Arch-Brexiteer John Redwood has something to worry about on his patch. In a rare Friday by-election, Liberal Democrat Imogen Shepherd-Dubey gained the Emmbrook ward on Wokingham District Council with an eye-watering swing from the Conservatives!
Congratulations Imogen Shepherd-Dubey for gaining Emmbrook Ward, Wokingham DC with 60% of the vote. Massive swing from Cons 🙂 pic.twitter.com/5Mu9cPcQWT
— ALDC (@ALDC) February 17, 2017
Emmbrook (Wokingham) result:
LDEM: 59.7% (+22.3)
CON: 33.3% (-4.5)
UKIP: 3.9% (-11.7)
LAB: 3.0% (-6.1)— Britain Elects (@britainelects) February 17, 2017
There was a massive fall in the UKIP vote despite them putting up a candidate from the more credible end of their range and putting out leaflets.
Well done to Imogen and her team for a fantastic result.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Lib Dem energy guarantee would cut prices for all households
Chase Park fair photos
A swamp of lies and disinformation
Doing better? The goal must be Sufficeincy
Michael Meadowcroft (1942-2026) - A Liberal to His Core
Peter Wrigley
Mick Taylor
expats
Matt (Bristol)
25 Comments
Hi Caron, not necessarily “a massive swing from the Tories”, on paper looks like a squeeze on everyone else. Important that yet, yet again UKIP go down whether to Labour, the Cons, ourselves or even the Greens. But yes 60% of the vore in a ward where we have been only a dozen or so votes behind the Cons twice in the last few years is good. It does not really matter where the vote comes from if it gives us 60%, does it?
Well done to Imogen and team!
It’s a 13.3% swing from Con to Lib Dem, theakes, which to me is reasonably massive.
I thought is was very informative to read about UKIP “putting up a candidate from the more credible end of their range and putting out leaflets”. I’m not suggesting we have this for every by-election report, but occasionally it might be helpful to provide a bit of accurate detail on what each party got up to leaflet-wise etc in the campaign.
Useful background to this by-election (I live in Emmbrook and was involved peripherally as deliverer, teller etc):
We had lost out by only 13 and 12 votes in the last two election cycles.
It is a wealthy ward containing an area that in 2013 was rated 2nd best place to live in Britain (based on a basket of indicators) by the Daily Telegraph.
Wokingham voted 58% “remain” in the referendum. Brexit was never raised as an issue in the election.
The by-election was caused by the very public resignation of a Tory councillor who was not happy with the way the Conservative group leadership treated their backbenchers as lobby fodder.
Another Tory simultaneously resigned the whip and urged people in Emmbrook to vote Lib Dem.
The former Green candidate declined to stand and urged Greens to vote Lib Dem.
Phil – a very affable UKIP candidate – delivered one A5 leaflet to my house.
Labour were completely anonymous.
It was a classic “two-horse race” ALDC campaign as is reflected by the squeeze.
Our main campaign message was “stop the rot” – see above.
The Tories campaign message seemed to be “vote for the local candidate” even though our well-known candidate was born and raised in the ward and lives a 1 minute walk from the ward boundary.
There was a hefty amount of material from both Conservative and Lib Dems, including an eve-of-poll yellow leaflet from the Tories headed “Lib Dem lies” or some such. I observe without comment that it was delivered to my door, even though we had a prominent stakeboard at the top of the drive.
Congratulations to Imogen, Prue and everyone involved in an outstanding campaign and a richly-deserved result.
1 They did vote for a local candidate who won.
2 Did the Tories pay someone to deliver their leaflet to you .cos if it was a supporter I would have thought they would think no point delivering to you?
UKIP are still rising in the latest opinion polls and the Conservatives continue to have a strong lead but this does not seem to be reflected in actual voting. Next week’s Parliamentary by election results should be interesting.
Nigel – this gold/black leaflet was something out of the normal run of election stuff. Delivered to our supporters only we believe, full of misrepresentations etc, and designed to suppress the Lib Dem vote, it did not have the word Conservative on it anywhere – even in the imprint. People locally were pretty disgusted by it.
Prue
If it lacked an imprint, I hope a complaint will be made.
UKIP have become the party of the media.They lack the resources or membership to exist without the media acting as their mouth piece. If they win Stoke they may pick up finance and members. If they fail and the media loses interest in them then the only home UKIP politicians have left is the Tory party and I expect some will end up there.
No imprint implies fraud. This maybe one way of getting round the election rules of how much can be spent. It has DEFINATELY needs investigating. When underhand information is not challenged it only grows.
Why did you not print the actual result?
Prue says the imprint doesn’t contain the word “Conservative”. She doesn’t say it had no imprint. That’s not illegal, so long as the name and address of the person promoting the leaflet is there.
@Tony Greaves:
LDEM 1575
CON 879
This is particularly gratifying for me as I live in Mortimer in Mr Deadwood’s constituency.
Arch Brexiteer.The lunatics (Tory right wing) have taken over the asylum!!
Just a minor correction – it’s Wokingham Borough Council, not District, Like the other Berkshire authorities, Wokingham’s unitary.
