Tag Archives: somerset and frome

With apologies for the delay in posting this – Ed

So much has happened in British politics in the last year, it’s easy to forget along the way that Rishi Sunak managed to lose a leadership election to Liz Truss. Having been selected for a safe seat, that was the first hard fought contest in the public’s eye that he had to contest. He lost, and lost badly. For all his career success, he isn’t very good at the basics of politics.

We saw that again with his decision to duck the House of Commons vote on the Privileges Committee’s verdict on Boris Johnson. The one hope for the Conservatives under Sunak is to show that they have really changed as a party, something that John Major managed to do, at least initially, after replacing Margaret Thatcher. But instead of using the vote to show his party is changed and that he’s serious about restoring probity to public life, Sunak ducked the opportunity. He’s Prime Minister of our whole country but driven by the internal myopic politics of a small number of his MPs.

Making the most of Sunak’s mistakes

Over the long history of our party and its predecessors, there are three things that have fuelled recoveries for our party: spectacular Parliamentary by-election wins, brilliant May local elections, and foreign policy disasters such as Suez and Iraq.

The first two are certainly the preferable routes to success and we’ve already made a good start on both of them in this Parliament, with three record-breaking by-election victories and the amazing wins this May, building on previous council gains.

Now we have the chance to build on that with Sarah Dyke’s campaign in the Somerton and Frome by-election. Sarah and the team are running a brilliant campaign, highlighting the Conservative failures on the NHS, cost of living and sewage.

But Sarah can only win with our help. 

Please do head over to help if you can as there are only a few days left until polling day on July 20. We only win by-elections when we all turn up to campaign.

We’ve already shown what we can pull off three times in this Parliament. Let’s make it a fourth.

New priorities for our diversity and inclusion work

At our last Federal Board meeting, we agreed a new set of priorities for our diversity and inclusion work, building on our recent progress in areas such as target seat Parliamentary candidates. For the next phase of progress, we’ll be concentrating on targets such as improving the diversity of our local government base and who we speak with on the doorsteps.

Both of these are important in their own right and also important for their knock-on impact. Who we have canvass data from and who our councillors are in turn affects much else that we do, such as who we then try to recruit as a member or who ends up on one of our committees.

To support these new priorities, our previous Equity, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EEDI) working group – which did great work to help get the previous diversity audit implemented – is being replaced by a new working group geared specifically to these new priorities.

Legacy fundraising