With nine principal council by-elections taking place on St Swithin’s day this year, we can only hope our electoral prospects don’t stay the same for the next forty days!  Of the two we were defending, we lost one, and we failed to pick up any seats elsewhere.  The Conservatives held steady, successfully defending four out of five; on Surrey Country Council (Worplesdon division); Great Marlow ward of Wycombe District; Wheatley ward on Rochford D.C.; and Pirbright in Guildford.  The one seat lost by the Tories on the 15th, Bloxwich West ward of Walsall M.B.C., was one of a trio of Labour gains.  They also took the Castle seat on Leicester City Council from the Greens and, disappointingly, the Riversway seat in Preston C.C. from our local Lib Dems.  In Wales, Llais Gwynedd, or Voice of Gwynedd for the Anglophones amongst us, held the Diffwys and Maenofferon seat on Gwynedd against a Plaid Cymru challenge, a contest in which there was no Liberal Democrat candidate.  

With a by-election clutch as dreary as the recent weather, we’ve saved the best ‘til last in the form of our successful defence of the Corfe Mullen South seat on East Dorset District Council.  Nestled in the Mid-Dorset and North Poole constituency of our own Annette Brooke, the ward itself has been a Lib Dem stronghold for the past seventeen years.  With weekly Focus and election literature, in addition to Definite and Probable-targeted letters, we capitalised on local issues of the day, particularly wheelie-bin allocations and a controversial nearby landfill site, to reinforce our message of community politics.  A legacy benefit of approximately 50% new canvass data across the ward and a smooth Postal Vote operation combined to defeat a negative Tory campaign and a lacklustre UKIP effort.  Congratulations to Councillor Philip Harknett, and our hard-working team in East Dorset.

Out in the towns, we had some good news in the form of a hold and a gain on Barnstaple Town Council, unfortunately counterbalanced by a pair of losses on Bradfield Parish Council in Sheffield.  We also lost a Town Councillor in Knaresborough, near Harrogate, to the Tories, making it a pretty torrid time for Liberal Democrats at all local government levels.  There are another nine principals up next week, of which we are defending three.  The best of luck to all our candidates and campaigners across the country.

There were six principal council by-elections on July 8th and a single Town Council contest reported to ALDC.  Of the six, our best result came in the Cockerton West ward of Darlington, where candidate Brian Jefferson gained a near 20% upswing in the Lib Dem voteshare to leap into second.  The urgency with which Labour’s council Leader and new M.P. pounded the streets testified to our candidate’s well-established reputation as hard working local teacher and community campaigner, who had previously served on the council for the Conservatives.  Our campaign team won the literature war, putting out three election addresses in a variety of sizes (all on recycled paper, for additional environmental currency), blue letters timed to coincide with the arrival of postal votes, and a targeted Good Morning, well in excess of the output from the opposing parties.  The BNP were active in the council estate areas, finishing with a typical flourish by illegally fly-posting election propaganda onto council properties on polling day, before having them all ripped down and storming into last place (shedding nearly 10% of their vote).  With a former UKIP candidate running for the Tories and polling a mere 10% himself, our candidate was the only competition for a complacent Labour and came within forty votes of a notable victory. 

Of the remainder, only one principal council seat saw a change of hands with Labour wresting the Blackwood ward on Caerphilly from an Independent in an election with no Liberal Democrat candidate.  In a similar vein was Blaenau Gwent, in whose Tredegar Central and West ward we successfully took one fifth of the vote last time around, but no-one to build on it two years later.  The Greens held on in Brighton, at the back end of a long shuffle prompted by Caroline Lucas’ elevation to the Commons in May.  The remaining principal council results were all Labour Holds, and their increasing voteshare features as today’s common denominator.  In the Towns, the St Ives Independents Held and Gained one apiece on St Ives T.C., the gain being at the expense of the Greens.  

With a princely nine by-elections coming on the 15th, there will be plenty to look out for.  In the meantime, a quick reminder that ALDC are accepting nominations for a variety of prizes in our Campaigner Awards 2010.  Details on our website are accessible via http://tinyurl.com/34dhlqe.  The best of luck to all our campaign teams across the country.

ALDC By-Elections Team

The tranquil surroundings of the Wells constituency formed the backdrop to our best result of the day, where a Lib Dem gain from the Conservatives put us only one seat behind the Tories on Mendip D.C. and brought the council into No Overall Control.  Candidate Garfield Kennedy led from the front, knocking on every door in the ward, building on Tessa Munt’s election to parliament in May.  Swiftly acquiring a number of strategic sites on the approach to a popular local supermarket for our superboards and a further forty different stakeboard locations, made it a high visibility campaign.  Our messages were spread, and some new members signed up, by the candidate hiring a stall in town on market day.  The Coalition was generally well-received on the doorstep and we found ourselves on the right side of local planning concerns and a parking charges controversy that were hurting the (Conservative-run) Mendip District Council.  Postal votes arrived before the budget, and the P.V.-targeted blue letter dropped onto doormats on the same day – in the end, the postal vote broke approximately two-thirds in our favour.  The campaign also made good use of ALDC’s Focus and Good Morning templates to help tailor their local literature output, templates for all occasions can be found in the members’ area of www.aldc.org.

