Tonight is a very busy election night with Liberal Democrat candidates in every principal council seat up for election.
The biggest result of the night so far is a spectacular gain in Broadstone in Dorset. Former parliamentary candidate Vikki Slade gained the council seat from the Conservatives.
Broadstone (Poole) result:
LDEM: 69.3% (+24.0)
CON: 23.3% (-13.2)
UKIP: 4.2% (-7.5)
GRN: 1.8% (-4.8)
LAB: 1.4% (+1.4)— Britain Elects (@britainelects) October 13, 2016
Remember how we audaciously took a seat from Labour in Tupton, North East Derbyshire, four weeks ago, pretty narrowly but with a massive swing from a standing start? Well, in the same ward we took two parish council seats tonight. Here are the results:
L Dem 394
L Dem 345
Lab 245
Lab 230
That’ll do nicely.
We also held two seats in South Lakeland, Tim Farron’s home area:
Windermere (Cumbria) result:
LDEM: 52.3% (+0.7)
CON: 40.7% (+1.3)
LAB: 4.6% (+4.6)
GRN: 2.4% (-0.6)— Britain Elects (@britainelects) October 13, 2016
Windermere Bowness North (South Lakeland) result:
LDEM: 60.1% (+11.1)
CON: 34.9% (-4.1)
GRN: 5.0% (-0.9)— Britain Elects (@britainelects) October 13, 2016
In Kent, 16.4% of the vote from a standing start.
Swanley (Kent) result:
CON: 32.4% (-8.6)
UKIP: 27.8% (+7.9)
LAB: 23.4% (-8.9)
LDEM: 16.4% (+16.4)— Britain Elects (@britainelects) October 13, 2016
There were two seats up in Lewisham. With limited resources, you can only really target one and we made some steps forward in that one:
Brockley (Lewisham) result:
LAB: 48.0% (+8.1)
GRN: 25.4% (-3.6)
LDEM: 10.4% (+5.0)
CON: 7.9% (+0.3)
WEP: 7.0% (+7.0)
UKIP: 1.3% (-3.7)— Britain Elects (@britainelects) October 13, 2016
In Tandridge, everyone lost out to a Residents’ Group.
Limpsfield (Tandridge) result:
OLRG: 57.4% (+57.4)
CON: 38.0% (-40.5)
LDEM: 2.7% (-11.0)
LAB: 2.0% (-5.8)— Britain Elects (@britainelects) October 13, 2016
A solid set of results.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social
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16 Comments
And a really good win in Knowsley Park Ward, taking a seat from Labour. Well done to everyone there.
Sorry Caron but if there are two seats up targeting one does not exclude standing a candidate in the other, ideally someone who will campaign in the targeted seat.
Thanks for all you do for us.
It seems that staying up late at night on a Thursday to follow election results is far more satisfying that watching the awful BBC Question Time, hey?
Caron is my hero & I hate to dampen our enthusiasm but Broadstone isnt a gain & our results for the last 2 weeks have been dreadful, taking us right back to May.
Broadstone is a multi member ward where we got the largest share of the vote last time, taking this seat is really just a hold, not a gain. The improvement in vote share was great but not matched elsewhere, in 2 seats we actually lost vote share.
The parish council seats in Tupton look good but its very hard to get full information on town/parish seats so I usually ignore them, if anybody knows when these 2 seats were last fought & our vote share, I would be grateful.
I have been looking at changes in vote share & on average the last 2 weeks have seen us doing about as well as we did in May, before that we were consistently more than 10% up on May after months of steady improvement.
I am a hard line optimist but we should acknowledge setbacks when they happen.
Just a quick comment to put our result in Brockley, Lewisham into context. This is a ward where the Greens have been the opposition to Labour since 2006, they hold one of the 3 seats (the only opposition councillor out out of 54 in the borough) – we have always concentrated elsewhere. Their candidate in this by-election was Claire Phipp, Chair of the Green Party in England & Wales. Caroline Lucas and Sian Berry had a large teams of helpers out with them – it was clearly a national target. The drop in their vote suggests the Green bubble has burst in London.
WEP – the Women Equality Party – have been quite vocal in London. Brockley was their highest share of the vote in May’s London elections. I think this was their first effort at fighting a local by-election and they had loads of help from across London, they had a high profile and claimed to have called on every door. It appeared from our canvassing they took votes from us.
Ours was a small campaign from a standing start 3 weeks ago. It demonstrated there is real potential here – our candidate Bobby Dean made a great impact and we have picked up issues to continue campaigning on. Many residents were confused about who was best positioned to beat Labour – we will build our credibility and show the choice is between us and Labour.
