Adventures in local elections, Ashford Borough 1981-2005

[yellowperil]

I will now turn to the Euro-elections in Ashford over the period in question, for several of which I was responsible for the Lib Dem campaign (or what there was of it, at times)within the Ashford parliamentary constituency - so three elections to the East Kent constituency (1984, 1989, and 1994) and two of the elections to the massive South - East England constituency elections in 1999 and 2004, fall within my period, though of course I will mention the earliest of the East Kent elections in 1979 ( before I became reawakened to politics in 1981 that one hardly registered with me at all, reminding me how most ordinary people reacted to these elections-not noticing them) . I may also mention the last two Euro-elections in 2009 and 2014, because I was still involved with them to a degree even when my general level of political involvement was diminishing. 

My thanks to Andrew_S for pointing me in the right direction when I was struggling to come up with a reliable statistical resource for these elections to back up my somewhat fluid and impressionistic memories, and to Davıd Boothroyd for being that reliable statistical resource

[yellowperil]

European Parliamentary Election 1979- East Kent


C Jackson (Con)     117,267    (64.7%)
J Holmes (Lab)         40.060    (22.1%)
A Morris (Lib)          20, 190    (11.1%)
D Conlan (Ind)            3,718     (2.1%)

As already indicated I scarcely remember this at all but I must have voted in it as I never missed a vote. However, I will include this in , partly because it would have established who was my MEP when I became politically active once more after a long interval, but also because it gives me the chance to explain the Euro -constituency I found myself in. Christopher Jackson had become the MEP for East Kent with a thumping Conservative majority over Labour, at a time when Tory candidates were expected to be Euro-enthusiasts and Labour to be rather more eurosceptical in tone. The Euro-constituency covered seven Westminster parliamentary constituencies: Faversham , Canterbury ,North and South Thanet, Dover, Folkestone & Hythe, and Ashford, and so it remained, with quite minor name- and boundary -changes, for the next three Euro-elections where my level of involvement increased quite considerably. It was sufficiently significant that for the Euro-constituency to be the formal unit of the SDP we operated under in those first three years of that party's existence, and we were frequently meeting in Dover or Canterbury or Margate in those heady early years and our Local Party officers like John Cox and Bill Macmillan were important to us. But I cannot remember much about the man who had been our Liberal candidate at these elections, not even what the A  in A.Morris stood for! I can just about remember what he looked like, but this is worrying as I have masses of memories of Tony Kinch who was to be our next , SDP, candidate, while Mr Morris was to be our candidate again in the "Salad" days of 1989!

[yellowperil]

European Parliamentary Elections 1984 - East Kent

C Jackson  (Con)      92,340  (62.5%)
D Enright (Lab)        43,473  (24.7%)
A Kinch (SDP)           34,601  (19.7%)
S Dawe (Ecology)       5,405  (3.1%)

The first Euro-election to get genuinely excited about, but producing a result which was to become all too familiar. It was the first ( but by no means the last ) in which I would spend a fair bit of it with the candidate as his minder whenever he was in the (Westminster ) constituency. And I think the energetic Mr Kinch probably spent a lot more than 1/7th of his time in Ashford- maybe it was his favourite Westminster constituency of the seven as it was probably more easily accessed from his home town of Brussels, and the SDP element was stronger than in some of the others. It has left me wondering how significant -if at all- the presence of the candidate in a Euro-election was. Compared with any other sort of election the chances of an ordinary elector having first hand experience of the candidate was minute, and before this much of my experience had been in very local one-person rural wards, absolutely at the other end of the spectrum. Tony though did work hard at what voter contact he was able to make and at the few public meetings possible, and something, whether his personal efforts or the general political climate enabled him to make some improvement on his Liberal predecessor, but not enough to get out of third place.  When engaged in election campaigning generally, one sometimes wonders if any of it makes any difference to the turnout of actual voters or whether it would all happen anyway, with just the minimum of effort. I have always found that feeling multiplied many times when it comes to the Euros.

