U.K Local By-Elections Thread

[Peter]

Labour are doing much better in these contests than they have for years (especially in Lincolnshire oddly enough)

I don't see why thats odd at all given the antics of some of the Conservative County councillors.

[Peter]

EDIT: Actually next year's local elections should be interesting all over the place; and due to the inevitable regional differances in the results, will confuse people who like clear national swings. Like the media.

Lets be honest, we won't see a truly national swing for a long time now, in any election. I agree that I hope the media gets this message.

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Yes, lets see if Labour can't lose all of the remaining 19 councillors it has in Surrey. (Alas, this is not possible since at least 8 will not be up for election in 06).

[Peter]

The two remaining Labour County Council seats are in Stanwell and Chertsey, neither are particularly safe, and Stanwell is approaching super-marginal status.

Here is a really cool map for the County council seats: map.

Unfortunately, the bastards have taken the election results off that website, so you have to go to the individual district/borough councils to retrieve the election results for the County wards.

[Peter]

Apparently Labour have gained a seat off the LibDems in Oxford; Jericho & Osney, on a big swing. Greenies almost took 2nd place.

More details soon hopefully. There were probably some other results last night; will post when found. I reckon we'll see a notable Cameron bounce as Tory voters turn out slightly higher than normal.

Yes, this is the 2004 seat, which was a LD gain off Labour. In 2002, both seats had been strongly Labour, and indeed the Greens did come in ahead of the LDs in 2002. Jericho & Osney was a part of the sysmic shift of 2004 that took the Council off Labour. Jericho has pretty good links into City Centre, and the disaster that the City Centre "refurbishment" was at the time had annoyed many of the residents.

2004 results:
LD - 848
Lab - 721
G - 332
C - 266

By-election result:
Lab - 713
LD - 437
G - 355
C - 115

The new Labour councillor is Colin Cook, who had been councillor for the ward before he was kicked out in 04.

I must confess that I don't know much about the Osney end of the ward. Jericho is often populated by a lot of students, and is notoriously the most expensive of all the student areas in terms of rent. There is a lot of social housing mixed in with this as many of the student houses used to be social, but a lot of residents took up right to buy in the 80s and 90s.

Those living in social housing tend to be in the service sector as opposed to manufacturing (which is the other end of town). Politically active students tend to break for the Greens at the local level for various complicated reasons.

What will have hurt the LDs is that the by-election fell 5 days after the end of the Uni term. Thus many of the more apathetic students won't have voted, and certainly wouldn't have cared to get a postal vote - these voters are often key Lib Dem voters locally. The politically active Green voters on the other hand, seem to have gotten their postal votes or stayed up the extra week.

Labour have recovered somewhat from the 04 defeat because the "refurbishment" of the City Centre is now no longer at the forefront of people's minds, and therefore those who use it are no longer punishing them.

Apparently the LDs went negative as well, though thats only something I've heard from a friend of a friend of a friend ......

[Peter]

Is there anyway we can calculate a net change in share of vote?

[Peter]

there was an upset in Surrey as an Indie gained a seat off the Tories (while the Labour candidate polled just 6 votes; that's less than the number of people needed to sign your nomination forms. Note that turnout was 59%...) and the Tories got solid swings in two other wards somewhere in the Southeast.
So not much of interest really; other than the ultimate paper candidate in Surrey o/c.

Where in Surrey was this?