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A longer view
By Steve Hanlon | May 4, 2008
I’ve been looking back over the results over the past eight elections (excluding the by-election in Up Holland a couple of years ago). I’ve plotted two sets of results below - first the share of the vote across the District and secondly the share of the vote across the constituency.
Firstly across the District:
For 2001 and 2005 when there weren’t District elections, I’ve put in the County election results instead. The differences in the trends are most likely due to the General Election being held on the same day.
For the West Lancs constituency area:
These show the total votes cast for each party in the District elections. For 2001 and 2005 the Parliamentary election results are shown.
Across the district there is a higher Conservative vote compared to the West Lancs constituency - that’s because the district includes the “Northern Parishes” which are in South Ribble constituency. The Tory vote in that area is proportionally much higher than in the rest of the District and consequently skew the figures.
For me, the interesting figures are within the constituency. Between 2001 and 2005 the two parties were virtually neck and neck. However, since 2005 there has been a much larger gap between Labour and Conservative - 10% in 2008.
The gap between the two parties isn’t enough to turn around the 14% lead from the last General Election, but if a strong third party candidate stood, then it could push things further away from Labour. As we saw this year - there were double digit swings in some wards to UKIP, Independent and in the case of Tanhouse, to the Conservatives.
The danger is twofold. If people want to protest and vote for a third party, then it makes a Tory victory a lot more likely. However, if they just switch directly from Labour to the Conservatives, as in Tanhouse, then Labour is in real trouble.
Topics: Local Politics |
May 8th, 2008 at 8:50 am
[...] Steve Hanlon has provided an interesting analysis of the local election results in [...]