Maybe it was just as well there wasn't more exposure to the limelight, actually, as knowledgeable and  enthusiastic as Tony was, he could be a little naive and careless with words sometimes and he did let slip a few comments which taken out of context would have caused furore today and even raised the odd eyebrow then. It was just inexperience I think at matters political rather than administrative, and not realising how an innocent remark could be reprocessed by unfriendly forces to take on a completely unintended meaning. Some thing that could be made to sound mysogynistic, and some Islamophobic. I some times remember some of Tony's more unfortunate off-the-cuff remarks when all hell breaks lose on such issues today. 

This was a time when I was at my most Euro-enthusiastic phase, an enthusiasm which remains but would be a little more nuanced these days. In those days I was active not only in the SDP but also within the European Movement, and most of my friends and acquaintances there were active members of the Tory Party. Most of them probably old Heathite wets, but quite a few leading Thatcherites too (remember always that Margaret Thatcher was one of the principal architects of the Single Market,something I find present day Thatcherite Brexiteers try to gloss over).

I remember going to one EM meeting - in Kensington Town Hall if I remember correctly- where we were all being urged to adopt all the symbolic attributes of the European state - flags, anthems , and I particularly remember the importance of using the blue channels at airports. Even at that stage I found all that a bit much and OTT. The principal keynote speaker at that event pushing all these things was one Nicholas Ridley, MP.

[Pete Whitehead]

Jun 7, 2018 7:09:46 GMT yellowperil said:

European Parliamentary Election 1979- East Kent


C Jackson (Con)     117,267    (64.7%)
J Holmes (Lab)         40.060    (22.1%)
A Morris (Lib)          20, 190    (11.1%)
D Conlan (Ind)            3,718     (2.1%)

As already indicated I scarcely remember this at all but I must have voted in it as I never missed a vote. However, I will include this in , partly because it would have established who was my MEP when I became politically active once more after a long interval, but also because it gives me the chance to explain the Euro -constituency I found myself in. Christopher Jackson had become the MEP for East Kent with a thumping Conservative majority over Labour, at a time when Tory candidates were expected to be Euro-enthusiasts and Labour to be rather more eurosceptical in tone. The Euro-constituency covered seven Westminster parliamentary constituencies: Faversham , Canterbury ,North and South Thanet, Dover, Folkestone & Hythe, and Ashford, and so it remained, with quite minor name- and boundary -changes, for the next three Euro-elections where my level of involvement increased quite considerably. It was sufficiently significant that for the Euro-constituency to be the formal unit of the SDP we operated under in those first three years of that party's existence, and we were frequently meeting in Dover or Canterbury or Margate in those heady early years and our Local Party officers like John Cox and Bill Macmillan were important to us. But I cannot remember much about the man who had been our Liberal candidate at these elections, not even what the A  in A.Morris stood for! I can just about remember what he looked like, but this is worrying as I have masses of memories of Tony Kinch who was to be our next , SDP, candidate, while Mr Morris was to be our candidate again in the "Salad" days of 1989!

To be pedantic, it was Thanet East and Thanet West at that time

[yellowperil]

Jun 7, 2018 9:01:49 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

Jun 7, 2018 7:09:46 GMT yellowperil said:

European Parliamentary Election 1979- East Kent


C Jackson (Con)     117,267    (64.7%)
J Holmes (Lab)         40.060    (22.1%)
A Morris (Lib)          20, 190    (11.1%)
D Conlan (Ind)            3,718     (2.1%)

As already indicated I scarcely remember this at all but I must have voted in it as I never missed a vote. However, I will include this in , partly because it would have established who was my MEP when I became politically active once more after a long interval, but also because it gives me the chance to explain the Euro -constituency I found myself in. Christopher Jackson had become the MEP for East Kent with a thumping Conservative majority over Labour, at a time when Tory candidates were expected to be Euro-enthusiasts and Labour to be rather more eurosceptical in tone. The Euro-constituency covered seven Westminster parliamentary constituencies: Faversham , Canterbury ,North and South Thanet, Dover, Folkestone & Hythe, and Ashford, and so it remained, with quite minor name- and boundary -changes, for the next three Euro-elections where my level of involvement increased quite considerably. It was sufficiently significant that for the Euro-constituency to be the formal unit of the SDP we operated under in those first three years of that party's existence, and we were frequently meeting in Dover or Canterbury or Margate in those heady early years and our Local Party officers like John Cox and Bill Macmillan were important to us. But I cannot remember much about the man who had been our Liberal candidate at these elections, not even what the A  in A.Morris stood for! I can just about remember what he looked like, but this is worrying as I have masses of memories of Tony Kinch who was to be our next , SDP, candidate, while Mr Morris was to be our candidate again in the "Salad" days of 1989!

