There’s some interesting online discussion from Labour perspectives about how they got their relatively good local election results in Oxford this May. Not all of the points really stand up to close scrutiny (e.g. Nick Clegg has repeatedly talked about childcare issues, as for example here) but some interesting food for thought nonetheless.
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a lot of what has been said is rubbish. we actually had a net gain of a seat in oxford, labour gained more, only one of us. they’re not more progressive but what they did benefit from was the first sustained tory campaign in oxford east for years. the tories ended up 3rd, rather than 4th, but stopped us winning in several seats. labour left a legacy of financial incontinence at the council which left us with huge challenges. but we actually faced up to those pretty well, with even the audit commission praising us. what is clear is that labour in oxford know their core vote and are able to maximse it, but all this nonsense about being more progressive is just insulting. most are pro-id cards, pro-iraq, pro hitting poorer people on fixed incomes with massive council tax bills, etc, etc.
Nick Clegg’s comments about childcare are very welcome but we need to campaign more on these issues at grassroots’ level. I don’t know about the situation in Oxford but in Hampshire/Surrey the Tories are making a lot of work/life balance issues eg the Tory front campaign called the ‘Save our nurseries’ campaign. We mustn’t let them get away with this by banging on endlessly in our leaflets about crime and anti-social behaviour with little positive to say about what else we can do to help ordinary mothers, fathers and families in their everyday lives.
My experience of Oxford was that the controlling party often got kicked – and the LDs haven’t been the largest party for a long time, even if they made up the executive.
What is worrying looking over the figures was that the Conservatives are starting to come second or third again, and not necessarily being that far away from taking seats . . . I suspect, if anything this resurgence will help Labour remain the largest party.
John Harris was not in Oxford the election campaign and it shows. Labour did not win by being more progressive, their consistently weak stance on the environment saw to that. Looking at some of the labour leaflets from the ward that Labour took of us I can see little evidence that social justice was a prominent theme. Housing, the key to increasing social justice in Oxford, gets only as much space as parking!
John Harris seems to be basing his judgment of what happened in Oxford entirely on what Oxford Labour party told him. That has inevitably given him a rather distorted view.
patrick wrote: “a lot of what has been said is rubbish. we actually had a net gain of a seat in oxford”
Of course it should be remembered, that Lib Dems lost four councillors through defections since the previous election, so if compared to the situation after the council election last year, Lib Dems have now three councillors less. That of course might also tell something about the candidate selection process, but that’s another issue.
John Harris is as usual talking a load of rubbish and in this case just recycling Oxford Labour spin.
Oxford is a council with issues such that the administration normally changes every election. Where we gave Labour a gift was in persisting with the administration after we stopped being the largest party.
Patrick: “financial incontinence” – was that deliberate? It’s quite a good description, even if it wasn’t intended!
Daniel: I agree on the point about what we might have done when defections put Labour as the largest party. Even if they had not accepted the challenge, it would have given us much ammunition I believe to have offered them the leadership as the largest party and caned them when they refused. I suggested as much at the time in July 2006.
jock- indeed it was! i thought it much more apt than simple incompetence…
An interesting phenomenon, perhaps connected with our own style of local issue based campaigning, is that local elections these days do seem to be much more focussed on local issues and less on being a referendum on the national government than used to be the case. I do remember in the past local election literature from Labour and the Conservatives being very bland and designed more to pull out people on the basis of party loyalty than to argue the case about local policy. Our activity has forced them to change this.
The consequence, however, is that many local election campaigns turn out to be an exhausted incumbent party being turned out by an opposition making vague promises, only for the same to happen in the next set of elections.
It seems to me that local government has become something of a mugs’ game – you put yourselves up there as the people nominally in control, only to find you have very little control of anything, just the ability to make minor twiddles to administration. Many of the big crunch issues in society are hitting local government directly – things like the big growth in the very elderly requiring expensive social services care, the increase in “problem” children, the increase in refuse and push to make collection and disposal of it more green, the increase in traffic and road use. Dealing with these, while keeping council tax rises below inflation level and retaining the same standards of service is almost impossible – yet it’s still a common fallback argument of national government and opposition “we’ll make savings by cutting the waste and bureaucracy that exist in local government”.
Hi Patrick,
Hope all’s well in Oxford and in Reading.
“we actually had a net gain of a seat in oxford, labour gained more, only one of us.”
Good try, but your share of the vote went from 32% in 2006 to 23% in 2008, and in Oxford East you were just 300 votes ahead of the Tories and nearly 5,000 behind Labour. Wouldn’t you say it is an example of the unfair voting system that you didn’t lose more seats? 😉
And, Don, Liberal Democrats had a net gain in Reading too – Labour had net 6 losses 🙂