Great result for Labour in my London borough of Brent
Yesterday, there were local elections in England and Northern Ireland and European elections throughout the UK. Local election results are still being declared and the European results will not be available until Sunday when all the other EU Member States have voted.
I have been able to vote now for almost 50 years: I have never failed to vote and I have have never voted anything other than Labour. For me, the personalities and the polices of the time are very much secondary to the basic ideology of the party: I want a fairer, more egalitarian society with a redistribution of power and wealth to the less fortunate and privileged in our society.
The result of the election in my London borough of Brent, where I have lived for 30 years, was an outstanding success for Labour. The party took 16 seats from the Liberal Democrats, so that now Labour has 56 seats to just six to the Conservatives and a mere one to the Lib Dems. In Brent as whole, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) took a miniscule 3% of the vote. In my own ward of Northwick Park, Labour took all three seats for the first time.
All the 56 Labour councillors have my congratulations, but I send especially warm wishes to my own councillors (Margaret McLellan, Joshua Miichell-Murray, and Keith Perrin), our good friends Ruth Moher and Mary Daley, and my closest friend from university days Dan Filson.
You can see the full results in Brent here.
May 24th, 2014 at 10:10 pm
How were the results overall?
Nadine.
May 25th, 2014 at 8:35 am
With 159 of 161 councils in England declared, Labour has gained 292 seats, the UK Independence Party has gained 155 seats, the Liberal Democrats have lost 284 seats and the Conservatives have lost 201 seats.
May 25th, 2014 at 11:11 am
What do you make of this UKIP result?
Nadine.
May 25th, 2014 at 9:02 pm
While UKIP won a lot of seats by concentrating their efforts in certain parts of the country, their overall share of the vote fell from 23% in last year’s local elections to 17% this year.
Overall I stand by my comments of a year ago:
http://www.rogerdarlington.me.uk/nighthawk/?p=11339
May 27th, 2014 at 10:02 am
It’s 45 years ago since I lost to Roger to become President of the Students’ Union! Grrr. Thanks anyway.
The results conceal that in some wards the opposition put in no effort. I saw no local literature from the Tories in my ward (there were leaflets but they were all Cameron, perhaps unwisely, with little local bite; and the LibDems were curiously muted and one-shot in their attack given they came wtihin 58 votes in 2010). It’s been argued their strategy was all wrong – they would have been better arguing that Labour needed a strong opposition than to argue, absurdly – from a position of 14 seats out of 63, clearly not a launchpad for winning the council – that when they won the council they would …
Things will be different in 2015 when I expect the LibDems to try to make a show of holding the Brent Central seat, though their ability to do so is seriously undermined by losing all but one seat on the council and losing their position as main opposition party. The turnout in 2015 will, I suspect, be higher than in 2010 when frankly Labour voters were depressed and to a modest extent stayed at home. Still, I’m not sniffing at a 18.7% swing from LibDems to Labour in our ward and 11.5% across the borough.
In the north of the borough where Roger lives, the Tories are also an opposition (though not his ward, I think, if that was Sudbury) and the whole-borough swing from them to us was 3.3% (and some double figure swings the other way, where they survived the drop in turnout better than Labour did).
Overall the turnout of 33.6% is pretty disappointing considering how much effort the party put in, but it seems sadly to be the pattern these days that 7 in 10 of the voters in this country leave it to the rest to decide who runs their council, and 3 in 10 leave running the country to others to decide.
May 27th, 2014 at 10:06 am
Oh, just realised you are a member of Northwick Park ward, not Sudbury. An excellent result in Northwick Park – Keith Perrin absolutely tireless!