To be pedantic, it was Thanet East and Thanet West at that time

Yes I know- I thought that came within my "quite minor name- and boundary changes" but they weren't that minor, I suppose, so I could have escaped that by saying "the two Thanet constituencies" 

[The Bishop]

Maybe worth noting that the 1984 Labour candidate was Derek Enright, deselected as the MEP in his previous Yorkshire seat.

(of course, he later re-emerged as MP for Hemsworth before dying rather too young)

[yellowperil]

Before going on to the 1989 Euro-election, I am sharing with you  some questions in my mind. I am at this distance more than a bit hazy about how these elections in big single-member constituencies actually worked . I can distinctly going on more than one occasion to the Winter Gardens at Margate for the count, and the business of the verification being done with the ballot papers upside down, making it impossible to do any proper box counts in spite of trying to develop x-ray eyes. I also remember delays in publicising the results because we were counting a couple of days before the rest of Europe. I have even hazier ideas of some preliminary counting locally (i.e in Ashford) -postal verifications, possibly?- or is all that completely wrong?

Also- am I right that in these elections it was not possible to separate out the results for each parliamentary constituency? I certainly have never seen such figures for Ashford at this time, but we do have them of course for the later elections when the number of Westminster constituencies within the Euro-constituency has gone up from 7 to 80-odd and instead of named single candidates we have party lists.

Putting out an appeal for anyone in our ranks who is expert at the psephology of early Euro-elections . Quite a challenge- I was quite active in all this at the time but I have an almost complete memory failure.

[yellowperil]

Jun 7, 2018 10:55:14 GMT The Bishop said:

Maybe worth noting that the 1984 Labour candidate was Derek Enright, deselected as the MEP in his previous Yorkshire seat.

(of course, he later re-emerged as MP for Hemsworth before dying rather too young)

Yes I have distinct memories of Derek and was reasonably impressed by him, (insofar as one allows oneself to be by an opposition candidate when you are busy promoting your own!)  and yes I do remember when he died. pity.

[Pete Whitehead]

There was certainly no counting by parliementary constituency - AFAIK the only time this was done was in 1999 when the system moved to D'Hondt and from 2004 the counting areas became the local authority areas (except in Scotland and Wales which moved to that system in 2009)

[swanarcadian]

Jun 7, 2018 11:38:04 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

There was certainly no counting by parliementary constituency - AFAIK the only time this was done was in 1999 when the system moved to D'Hondt and from 2004 the counting areas became the local authority areas (except in Scotland and Wales which moved to that system in 2009)

It was nice to pretend I was watching a general election night in 1999.  They displayed which party won a plurality in each constituency.

With thanks to David Boothroyd for posting it on YouTube:

[yellowperil]

Jun 7, 2018 11:38:04 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

There was certainly no counting by parliementary constituency - AFAIK the only time this was done was in 1999 when the system moved to D'Hondt and from 2004 the counting areas became the local authority areas (except in Scotland and Wales which moved to that system in 2009)

Maybe then my aberrant memory is transposing memories from 1999 or later into earlier events. It is interesting how difficult I am finding it to pin down these elections in my head compared with Westminster, county and borough elections over the same period.

[yellowperil]

Jun 7, 2018 12:00:34 GMT swanarcadian said:

Jun 7, 2018 11:38:04 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

There was certainly no counting by parliementary constituency - AFAIK the only time this was done was in 1999 when the system moved to D'Hondt and from 2004 the counting areas became the local authority areas (except in Scotland and Wales which moved to that system in 2009)

It was nice to pretend I was watching a general election night in 1999.  They displayed which party won a plurality in each constituency.

