There was one principal local council by-election held on Thursday 14th July and the Tories held the seat. There were no parish or town council by-election results reported to ALDC.The Tory Parish, District and County councillor for Old Catton Division of Norfolk resigned from just his county seat. In reality the ward is a largely suburban fringe of Norwich, but falls into Broadland District Council where we have one councillor. In campaigning terms it’s virgin territory for us outside the parliamentary 2009 by-election and two freeposts in the 2010 General Election.
With a small local party, stretched by holiday and health absences we set out a series of clear objectives for the campaign, high amongst which was building up the ward’s organisation and training.
From a slow start we ran a four leaflet campaign, with a target leaflet to postal voters and a “Today is Polling Day” leaflet across the whole ward. Where we were less good was on canvass contact and work on the postal vote, both key to success in any election. Canvassers on the final week felt that with more doorstep contact the result could have been even better.
This was particularly frustrating as the Tories not listening message was clearly getting through. In West Norfolk a huge local campaign against an incinerator had been completely ignored and we reminded the Catton voters of this, with a number of developments in the area about to be decided.
The Tories only seemed to put out one glossy A4 but Labour put in a lot of effort, wheeling in two MPs, to do less well than they did in May. The result, for consistency, is compared with the county elections in 2009. However by comparing it against the district result in May it shows a drop in the Labour vote of 2% and our vote up 12%.
An encouraging night.