It’s a while since there’s been good news for Liberal Democrats north of the border, but that has changed today. Jean Davis has just pulled off an audacious by-election victory in the Aird and Loch Ness by-election in the gorgeous Highlands. More to follow, but don’t let anyone tell you the SNP can’t be beaten.
The ward takes in the towns of Beauly, Drumnadrochit and Fort Augustus and covers some of the most utterly beautiful terrain in the whole country. It’s a massive ward, which now has two Liberal Democrat councillors representing it. Given that we came fourth in this ward in 2012, this result is stunning. It’s really embarrassing for the SNP as it’s the seat vacated by their new MP for Inverness, Badenoch and Strathspey who beat Danny Alexander in May.
Here’s the result in full courtesy of those nice people at Britain Elects:
Aird & Loch Ness (Highland) stage results:
Liberal Democrat GAIN from SNP. pic.twitter.com/hu1q4JaDbG
— Britain Elects (@britainelects) October 9, 2015
It’s interesting that we got a fair whack of transfers from the independence supporting Greens but were ahead all the way.
This shows that the #libdemfightback is real and happening in the Highlands.
More to follow as people react to the news. I have to say this one has come from nowhere. I did some canvassing when I was up at the end of August and it was ok, but not spectacular.
I’ve known Jean for ten years since she was the General Election candidate in the Western Isles and I couldn’t be happier for her.
Willie Rennie said:
This is excellent news from the Highlands and huge congratulations to Jean Davis and the local team who have worked their socks off.
This is the first time that the SNP have been beaten in a council by-election since the General Election and it is the Scottish Liberal Democrats that have done it.
This was a seat held by the SNP’s former leader on Highland Council. This result is a clear endorsement of localism over the SNP centralisation agenda. It looks like the gloss is starting to come off the SNP in the Highlands.
People were telling Jean and her team that they were fed up with being taken for granted by the SNP who have put Highland issues at the back of the queue. Liberal Democrats have always stood up for the Highlands and Jean will be an excellent councillor for the good people of Aird and Loch Ness.
And how’s this for an amazing bit of SNP spin?
SNP vote increases by 4.6% in Aird and Loch Ness by-election – http://t.co/WSq2UQp2j8 #snp #sp4
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) October 9, 2015
The Lib Dem vote was up by 21.2%, just so you know.
* 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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28 Comments
Excellent News about real people leading the #libdemfightback in their local communities. Congratulations to Jean and the whole team.
Great news to add to an 11.2% swing since May 2015 against the Tories in Woking (Goldsworth East) and 3 near-misses in the other Woking by-election and in Hampshire and Oxfordshire.
That’s fantastic! Congratulations to Jean!
Congratulations to everyone involved, a great result.
We still have a long way to go but seeing the positive increases of the vote since May is encouraging and results like this show what can achieved.
What’s that faint familiar sound I can hear? It might just be Charles Kennedy’s gentle chuckle. 🙂
Congratulations & thanks to our team. Skip this if you have already seen my earlier comment. Looking at the 9 byelections I have been able to find where we fought both in May this year & in the last few weeks – our vote has gone up by an average of 6%. Its a good start.
Looking at the detailed results, it appears that Green and Independent voters were reasonably evenly split between the SNP and the Lib Dems as second choices (Greens a bit more SNP, Independents a bit more Lib Dem), but that 303 of the 467 Conservative voters had the Lib Dem as their second choice and only 23 had the SNP as their second choice.
Does this tell us much about this sort of seat (where, after all, the SNP did increase their vote share), how Lib Dems are perceived in Scotland, and how the party should campaign?
Excellent day yesterday, progress. Bur re the gain from the SNP, there is a caveot, ALDC REPORT THAT PREVIOUS OTHER iNDEPENDENTS IN THE SEAT ACCOUNTED FOR 38% of the PREVIOUS vote, so presumably we picked up a lot of that.
The results in Oxfordshire and Totnes are also worth mentioning.
