There were two principal local council by-elections that took place on Thursday 11th March 2011. Labour held one seat and took one off the Lib Dems. There were no parish or town council results reported to ALDC.
In the Rosegrove with Lowerhouse Ward of Burnley council, we lost a seat to Labour. This is a ward within Gordon Birtwistle’s parliamentary seat (which is co-terminous with the Borough) and was already a split ward. We had two councillors to Labour’s one. Labour’s existing councillor won in 2007 on the drawing of lots after a dead heat between him and the BNP candidate. Though the post mortem has yet to take place we perhaps suffered from having a series of councillors who did not complete a full term of office in the ward. Three had stood down in recent years.
In the Brunswick Park ward in the London borough of Southwark, Kate Heywood flew the flag for the Lib Dems. The campaign was hard fought and unusually for a local by-election included a public hustings meeting. As has been the case in several recent by-elections Labour upped their game significantly in the last ten days running on national issues. We got our vote out on polling day but Labour managed to increase the usual level of turnout for by-elections in similar wards in Southwark by around 10% to hold off our challenge.