Tag Archives: mid suffolk

Was an obscure set of elections in Mid Suffolk a pointer towards May?

By Mark Valladares | Fri 10th February 2023 - 3:32 pm

Welcome to Mid Suffolk, a historically Conservative, rural District in the East of England. Liberal Democrats had led a coalition administration until 2003 but, since then, it has been Conservative-led. By the way, don’t take Wikipedia too seriously when it suggests that it was in no overall control between 2005 and 2007 – the Independents around here generally aren’t.

Labour have, over the years, faded into insignificance, having disappeared from the council chamber in 2007 (apart from a lone councillor in Stowmarket North from 2011-15) and only ran eight candidates across the District in 2015. The Greens won their first seat in Mendlesham in 2003 and had slowly built up their strength through classic LibDem-style campaigning to become the official opposition by 2015, albeit with only five of the forty councillors, whilst the Liberal Democrats had fallen away to a clutch of long held wards.

It would be fair to say that the prospects for change in 2019 were not promising, despite boundary changes and a resultant reduction of the number of councillors from forty to thirty-four. Indeed, the political editor of the East Anglian Daily Times, Suffolk’s main newspaper, glossed over Mid Suffolk as being relatively uninteresting.