 Our second gain of the day was the Clee ward of Shropshire Unitary Authority, where candidate Richard Huffer built on his established reputation as a dedicated community worker to take the ward from a complacent local Tory party.  A range of literature, beginning with the post-General ‘Thank You’ Focus and including letters targeted geographically to capitalise on the range of local issues affecting specific areas.  Richard succeeded in converting a number of disillusioned soft-Conservative votes on the basis of his prodigious door-knocking efforts and his long record of action on local issues.  The prospect of Conservative-run Shropshire cutting funding for ‘Meals on Wheels’ and local mobile library services also helped seal the deal by keeping the focus firmly at local level.

 In other developments, the Tories gained a seat on Fylde Borough Council from an Independent and they held the Huntingdon and Hatherton ward of South Staffordshire District Council by the princely margin of two votes.  It was a reasonable day for Labour, holding the three they were defending.  Finally, the non-principal by-elections saw a Lib Dem loss to an Independent on Chard Town Council in Somerset, and our own Town Councillor Michael Reginald Lock successfully defending a seat on Yeovil T.C.

ALDC By-Elections Team

There were three principal council by-elections and six by-elections out in the towns.  Of the three main events, two Labour seats and one Tory ward were all successfully defended, with very little change in the vote tallies.  We ran candidates in two of the three, Bedford and Braintree, but to no avail.  The third by-election, in Conwy, saw Labour gain 11% in vote-share, mostly through the absence of a Plaid Cymru candidate who took 12% last time the seat was contested.  Three of the five Town Council seats up were Lib Dem defences, and a 100% retention rate is excellent news for our campaign teams.  We held on to our seat in the Dunmore ward on Abingdon Town Council, a glimmer of consolation after Evan Harris’ narrow defeat in May.  We also held two seats on Chippenham T.C. in the Monkton Park and Pewsham wards, where Duncan Hames and the local Lib Dem team fought and won the newly-created Chippenham seat that emerged from the latest boundary review.  Elsewhere, Labour held a seat on Llandudno, where Gareth Owen and the Lib Dem team doubled their previous vote tally, Labour gained one from the Conservatives in Shrewsbury, and finally the Tories picked off an Independent Town Councillor on Burton Latimer TC in Northamptonshire.

As it has been a bit of a quiet day, the ALDC By-Elections team wanted to take a moment to emphasise the importance of keeping our local voter intelligence fully up to date.  A lot has changed since the election and coalition agreement, and with the budget also polarising opinions on all sides, we should consider that our pre-election voter ID may be out of date.  ALDC is here to help our campaign teams keep their voter intelligence on the cutting edge, and our new Summer Survey is available online at the ALDC shop.  Tailored to generate a range of casework and Focus issues and to feed back valuable information on which local issues are driving voters’ political priorities, the ALDC Summer Survey can be printed and delivered to order.  

With seven principal by-elections next week, including Tulse Hill in the London Borough of Lambeth, and a brace out in the Towns, we hope there will be plenty of exciting developments to share a week from now.  Until then, the best of luck to all our teams out in the field.

It isn’t very often that Liberal Democrats are wont to celebrate a good defection, but June 17th marks a unique anniversary in the combined histories of Cold War geopolitics and international dance.  It was 49 years to the day since ballet superstar Rudolf Nureyev danced a hasty pas de deux with his Soviet bodyguards before vaulting into airport security in Paris to claim political asylum in France.  Unfortunately, our by-election teams proved a little less nimble out in the field - of the four principal council by-elections on the 17th, Liberal Democrats were defending in one, standing in three, and won in none.  

Our one loss for the week took place in the North Holme ward of East Lindsey District Council in Lincolnshire.  The key to understanding this dramatic decline is hidden in the percentage change, the Lib Dem vote was down roughly 60% on 2007 – such a high figure usually indicates the lack of another major party candidate in the previous election, and in 2007 the contest was solely between us and the BNP.  Whilst it was inevitable we’d lose a number of votes when Labour and the Tories fielded candidates this time around, all losses are disappointing and in this case we finished behind the BNP, who took third place by fourteen votes.  Labour took the seat with a majority of thirty-one.  Labour won in Hastings, with a 12% Con-Lab swing and our candidate dropping roughly 2% to place third.  The Tories gained a measure of compensation with two gains of their own.  Firstly, a near 20% swing won the Conservatives a seat in the Earls Barton ward of Wellingborough Council in Northamptonshire and, secondly, walking in unopposed to a by-election victory in Chichester.