With thanks to David Boothroyd for posting it on YouTube:

Nice video, but yes I know we have the breakdown from 1999 onwards, afaik this was not possible for any constituency before this and I think they deliberately mixed the ballot papers up after verification to prevent any extraction of data which might berelevant to Westminster or local elections.

[yellowperil]

European Parliamentary Elections 1989- East Kent

C Jackson  (Con)      85,667       (44.0%)
G Perry (Lab)           56,706       (29.1%)
P Kemp (Green)      36,391        (19.0%)
A Morris (SLD)        15,470         (7.9%)

This is another "remember the candidates " time -I have already said how difficult I find it to remember Morris, and Perry, the Labour candidate this time, unlike Derek Enright last time or Mark Watts next time,  made absolutely no impression on me whatsoever, though I do note he upped the Labour vote quite considerably on Derek's performance 5 years earlier. That may in part be due to a roughly 19,000 vote reduction in "our" vote compared with Tony Kinch, and I seem to remember a much more pedestrian and uninspired campaign on our side - this was of course the early days of the LD when our vote share nationally shivered close to zero, and it certainly showed in this campaign.Chris Jackson coud remain comfortably above all this, though his total vote and vote share was getting less dominant with each election. But the candidate from this election I do remember is Penny Kemp. 

Not in a good way though. Those of you who have followed me on here for some while may believe I am an easy going chap who likes to see the best in everyone, and respects his opponents. I would say in general I am also quite well disposed to the Green cause and if I had to live in a political system which required a second alternative vote, if I had given a Liberal first vote, the Greens would have my second  (and I can conceive of situations where it would be the other way round). So when I say of all politicians I have come across, the one I could not stand at any price was Penny Kemp, that is saying quite a lot.  She was quite local to me ( she lived in Headcorn) and I found her rude , pushy and  really quite an unpleasant person even when I wanted to agree with what she said. All that got off my chest, I have to say the Greens did quite well in this election!

[Davıd Boothroyd]

There may have been constituency results prepared for Herefordshire and Shropshire in 1994 - there were apparently interim figures given out during the count.

[yellowperil]

European Parliamentary Elections 1994- East Kent

M Watts  (Lab)             69, 641  (34.5%)
C Jackson (Con)            69, 006  (34.2%)
J Macdonald ( LD)        44, 549   (22.1%)
C Bullen (UKIP)                9,414    (4.7%)
S Dawe (Green)                7,196   (3.6%)
C Buckley (NLP)                1, 746   (0.9%)

Up to this point, the Euro-elections in East Kent had been pretty boring, in that one party , the Conservatives, were so far ahead of the opposition that there really was no contest. In  I994 that all changed. Not only a different winner, but a photo-finish of  a result to produce that, and with the Lib Dems also doing significantly better than before, a result that wasn't that far off being a 3-way split. Time, obviously, to change to a completely different system.

This time no difficulty in remembering the candidates- I had been on meal-sharing terms with two of the candidates, Mark Watts and John Macdonald ( not together and not actually during the election you understand). John was actually a constituent of mine as he was an Egerton resident, and I had had to help him through a number of problems up on his ridgetop farmhouse, and he owned a stretch of farmland along the road between Egerton and Pluckley providing excellent poster sides- one case where we were able to turn farmer's fields yellow all along a main road linking two Lib Dem held villages.

John  of course was a senior QC, the Lib Dem's principal spokesperson on constitutional matters at the time and the former parliamentary candidate for Folkestone & Hythe. His canditature was a departure for the Lib Dems in that they were putting up a candidate who was high profile in the area and not a Europe specialist coming out of Brussels.  I'm not sure he expected to win, but he was really serious about giving it a good try and I for one was working flat out to maximise his vote within the Ashford constituency. I found a calculation of the votes in the Euro-constituency from the previous County elections being used to galvanise support among activists and to try and convince them this was an election which could be won. It was always a challenge to involve a lot of Lib Dem activists that it was worth fighting a Euro-campaign. There were a lot of councillors and other top activists who might turn out for John Macdonald  who would not have bothered for Morris or Kinch. Eileen even persuaded a local farmer to go out and vote Macdonald even though he was a Campbell, and he came away from the polling station muttering to himselfi n bewilderment that he had ever done such a thing..

