Author Archives: James Cole

Every single vote to 20%

By James Cole | Tue 27th September 2016 - 9:24 am

There were nine by-elections in total on Thursday. Seven were spread out across England with one each in Scotland and Wales so after celebrating our two gains I decided that they represented a big enough cross section to do some analysis.

Across the seats we contested the average increase in our vote was 12.3% and our total vote share was an impressive 24.7%.

However, we only contested six of the by-elections. 1/3^rd of the elections went ahead without any Liberal Democrat on the ballot. Unfortunately when you add in these three 0% figures our vote increase comes down to 8.2% and our vote share down to 16.5%

In the 2016 local elections the media glossed over the fact that we had the biggest number of net gains and were the only party to gain control of a council. But what they couldn’t gloss over was the fact that we’d pushed UKIP back into 4^th place with our vote share. LAB 31%, CON 30%, LDEM 15%, UKIP 12%. Wherever the graphs and tables were shown it was clear that the Lib Dems were back.

Everyone is aware of the electoral reasons for always putting up a candidate but it really does matter for another reason which I will show you below.

Posted in Op-eds | Tagged candidates and Council elections | 9 Comments

A Defence of the House of Lords

By James Cole | Sun 27th September 2015 - 1:25 pm

View image | gettyimages.com

There are many articles advocating Parliamentary reform and there are many points in them which I agree with. However all of them have called for the House of Lords to be replaced with an elected second chamber. While I agree that it requires significant reforms, I think that replacing it would be a huge mistake.

However it is set up, a system with two elected chambers inevitably ends with a power struggle between them, of which the Italian and US Senates are some of the best examples. Legislation is used for pointscoring or outright blocked, not due to flaws or voter opposition, but because of conflicting electoral agendas.