Tag Archives: police and crime commissioner elections

Nick Clegg: I’m not voting in this Thursday’s PCC by-election

Police helmetThere’s a by-election taking place this Thursday. The good news is the Lib Dems won’t lose our deposit.

The reason is the party’s not standing a candidate in the Police and Crime Commissioner by-election triggered by the resignation of former PCC Shaun Wright over the Rotherham child sex abuse scandal.

Here’s how Nick Clegg explained the decision to the BBC earlier this month:

“Having looked at the experiment of police and crime commissioners, I’ve come to the conclusion it just doesn’t work. Look what happened in South Yorkshire and across the whole of the north of England; it’s all re-hashed, re-tread Labour politicians and, guess what, the public don’t like it and they don’t bother to vote for it at all.”

Posted in News | Also tagged , and | 31 Comments

Opinion: we must campaign to win in every election

Those of us who have been around a while will remember fighting nationwide elections we knew we couldn’t win. European elections were always like this until the nineties, when we suddenly made a (minor) breakthrough even before PR voting was introduced.

So in the scheme of things Thursday’s PCC elections were nothing new.

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged | 29 Comments
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Recent Comments

  • Anthony Acton
    I agree with Graham. The party has had two opportunities to get on equal terms with Labour and the Tories this century. The first, in 2010, was wrecked by the d...
  • cim
    @Peter Davies I'm not talking about young people in general, though - according to the polls, 10% of younger voters support the Lib Dems, same as any other age...
  • PM
    @Tom, You're not the only one who's suffered from writers block when it comes to describing the recent social unrest in France and other EU countries. No-one...
  • Kevin Hawkins
    Here is my usual monthly summary of the last fifty local by-elections. It does not include the by-election on the 5th November as I like to give summarise at m...
  • Peter Davies
    @cim You are massively over-generalising about young people. The proportion that believe we were wrong to declare war against Germany in 1939 is tiny. So is the...