Agent’s Report
Parliamentary Campaign - Although the Parliamentary result may seem disappointing, Emily’s campaign did us proud. and she brought us the kind of national - and international attention and profile we would never otherwise have achieved. Emily worked tirelessly up until the last second as did the formidable Benn family. It was a great honour to have had both Tony Benn and the Minister, Hillary Benn, campaigning on our candidate’s behalf.
To start at the count: our share of the Parliamentary vote dropped by 8.8%, the Liberal Democrats increased their share by 1.2%, the Tories by 4.6%, the Greens by 2.3%, and UKIP by 1.4%. Turnout was up by 3.6% over 2005. Even assuming that the Liberal Democrats and the Greens - who didn’t stand in 2005 - took all of their extra votes from Labour, our vote would have been still less in real terms than in 2005, in spite of the increased turnout. It seems that many of our voters sat on their hands.
It seems right to conclude that the vote of the Right was energised, the increased turnout was almost exclusively to the benefit of the Tories, and we suffered from abstention, as well as tactical voting for the Liberals. (The Liberals’ campaign literature mischievously and misleadingly asserted that they were the only ones with a chance of winning, though we were second in 2005)
Local Campaign
The results for the Local Elections are very different. In spite of not fielding candidates in several wards, we substantially increased our share of vote in those that we did contest with the sad and one-off exception of Cokeham where a mistake in the nomination papers meant that Barry Mear could not be listed on the ballot paper as the Labour Candidate, which obviously cost him vital votes. In Eastbrook, Steve Carden did fantastically well to come within 63 votes of taking one of the seats - we only contested one of the two, and Steve was pipped by the Liberal who obviously gathered crucial ‘second preference’ votes. Andy Bray did extremely well in Southlands. If it hadn’t been for the renegade Liberal/Conservative Carl English, he is likely to have taken the seat. There was a 13% swing to us in St Mary’s, and even in lower priority wards, we saw a very positive swing.
Although the Tories won again, the swing against them was frequently in double digits, in Council Leader Neil Parkin’s case, 14.9%! At first glance, this seems bizarre, but when we dig deeper, we can see the reason: TURNOUT.
In Local Elections, turnout is generally around 35% - or less. In this combined election, turnout was nearly 40% higher. The Tories benefited from the same 3.6% that boosted their result in the General Election, but the huge increased turnout for the Local Election was proportionally much more in favour of the non-Tory vote; hence the surge away from the Tories.
The Future
The electorate made a very clear distinction between national politics and local politics, but the extraordinary tie up between the Tories and Liberals is not going to make things any easier for either of them in Adur. The Tories do not have an overall majority in Adur, but up till now they have had the advantage of a divided opposition. Now, of course, there is only one opposition party, the Labour Party.
We have a great opportunity for a breakthrough in 2012. It is a tragedy that it will be on the back of this misbegotten coalition’s catastrophic cull of public sector jobs and vengeful cuts to the services that make us a decent and caring society.