Put a backbench MP and a ruling group councillor together and they’ll often tease each other about who really has the more power – with the councillor often coming off the better. “I’ll see your ministerial questions and raise you a £500m budget” and so on.
So we certainly shouldn’t forget the other elections on Thursday:
- All the seats in the 32 London boroughs
- One third of the seats in the 36 Mets
- One third of the seats in 20 unitary authorities
- Half the seats in 7 district councils
- One third of the seats in 70 district councils
- Four Mayors
A happy side-effect of the strong general election campaign performance by the Liberal Democrats is that this may well carry over into local election results too. As The Times put it:
Cleggmania set to boost Lib Dem vote in local elections
Cleggmania is expected to have a huge impact on the local council elections being held on the same day as the general election, with the Liberal Democrats taking control of several London councils and winning dozens of seats across England.When the election campaign began, the Lib Dems were expected to lose at least 50 seats in the council elections. Now the party is reaping the benefits of Nick Clegg’s performances in the television debates, which could propel them into power in key town halls.
Tony Travers, from the London School of Economics, now predicts that the Lib Dems will win up to 100 seats, with the Tories losing roughly 150 and Labour gaining about 50.
Not so convinced by the initial 50 seat loss prediction, but even so the basic point stands. Most of the seats up for election were last contested in May 2006 and in the month prior to those elections that average poll ratings were Conservative 34%, Labour 33%, Liberal Democrat 20%.
In particular this should be good news for London, where all councils are elected all-up every four years with the election year often having had the annoying habit of coming just before or just after a period of particular popularity for the party. This time however London campaigners could hardly have asked for better national conditions against which to fight their local campaigns.
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6 Comments
In my borough, the Conservatives, with a large majority from the last local government elections, managed to lose £20 million in Icelandic banks, and have subsequently used ever undemocratic method at their disposal to suppress any discussion of it in council. Amazingly they picked they head of this moronic faction as their parliamentary candidate; I shall be pleased to vote Lib Dem in both the national and local election, not that our parliamentary candidate has a cat in hell’s chance (as evidenced by the campaign – one leaflet with a poor quality photo of her, that’s all, not even a megaphone once on the High Street, strewth, even with an 11,000 Labour majority to overturn, there should have been more than that).
Anyway good luck to Lib Dem candidates wherever they are up and down the country, whatever post they are standing for.
Swings and roundabouts I suspect. Dont forget that the Tories and Labour will be pulling to the polls people who have no interest in local elections and dont vote in the locals normally. Who put FOCUS straight in the bin. We have to combat this sleeping vote by turning out the support we dont normally get to the polls and also in many cases persuading people to do a split vote (for us in the locals even if not in the nationals).
I suspect the local results may be a mixture of happy surprises and considerable disappointments. I advise against too confident predictions.
There is also in some places an extra candidates effect. Parties putting up more paper candidates than usual where they have a Parliamentary candidate, so they can assess whether they have unexpected local support they can target in future local campaigns . In Milton Keynes UKIP, the Greens and the Christian Peoples Alliance have candidates in all 18 seats up. Will this change the ballance for other parties in key wards? Who knows. Labour and ourselves.also have a complete slate of candidates. Plus there is a smatter of independents and one BNP.
The Tories entertained us all by messing up their nomination in a ward they were targetting to take from Labour so only have 17 candidates in the field. Total 99 candidates for 18 seats…. thats a lot of choices.
As Edis says – swings and roundabouts. In Bristol we have a third of the seats up, and my feeling is that one or two are more vulnerable if a higher turnout brings out Labour voters who don’t usually turn out in local elections. But we also know the intensive General Election campaign has put a fewf seats in play that may not have been if it had been just a local election.
What is clear is that the GE make it difficult for any meaningful city-wide campaign to get heard. Still it could be worse, in County Council area they suffered this for three elections in a row!
My ward is a straight up Lib Dem / Labour race, as is my constituency. I’m going to be very interested to see how this plays out in the polls – our constituency-wide canvassing shows dramatic increase in support, and if that plays into the locals as well I think we’re in with a chance. Turnout will increase, but we may see more Lib Dem than Labour extra supporters turning out to the polling stations this time.
I’m off to do more delivery – wish me luck! 😉
I’m a bit dissapointed, that though the Liberal Democrats are the first party to acknowledge the importance of internet communication in this era, there are still four mets, all beginning with an “s” – Sandwell, Sefton, Solihull and Sunderland – withouth any kind of Liberal Democrat web presence. Beside them, there are two mets, which have an internet presence for the constituency party, but not for the local party, namely Stockport and Wigan. Additionaly, Rotherham and Barnsley Liberal Democrats share a website.
I wish this will be taken into consideration when drafting future Liberal Democrat internet strategies, especially as it is now so easy to create a local website in mycouncillor.org, where for instance the Wakefield Liberal Democrats have their website.
We should seriously consider whether it is a good idea to have the general election on the same day as the locals. The locals have received almost no press coverage, and I guess the parties have tended to scale down local literature and give an emphasis on the Parliamentary elections. The result is that most people will be casting their local election votes having hardly thought about it, maybe even surprised to have been handed a local election ballot paper alongside the Westminster one. Having local elections separate means people give more thought to it, punish poor councils or councillors, reward good ones. There’s been an interesting pattern in local elections recently where they’ve obviously become more about local issues and less an opinion poll on national politics, it’ll be a shame if that trend is reversed tomorrow.