Local elections are now dominated by the postal vote and much of that would have been completed at the time of Farron’s speech to the conference, looks as if he can move things along. Challenge is to sustain it, but moving up the % vote and getting from third fourth into close seconds etc is the progress we need. We need some by elections in the North of England to see whether the same is applying there as in the South.
Kath Lewis didn’t quite make it in the Deganwy Ward for Conwy Town Council-
we only polled 46 votes in the last by-election in that ward but this Thursday she trebled that to poll 126 votes to Labour’s 162 but the Tories swept in to retain their hold polling 579. But our increased vote is in the right direction.
Good news; but what happened to Labour?
John
Labour forgot to stand… They have stood before, but come 5th http://vote-2012.proboards.com/thread/6464/elections-7-8-october.
theakes, you are correct about Independents but one suspects that in the 2010 GE this area voted for us, but probably SNP in 2015. Lets hope we get similar results in our former Highland seats in the Holyrood vote!
re Nth of England, we did have a by-election in Pontefract recently, but no sign of a revival there! What you mean is “in the Nth of England somewhere where we have some credibility!”
Paul Braker,
If you want to check all by-elections and previous results (and get correct swings in Scottish STV seats, which you do not get from ALDC, who insist on treating them like multi councillor seats in England), the voteUk site is very useful http://vote-2012.proboards.com/board/3/local-elections. Someone has complied all our results up to mid August, but then lost interest
Well done. Just shows what can be achieved when people put their back into it.
Forgot to stand? That just about sums them up, doesn’t it?
well, maybe they did not stand deliberately.! Who knows! Perhaps an electoral pact has been formed without anyone noticing!
But we have no stones to throw having not put up a candidate in two by-election yesterday…
“It’s really embarrassing for the SNP as it’s the seat vacated by their new MP for Inverness, Badenoch and Strathspey who beat Danny Alexander in May.”
Quite so.
And equally embarrassing for some is the apparent truth that the voters of this area have stronger support for the Lib Dems under our new leader than they recently had for Danny Alexander.
John Marriott, they also didn’t run in 2007. In 2012, they did and got just 221 first preference votes.
Tony Dawson, iirc Alexander’s actual vote held up. The SNP surge came from elsewhere.
Have the detailed preferences been published? I see that in addition to insisting they got a 4.6% increase (well within margin of error and still not resulting in as many *total* votes as the lead candidate in 2012 – Margaret Davidson, Independent – got in *first* *preference* votes), the SNP are being as gracious as ever in defeat by attributing defeat to Tories switching on fourth preferences.
So what? Unless you’re some sort of fascist, people have the right to vote whichever way they want.
Alec,
There is a table above of the transfers , although not a list of every vote which may come from Highland council..
SNP would have lost on FPTP and only were ahead briefly after the Green transfers. If I was them I would be concerned that the Green vote only split narrowly in their favour.
It will be interesting to see what happens in Huntly, Strathbogie & Howe of Alford on 5th Nov (which is another very rural ward in Gordon/Aberdeenshire West). If we could top the poll there it would be one in the eye for Alex Salmond! Christine Jardine did pretty well to only lose 3.3% in Gordon in May. But in 2012 in the ward we were third behind SNP and the Tories so it will be an achievement to win one of the two seats on offer. In 2007 we were just a fraction behind the SNP on first preferences
One in the eye for the SNP. Embarrassing for the SNP? Even on the rare occasions you achieve success your response is SNP bashing. Not a word on how you can move forward. No point in explaining the breakdown in the voting to you. Suffice to say the SNP A Votes increased a small amount, but the voting system gave us the correct result. No vitriol from this side. Leave that to you.
Cheers, Andrew. It must have been added afterwards.
I see no mention of relative preferences at third/fourth levels. Is this info available, or is the “SNP spokesman” lying when he says Tories switched to the LibDems?
