Manchester Liberal Democrats produced a campaign video for their Council election campaign. In 2016, former Lib Dem MP John Leech was elected as the only opposition councillor to Labour. That’s right, it was just him and 95 Labour councillors. He punched well above his weight, though, frequently exasperating the Council leadership by subjecting them to some serious scrutiny.
Our campaign is about everyone and everything that makes Manchester the great city it is today; a strong local community, a celebration of diversity and non-conformity.
Liberal Democrats care passionately about our local communities because it’s where we live and it’s what we believe in. We will always put local people first and it’s about time our council did too.
On 3rd May, we have a chance to elect a council that leads from the front; that cities around the world look up to; where we celebrate diversity, house the homeless, welcome the desperate and build a future for our children. But only a vote for the Liberal Democrats can break this one-party state and build that vision.
Every seat in Manchester is up for grabs. The Lib Dems’ people centred approach is presented in an interesting way. Let’s hope that this short film helps elect a sizeable contingent of councillors.
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8 Comments
Not so long ago we had what 35 Councillors in Manchester. Shows how far we have fallen in a short time. Long way back. Even to capture 3 wards next week would be something, ie Withington, Didsbury, Gorton maybe.
It’s an excellent video, and the Manchester team should be very proud.
One of the great ‘what if’s of recent politics is ‘the Gorton by election that never was.’ It’s quite hard to remember now, but this time last year we were all getting excitable emails from the Campaigns dept urging us to ‘help Jackie Pearcey become our next MP’. Then Theresa May came back from hill-walking in Wales and the rest is history. I’ve heard it from a number of reliable sources that we’d have won that by election comfortably; that JP was a superb candidate, that the response on the doorsteps was incredibly positive and that both Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour candidate were electorally toxic. Imagine if that had played out and we had won, just a few months after Richmond Park. Two bright new excellent women MPs – one in the gritty inner-city north, one in the leafy suburban south east.
Politics is full of ‘might have been’s, but I think a) that Manchester LibDems deserve a break, b) that John Leech is a total star, and c) that this is a great video. I really hope they get that break next week.
There was a council by-election in the Gorton constituency on May 4th 2017 (so not on a great day for Labour) which Labour won comfortably (ie 4:1 ish over the Lib Dems) in a ward the Lib Dems used to regularly win. It doesn’t give much support to the idea that there was a sensation in the offing.
Of course we’ll never know – and momentum in by-elections can produce some startling changes.
OnceALibDem — the problem with that council by-election is the same problem we saw with the constituency in the general election. Everything about the campaign had been based on the idea that there would be a Parliamentary by-election there, and pretty much every piece of literature delivered in February and March had been based first and foremost around Jackie Pearcey as the Parliamentary candidate.
*As soon* as the general election was called, we had to change focus to the council by-election, but we had to do it with basically no volunteers, because all the people who had been helping out up to that point — and who we’d based an entire campaign strategy on having help from — disappeared that afternoon.
We hadn’t been campaigning particularly hard in the ward in which the council by-election was held — we’d obviously been campaigning hard in the whole constituency, but it wasn’t one of our strongest areas, and we were doing better for example in Gorton proper, where Jackie had name recognition from her decades as a councillor.
The result was that all the momentum in the constituency was lost — by the time the general election came it had been two months since people had been blitzed with literature, and in that time Labour had sunk massive amounts of money into poster advertising which we couldn’t possibly match. The local stuff had been swamped by the national stuff.
So I wouldn’t read into the Rusholme by-election result, *or* the horribly disappointing final result in the constituency. I was campaigning during those initial months and spent much of that time basically working a forty-hour week campaigning for the party, and I spoke to a lot of people and saw the early canvass returns.
My own gut feeling is that it wouldn’t have been the comfortable win that TonyH suggests — though given another month of by-election campaigning, who knows? — but my sense of the constituency was that it was going to be either a Witney or a Richmond Park — either a narrow victory or a narrow loss. That all changed in the last month, but it *was* entirely winnable had the original by-election been held.
You obviously had horribly bad luck, Andrew. I hope all the hard work pays off now in the local elections, with better luck too.
OnceaLibDem – the whole point is that once the GE was called the entire situation changed. Everything got wrapped up in the GE, including that local by election, so there’s really not much to be read into that. Especially given Andrew’s explanation.
Anyway. Mancs is a great city and deserves better than to be a one-party state. I hope we can make some advances next week, even if modest ones. All oak trees were once acorns.
Undoubtedly that had an effect but the Rusholme result just isn’t consistent with being on 30+% across the constituency a few weeks before. This is a ward which was one of our stronger areas polling above the constituency average in both 2010 and 2015.
I find it hard to believe support was so soft as to have collapsed so much in a few weeks.