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Election results - behind the headlines
By Steve Hanlon | May 4, 2008
Sadly, last Thursday was a bad day for Labour in West Lancs. We lost two excellent Labour councillors in Cynthia Dereli and Maggie Skilling. I’ve worked with Maggie for a few years - she was our local councillor when we lived in Up Holland and she was brilliant. Both Cynthia and Maggie worked tirelessly for their wards. They were well known and amongst those I’ve spoken to, there is genuine surprise in both Up Holland and Burscough that they lost.
No doubt, the local papers will just report the headline changes of the Labour losses, but the headlines hide some of the more interesting results. For me, the headlines were:
• The result in Tanhouse ward was the worst ever for Labour in Skelmersdale. Going to a recount, Labour won the ward by just 34 votes in the end. A swing of 21% to the Tories - right in the heart of Skelmersdale’s new town.
• The swings against us in Burscough and Up Holland were small but enought to count, around 2% compared to swings of 17% against us in Ashurst and 14% in Skem North. The collapse in support was in other areas, not necessarily where we lost the seats.
• Labour’s share of the vote dropped in all wards except Burcough East and Tarleton. In Burscough East the vote increased by 0.5% while in Tarleton there was an increase of 3.09%.
• Local Greens failed to capitalise on the drop in Labour support.
There is good news for Labour. Where there was a large swing away from Labour it generally didn’t go to the Tories. Instead it went to the local independent or to UKIP. If this is a protest vote, then Labour needs to listen and learn and rebuild trust with this electorate.
However, someone needs to take a long hard look at the result in Tanhouse. The last bad result was in Skem North when the independent lost by 58 votes against the then leader of the Labour Group. This year’s result is worse by an order of magnitude. The Labour vote held up, but the fact that a reinvigorated Tory vote made the result so close has to be a concern for all of us who want Labour to be winning in West Lancs.
Paul Cotterill, the Labour councillor for Bickerstaffe, has a clear view of what can be done to improve things, and I think he is right.
Topics: Local Politics |
May 4th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
[...] sakmode wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThe swings against us in Burscough and Up Holland were small but enought to count, around 2% compared to swings of 17% against us in Ashurst and 14% in Skem North. The collapse in support was in other areas, not necessarily where we … Read the rest of this great post here [...]
May 4th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
[...] admin wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThe swings against us in Burscough and Up Holland were small but enought to count, around 2% compared to swings of 17% against us in Ashurst and 14% in Skem North. The collapse in support was in other areas, not necessarily where we … [...]