Remaining Tory preferences did overwhelmingly switch to Lib Dem – although I suspect that’s as much about rightwing Tories preferring centre ground Lib Dems to leftwing SNP rather than unionism. SNP aren’t eliminated very often in the early stages but you’d expect Labour and SNP votes to switch to Lib Dem rather than Tory too.
Incidentally the lack of switches from Tory to SNP contradicts the claim by FPTP enthusiasts that preferential voting encourages tactical voting by supporters of the defending party (SNP) putting the opponent who is likely to receive switches from other candidates (ie the Tories) as their first preference in the hope of eliminating the party they see as their main threat (Lib Dems).
Will someone advertise the Huntley Strathbogie etc by-election on flocktogether so people know it’s happening and can help?
Paul Kennedy,
Only a tiny minority of obsessed political hacks would put their preferences in some bizarre order in an STV election in order to help their first choice candidate. And only desperate advocates of FPTP trying to find some reason to validate their outmoded and undemocratic voting system would come up with such an argument!
I think preferences have become a bit strange in Scotland with voters polarising on unionist vs separatist lines and Tory voters transferring to Labour before SNP. For example here: http://vote-2012.proboards.com/thread/6451/elections-1st-october?page=6 There is a post related to Linlithgow that shows Tory votes going far more to Labour than to SNP, and only Green votes breaking SNP.
Alec: preferences are carried through as candidates are knocked out, so you need more detailed tables to find out what the 4th preference of a green voter is, or whatever. On some Scottish council websites I have seen tables with that data in them (since the transferring is computerised that data will exist electronically)
Steve: 50% in the polls and you are reading and posting on a Lib Dem website? why?
Cheers, Andrew. It does sound like the “always someone else’s fault” response from the SNP.
Incidentally, I’ve seen stats that 70 Green voters had no second pref votes.
One Swallow doesn’t make a Summer. On the same day a seat was lost to the Tories in Woking. Also in the last few weeks there have been defections to other Parties.
PHIL THOMAS: Quite so but although there was no net gain in seats there was generally an increase in the share of the vote, in some cases considerably so and several near misses in places where the Lib Dems had not even been in second place before. However the national opinion polls do not show any change in support for the Liberal Democrats or Labour after the election of new leaders for both parties, particularly for Labour.
The real test for Lib Dems is next years Scottish Elections so far all the polls indicate that the SNP are on course for an other resounding victory and there is every chance based on the polls that the Lib Dems will have their lowest number of seats if any since the Scottish Parliment was formed so good luck.
Andrew McC. Because I believe in debate and see websites populated only by those of one persuasion as pointless. I also have an open mind (you should try it) on my second vote in the upcoming election. Liberal. Democrat. That’s not coming across in querying why I am here.
Will: I think the Liberal Democrats did a bit better in the percentage of the votes cast in Scotland than was predicted.
I agree it is time to stop the attacks on the SNP as they do no good. It is time to be positive and campaign for an Independent Scotland within the United Kingdom.
Steve,
I have nothing against the SNP in principle, and think the Liberal Democrat unionist stance in the referendum was foolish. If I lived in Scotland I would certainly have been tempted to vote for independence, and might have done so. Living in England I am not in favour though – Britain is better with Scotland as part of it for all sorts of reasons…
I don’t like Alex Salmond though. The SNP did very well to replace him with Nicola Sturgeon. I was VERY sorry to see him beat Christine Jardine in Gordon and hope he will be out in 2020, (unlikely as it seems right now). That is just my personal impression though…
This is a website inhabited mainly by Liberal Democrats who have been fighting elections for years. People who fight elections love winning and hate losing… We were hammered by the SNP in Scotland in May and the SNP were very triumphant about it. If I was you I would be sanguine about us getting a tiny iota of our own back. It is only human!
You will have seen if you have been reading this website that there is a full spectrum of debate even without the intervention of people from other parties! You are more than welcome as far as I am concerned but please accept that you are a guest in someone else’s space. When I go to Scotland I am not at all surprised to hear criticism of the English, and it does not upset me