By-Election Results 15th December 2016

The 15^th December was a final ‘Super Thursday’ for local by elections in 2016 (there are two by elections next Thursday and a third on Wednesday but next week is not on the same scale) with lots of Liberal Democrat interest. We had principle council by elections in England, Scotland and Wales as well as a clutch of parish level councils.

The overall result confirmed recent trends: it was an excellent night for the Lib Dems with Labour’s support continuing to fall while the SNP held reasonably steady. It was also a dreadful for the Conservatives who lost all four seats they were defending.

The Lib Dem fightback is continuing to gather pace. We had three by elections in moderately leave voting West Country districts. Could we still build a winning local coalition there? The answer was an emphatic yes.

In two Teignbridge districts we won from the Conservatives while over in Somerset we took a seat that had been blue since local government reorganisation in 1973.

Part of the success is that we are once again able to squeeze Labour in areas like this.

In all these seats we had strong local candidates with established teams running good campaigns. However, the swings to us are still remarkable – over 40% Con to Lib Dem in Blackdown.

The Teignbridge campaign was notable for a couple of strange Tory leaflets. In one, they featured a large picture of a graveyard with speech bubbles coming out of the gravestones offering endorsements of the Conservative candidate. That might be demographic profiling taken too far!

Elsewhere in England Labour held Higher Croft in Blackburn. Sadly, there was no Lib Dem. Labour achieved a respectable 58% of the vote, which was down on 2016 (and in 2012 they had 80% of the vote). UKIP were second with 25% of the vote. However, in a warning to Mr Nuttall of the challenge he faces, the gap between Labour and UKIP widened from 2015.

Across in the East of England, the Conservatives horrible night continued as they lost to the independents in Bury St Edmunds (St Edmundsbury Council). There was a Lib Dem candidate in a seat we didn’t fight last time, who gained a reasonable third place.

Up in Fife the SNP held Leven, Kennoway & Largo. Comparisons are always tricky in Scottish by elections because they have multi member seats fought by STV in full council elections while by elections are effectively AV votes. Despite a clear majority for the Unionists parties when their votes were combined, too few votes transferred between them to defeat the SNP.

Initial reports suggesting a catastrophic fall in Labour’s vote proved false. They saw their vote decline slightly while the main gainers were the Conservatives, continuing their accent in Scotland. The success of a moderate Conservative party lead by an openly gay women north of the border rather contrasts with the direction being followed by Tories in England.

In Wales, we had a slightly disappointing result in Welshpool. Despite a very hard fought campaign by Richard Church and the team in Montgomery, we fell back against the Independents. The appearance of a Conservative for the first time impacted our vote more than the Independents. The seat, and the council, are independent strong holds. Despite Powys Council facing considerable criticism this election demonstrates the difficulty in holding individual independents to account for failures by an independent administration.

The success of the Lib Dems in local by elections this year is remarkable. With 28 net gains we have the best results for 20 years. What is more the success is accelerating:

Our vote (compared to the last time each seat was fought) is up by:

3.9% since the General Election in 494 contests

4.8% up in 2016 (288)
7.1% up since the referendum (168)

Some of the comparisons are with vote share in May 2016 so if you compared with the last result before the General Election the swing would be higher.

In the South West, the figures are (increases in our vote share):

16.0% since the General Election
18.3% in 2016
18.5% since referendum

In parish elections we held a seat in Kidlington in Oxfordshire and gained one in Brickhill parish in Bedford.

My thanks to John Swarbrick for additional reporting and statistical analysis.