After a number of quieter Thursdays, May 31st gave us something to get our teeth into with five principal council by-elections and one town council contest taking place. Unfortunately, the increased quantity of elections didn’t help boost our yield and it was a week that went without a win.
The best result of the day was in the Fosseridge ward of Cotswold District Council, where 20-year-old campaigner Danny Loveridge took 26 per cent of the vote, an increase of five per cent on the last contest. In the second-safest of the Tories’ wards on Cotswold, and with an Independent candidate taking a hefty slice on his first time out, the Conservative decline of over 20 per cent is precipitous. The result, however, was a rather comfortable Conservative hold.
In Eastbourne’s Meads, Lib Dem Gerard Thompson took second place in a tough scrap with both Labour and UKIP, who each came within 100 votes of finishing second. However, the Tories held quite well on the day, boosting their share of the vote by 7% and taking just shy of 60% of the vote. The Tories also held in Bournemouth, where the local Focus team lost a little over 13 per cent of their previous vote-share and placed third, behind Labour, in the Redhill and Northbourne ward. It was a tough night in the Brunswick Park ward of Barnet, where our 15 per cent drop and the absence of a Green Party candidate appear to have pushed Labour over the finish line, taking the ward from the Conservatives, and finally, there is nothing much to say about Town in North Lincolnshire, where we failed to get a name on the ballot.
There was a hard-fought contest out in the towns in the St Andrews ward of Burgess Hill Town Council. Our campaigner Roger Cartwright came second in a race where the top three candidates were only separated by twelve votes and Labour gained the seat, pushing the defending Conservatives into third.
It looks like a quiet week ahead, with no elections scheduled for June 7th currently reported to ALDC, please drop me a line if you know of any. In the meantime, we’d like to wish all of our candidates and campaigners the very best of luck as we move into the summer.
Craig Whittallcraig.whittall@aldc.org