues to decline, holding only one seat while losing two to Reform and one to the Conservatives. The Tories also lost their seat to Reform, while the Lib Dems held their only seat of the week.
In Wokingham BC, Cllr Chetna Jamthe secured over 50% of the vote and maintained a healthy lead over second place Conservative candidate. Well done and congratulations to Chetna and the team for the win in the Winnersh ward.
Wokingham BC, Winnersh
Liberal Democrat (Chetna Jamthe): 1177 (52.7%, -7.2%)
CON: 833 (37.3%, +10.7%)
LAB: 126 (5.6%, -5.1%)
GRN: 99 (4.4%, new)
Tendring DC saw another strong performance of the Lib Dems, as Rachael Richards doubles the vote share, but ultimately losing to Reform in The Bentleys & Frating. Well done to Rachael and the local team for the work put into running this great campaign, you’ll get them next time.
Tendring DC, The Bentleys & Frating
Reform: 432 (45.3%, new)
Liberal Democrat (Rachael Richards): 328 (34.4%, +16.8%)
Conservative: 163 (17.1%, -31.4%)
Labour: 31 (3.2%, -7.7%)
Leaving the busiest for last, Medway Council had three seats up for election yesterday. Reform gained both seats in the double vacancy in Rochester East & Warren Wood from Labour, with Labour barely holds on to the Gillingham South seat despite losing 20% of support compared to when last time the seat was up. Thank you to Anita Holloway, Sarah Manuel, Onyx Rist, and their respective teams for representing the Lib Dems in the area.
Medway Council, Rochester East & Warren Wood (Double Vacancy)
Reform: 870, 802
Labour: 781, 717
Conservative: 479, 432
Green Party: 141, 109
Liberal Democrat (Anita Holloway, Sarah Manuel): 81, 80
Heritage Party: 21
Medway Council, Gillingham South
Labour: 706 (37.4%, -19.9%)
Reform: 506 (26.8%, new)
Conservative: 330 (17.5%, -0.6%)
Green Party: 167 (8.8%, -4.4%)
Liberal Democrat (Onyx Rist): 99 (5.2%, -6.2%)
Social Democratic Party: 69 (3.7%, new)
Heritage Party: 12 (0.6%, new)
For a full summary of these results, and all other principal council by-elections, please refer to the ALDC by-elections page here.
* Matthew Ma works in the Campaigns and Communications team at ALDC
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6 Comments
The Big Story this week is the rise of Reform but I would point out that we have seen this Story before with Us, in the form of The SDP/Liberal Alliance. In 1981 The Alliance spent months as the Leading Party in The Polls, We peaked at a ridiculous 50%.
The parallels between the Early 1980s & now are clear, it suited the Media to big-up The New Political Force because it made a great Story, the better The Alliance/Reform did/do, the more The Media piled in & Vice Versa.
The end of The Story in 1981 was that a better story came along & at The actual Election The Alliance got 25%, half of their peak, its not unreasonable to expect something similar in 2029.
Further to Paul Barker’s comment
As the 1981 General Election came closer significant differences began to appear within the leadership of the Alliance and in particular individual leaders felt and demonstrated to the media (who willingly picked it up) that their views were more important than those of the membership.
We need WINS. We need our POLICIES widely PUSHED on ALL MEDIA and doorsteps.
We need to be careful about how local papers report results where Reform do reasonably well. There was also a town council election in Taunton (Lyngford) which the Liberal Democrats held with their vote down from 50.4% to 49.2%. Reform came in from nowhere to get 26%, which is quite a creditable achievement. However, to the Weliington Weekly News, the Reform vote was the main event. It headlined its report ‘New branch of Reform UK secures second place in its first by-election’. The picture of their candidate said he was the MP. It also said “The candidate for the Liberal Democrats, Liam Pollard won almost half of the votes cast, with 221, followed closely by Reform UK’s Jim Langford, with 118 votes, and James Edward Scoins of the Conservative Party with 67.” I don’t think the result can be described as close and the report also omitted to say that Labour stood, their vote fell heavily and they received just 43 votes. While accepting that Reform is a new party, it’s important to note that they currently have just 70 councillors to our 3,051.
Since Trump announced his possible annexation of Canada as well as tariff orders the Liberals have seemingly come back from the dead and instead of polling in the teens or low twenties some polls have them in the low thirties, enough for a hung parliament once again.
I raise this because Reform could face a like difficulty here if Trump is heavy handed on us, people will drift back a to the government provided it is seen as standing up to the the threat and not being polite about it.
Reform may well suffer in the midst of Trump, if he turns on us and the government stands firm, it will reflect adversely on Trump’s mate Farage. This appears to have happened in Canada where the Liberals have suddenly surged from their low base of a month ago to be only 5/6 points behind the Conservatives, another hung Parliament beckoning.