It’s interesting to note that all UKIP’s leaflets and relative reasonable-ness garnered them 104 votes for their trouble (Labour got 79). Lots of snark on Twitter from a disgruntled Labour councillor complaining about Imogen (the winning candiate) being based “all the way over in Winnersh” despite the proximity of her house to the ward…
Another very impressive local election success. However our National Polls remain static around 10%.
On two key subjects we are offering a different message. Brexit where we oppose the strategy adopted by May that will lead to the economic decline of the country and appealing treatment of EU nationals in the UK, and UK nationals in the EU. There will be very little change in immigration after all this. We also have a different and positive message on the NHS, see Norman Lamb on LDV today.
So what is going wrong?
David, one interesting thing I’ve noticed is that in *none* of our significant by-election victories, even this one in a strongly Remain part of the world, was Brexit even mentioned. For lots of people, the NHS is increasingly important, at the expense of immigration, and Brexit is rarely an issue in any one locality (I’d say Richmond Park was an exception).
It’s possible that one reason we’re static-if-moving-very-slowly-up in the polls even as we do well in actual contests (including Sleaford & North Hykeham where our vote increased a lot) is that our national messaging is all Brexit-based, while our actual campaigners are beavering away with the NHS and issues that actually resonate in their communities. Norman Lamb’s big NHS drive lately is therefore welcome, and should be given even greater prominence.
The reason for our focus on Brexit is that once things start to happen it will be the dominant issue in British Politics, we are preparing the ground.
Its a puzzle why our Opinion Poll rating lags so far behind our our actual performance in Elections, the point is that those Elections only involve tiny numbers of voters & usually get very little publicity. Our National Media are still behaving as if we have ceased to exist or are irrelevant. That may change next Thursday. If not, then we will have to wait till The Locals in May.
FYI an average of the last 6 Polls gives us 10.7%. UKIP are still slightly ahead at 12.5%.
Further to Paul Barker’s comment:
From our Liberal perspective Brexit is clearly wrong from both principled and pragmatic standpoints. However in terms of what is pragmatic, it is our opposition to Brexit that generates media attention. Whatever ‘prominence’ we give to other issues does not get reflected in national media.
I have no doubt that Brexit will be a damaging mess, recriminations will abound that will hurt both Conservatives and Labour. The UK economy remains debt ridden and unstable (see Andrew Rawnsley’s column) there is much to go wrong and Brexit makes it worse.
While the party cannot realistically take a different stand on Brexit because of its previous total support for Remain and this might help in the short term, what happens in the longer term if we turn out to be wrong about the effects of leaving the EU and the UK economy out performs EU economies ? In other words what happens if the Brexiteers turn out to be right?
nveloppe:
… and what if everything is the figment of the imagination and I (or is it you?) only came into being within the last moment? … and what if the other side of the moon is blue cheese? … and what if the Sun and the universe really does revolve around the Earth?
As with these examples (OK, possibly not the first) there are plenty of facts that suggest Brexit will be very damaging and none to suggest the converse. The main uncertainty is quite how extensive the damage will be.
I remember getting a letter telling me I had won a fortune in a Spanish lottery, I really do not think I was so stupid to discard the letter – but what if I had been wrong? You might well ask.
Interesting to read that Brexit has played little part on the electorate’s concerns in recent local elections. How much of the content of the Lib Dem leaflets in this impressive by-election win was concerned with Europe, if any? It would be very interesting to know, given the elections coming in May
I wouldn’t criticise anyone from another party putting their leaflet through a door where a Lib Dem poster is displayed. I ALWAYS delivered Lib Dem election leaflets to seemingly hostile households not least because there could be more than one person living there. It also shows the opposition we are around.
In my own election campaign I remember canvassing a rather officious Tory gentleman who told me he would be voting Tory and his wife would be doing the same. Unbeknown to him his wife was at the far end of the hallway in the kitchen frantically waving and putting her thumbs up. So I might not have got his vote but I ceratinly got hers!
Congratulation to the winning team!
With Paul Murray’s background, it becomes clearer why we LibDems won:
*) Remain-district: Redwoods hysterical “Leavism” is embarassing local Tories, so they stay mum about it;
*) Local Tory politicians (the local “Political establishment”?) are bickering and being authoritarian;
two factors convincing Tory voters who IS behaving in their interest, both local and national, and thus more worthy of their vote
Isn’t it time John Redwood finally gives in and follows the advice he’s heard many times before:
*) why don’t you move to Starship Enterprise? You’re not doing Britain a favor by staying in the Commons… 😉
@Bernard Aris
I think you are misinterpreting Paul Murray’s posting. Remain played no part in the by-election. The only mention of it in the LD literature was as one of the reasons to join the Lib Dems in the opening weekend leaflet. The swing, although large can easily be explained by the other factors as previously set out – well known local candidate, hyper marginal and by-election being caused by Tory internal divisions.
This tells youallyou really need to know about the campaign:
https://www.wokinghampaper.com/councillor-quits-wokingham-tories-blaming-council-secrecy/amp/