The lesson to learn from Brockley is how important it is to fight all by-election. We can now build the foundations and have the motivation for a winning campaign in 2018.
Chris Maines,
I note that despite the multi-directional squeeze, we still exceeded the national opinion poll level in Brockley, a seat that we have never held.
On to the others:
Getting 16.4% anywhere in Swanley is a remarkable achievement. This is a working-class Tory area with zero history of Lib Dem representation.
Getting 2.7% in Limpsfield (a very high status area) was terrible, but anti-Tory votes were hoovered up by an Independent (who also got many Tories, too). The only consolation is that Labour’s score of 2% was even more terrible.
Broadstone and Windermere show that where we are strong our vote is either holding or rising.
Nationally, the party is in the first stage of recovery. We are holding on to those areas where we remain strong and moving back into areas where we were once strong (pre-coalition). However, we are only failing to do the latter where independents have moved into the position from which we were ejected during the coalition years. In areas where we have always been weak, we tend to push our vote above the national opinion-poll level if we fight a campaign. If we run a paper candidate, we usually end up with less than 5%.
“However, we are failing…”
Delete “only”.
We are failing in a few areas with no independents, too. Especially cities.
Paul Barker,
That is a very negative interpretation of the results. I would say they are very much in line with post-referendum votes. Strongly up in places like Dorset where we have been strong in the past. Surprisingly strong in some places we have not stood for ages.. (for example 20.4% from a standing start in a District election in Swanley where we have not stood in living memory, which came in after Caron’s post). And treading water where we have little track record and are facing other more active parties and independents. There is a more complete set of District and County results here:
http://vote-2012.proboards.com/thread/8767/elections-october-13th?page=6
meanwhile does Knowsley count as a “city”? Northern anyway!
http://www.knowsley.gov.uk/knowsleycouncil/media/Documents/knowsley-park-north-result.pdf
Carl Cashman was our candidate, Nathan Ingram Labour…
And the unstoppable “Labourdoorstep” was at work…
https://www.facebook.com/events/558459531004564/?active_tab=discussion
Everyday the narrative in the national media is all about Conservatives being split over Europe while Labour are split over everything and UKIP is in meltdown. The Conservatives look like they are damaging the economy and Labour are still blamed for crashing it. On this site we are reassured that 48% of the population are looking for an anti-Brexit party for which to vote.
Meanwhile, after a few years of losing votes and councillors, the general election which marked a low waterline for Lib Dems was almost 18 months ago.
So why is the party polling no higher than it did three years ago, and why is it not performing even better in these local by-elections?
@Paul Barker. ‘When was Tupton last contested?’
By the Lib Dems -not in living memory. Until the District Seat last month and the twin Parish by election yesterday.
But the common story of the majority, if not all, of the LD wins this year is that where very strong campaigns are mounted we now have the potential to win again. But anyone relying on a token leaflet or two and/or social media and/or little door knocking, is not going to get very far against a background in the national opinion polls, for the last 5 years, of around 8%.
Peter Watson asks a good question & gives part of the answer. The past 3 weeks have seen an avalanche of publicity for The Tories, Labour, UKIP & more recently, The SNP. Meanwhile there has been vitually no mention of The Libdems. Even bad publicity is better than no publicity, particularly when it comes 18 Months after the widespread announcements that The Libdems were dead (again).
When will that change ? When we do something to attract media attention. Witney might do it or Richmond Park if May goes for Heathrow Expansion & Goldsmith keeps his word. We might have to wait till next May. It will happen at some point & then things may well change very fast.
And a excruciating near miss on Swanley Town Council, by 1 vote.
Paul Barker- The Broadstone seat is a three member ward, last May it returned 1 Lib Dem and two Tories, this by election was to replace one of the Tory councillors. We won, that is a gain.
Puzzled by disparity between local and national performance of the Party? Fret no more.
The local and national perceptions of the position of the party are different.
For eight years nationally we have been seen as rightward and more authoritarian than what people for the previous thirty years thought was the Liberal (Democrat since 1988) sentiment.
We can fix this locally more easily than nationally – but actually our national image hasn’t changed enough since 2015.
Local campaigns remind people ‘who we were’. That is ‘where we were’. Where we stood. Where we raised our flag. Our principles. Our values.
Through their TV sets we are still coming across as more right and more authoritarian than we were a decade ago.
Broadstone ward (Poole UA) is in the Mid Dorset and North Poole Westminster Constituency. A constituency the Liberal Democrats held from 2001 to 2015.