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Category: UK Elections – others

Sean Fear’s local elections column

Sean Fear’s local elections column

Universities are still hostile to the Tories In the days of Sir Maurice Bowra, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien, it would have been hard to imagine Oxford as being anything other than a Conservative stronghold. Academics, students, and college servants were all overwhelmingly Conservative in their sympathies, and Conservatives dominated the City Council. Sadly, that has all changed. Mark Senior’s description of the Conservatives as a “minor party” in the City is all too true. The Conservatives don’t have a…

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Sean Fear’s local election commentary

Sean Fear’s local election commentary

How London Voted on May 5th I have now finished working out how each of the new constituencies voted in May’s local elections. This is a useful exercise, as the new boundaries will almost certainly be in force at the time of the next election. As each of the three main parties contested the vast majority of London’s council seats, it is quite easy to work out the results by constituency. In each case, I have taken the highest vote…

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Sean Fear’s local election commentary

Sean Fear’s local election commentary

Has Labour’s Southern Discomfort returned? “Labour’s Southern Discomfort” was the title of an influential Blairite pamphlet in the mid 1990s. Last year’s general election results suggested that Labour was once again starting to struggle in the South, and East Anglia, and May’s local election results suggest this is an increasing problem. Across Southern England, and East Anglia, Labour holds just 1,775 council seats out of more than 10,000, 18% of the total. However, of these 684 are in London. Labour’s…

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Harry Hayfield’s June-July local election summary

Harry Hayfield’s June-July local election summary

After a good June do July’s results spell trouble for the Tories? In June the Conservative advance in local elections continued. The Conservatives were defending 13 seats this month and ended up with 17 seats (the majority of which were gains from the Independents). Mind you, they did manage to lose Nascot in Watford to the Lib Dems but it wouldn’t be a local by-election without a Lib Dem hiccup (remember Bromley?). So what does this mean in a national…

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How to avoid Lib Dem by election batterings

How to avoid Lib Dem by election batterings

What Labour and the Tories could do to defend themselves Anybody with any doubt about the power of the Lib Dem by-election machine should check out the excellent “British Parliamentary By Elections Since 1945” site where election literature from almost every campaign has been collected and is available to view on line. Quite simply the party is so far ahead in finding vote-switching messages and creating effective vehicles to communicate them that virtually every Tory and Labour seat in the…

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Sean Fear’s local election commentary

Sean Fear’s local election commentary

How have the parties been performing since May 5th? The Conservatives have continued to perform strongly in local by-elections, since the last round of local elections on May 5th. Over that period they have made a net gain of 7 seats, compared to a net gain of 3 for the Liberal Democrats and a net loss of 2 seats for Labour. The bulk of the gains have come from rural Independents, who have often not contested the seats which have…

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Sean Fear’s local by-election review

Sean Fear’s local by-election review

Nobody can win in West Yorkshire West Yorkshire is unusual in having evolved a multi-party system in local elections. This is unusual under first past the post elections, as there is pressure on the voters to choose between two alternatives, in order to provide one party with an overall majority. Four out of five Metropolitan borough councils, Leeds, Bradford, Kirklees and Calderdale, are now under No Overall Control. What’s more, there is little prospect of that changing in future elections….

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Who’ll win the by-election spinning war?

Who’ll win the by-election spinning war?

Which party’s done best in “expectation management”? So the polls are about to close, the counts will soon be starting and most normal people will be off to bed without any thought about the events during the day in Gwent and South East London. Now the big question is how the electoral health of the parties will look after the spinners have done their “explaining” and the radio and TV news teams have decided how to present what’s happened. This…

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