Those county elections statistics for east Kent 1993:
Cons       69, 644    (36.2%)
LD           61, 096    (31.7%)
Lab         57, 599     (29.9%)
Others      4,011      (2.1%)
Almost perfect barchart statistics - but not quite-   Labour in third place but not quite in "can't win here" territory- just too close for comfort.  As indeed so it proved.Compare these figures with the actual result above and the differences are interesting- they probably reflect that Labour was strengthening and the Tories further weakening since 1983, while much improved though the Lib Dem performance was compared with earlier  Euros, there was still a tendency to be weaker at the Euro-level compared with  local elections.

Mark Watts was another known and very professional politician rather than a Euro-specialist and very much in the New Labour mould. My contact with him was through the Egerton Fete lunches which tended to bring together politicians of all colours sitting round a lunch table with their partners and children for a stupendous 3-course lunch, and I had done so with Damian Green and even John Grugeon, so Mark Watts was no great surprise. Mark always reminded me of someone and I've just realised it was Ben Elton!  

[tonyhill]

A. Morris, the Liberal candidate in 1979, was probably Anthony Morris who had been an information officer with the EEC Commission since 1967. Born 1929, educated at Sidcot School Somerset, and Cambridge. (Information from The Times Guide to the House of Commons October 1974 - Liberal candidate for Essex South-East). There was a Times Guide to the European Parliament in 1979 but I rather suspect that it did not sell well, and there were probably none produced subsequently.

[yellowperil]

Jun 7, 2018 19:45:38 GMT tonyhill said:

A. Morris, the Liberal candidate in 1979, was probably Anthony Morris who had been an information officer with the EEC Commission since 1967. Born 1929, educated at Sidcot School Somerset, and Cambridge. (Information from The Times Guide to the House of Commons October 1974 - Liberal candidate for Essex South-East). There was a Times Guide to the European Parliament in 1979 but I rather suspect that it did not sell well, and there were probably none produced subsequentl.

That's the guy!Now I have a little nudge, my memory is working a bit better and the information job at the Commission rings a bell, even Sidcot school which would probably have registered with me at the time. and my impression was a nice enough chap but no great ball of fire!Thank you! I thought A was for Anthony but was a bit suspicious of my memory on that, given that Kinch was also an Anthony.

[yellowperil]

Dont miss the update on the 1994 election!

[yellowperil]

European Parliamentary Elections 1999- South East England

Now we are changing to List elections across this absurdly large constituency, I find along with various drawbacks there should be some gains from a psephological perspective. We will , I hope , now be able to look at the votes not only across the whole constituency but also by Westminster constituency,. And most interesting of all if we can find them, the internal party primaries that determine where names come on the list. With a constituency this big, one wonders what motivates people to stand  for election if they are going to finish up in tenth or eleventh place on a party list? I suppose it would be okay for the sort of candidate who allows their name to go forward to stand as a paper candidate in an absolutely hopeless ward in local elections - and looking at our local election lists the Tories had been particularly good at that , putting up ex-MPs and sitting County Councillors to sit for absolutely hopeless borough wards. The other person I suppose is the ambitious young politician prepared to raise a profile among the party ranks, in stages, so maybe 9th place this time, 5th the time after that, a genuinely winnable place after a decade of trying ?

Not all Euro-constituencies were of course as absurd as South East England. I know there was a party advantage in this in that this enabled the Lib Dems to get two MEPs from each election until the last one and even then uniquely to salvage one place for Catherine Bearder, but I still think it was a nonsense and it could easily been split into two, a genuine South East one (Kent, Surrey and Sussex, basically) and a South Central one (Hants, Berks, Bucks and Oxon, basically). Having an MEP for the South East based in Oxford always seemed a bad idea to me, and blow the party advantage. Incidentally I would probably apply the same argument to London - two London constituencies , one each side of the river, would have made a lot more sense, but a least with London there was a recognisable whole unit which meant something, whereas  the South East England constituency was an amorphous nothing. I know it is a unit of regional government but then that's a nonsense too and would be betters split in two
as above.

Anyway,the list results by regional constituency and for Ashford parliamentary constituency:

South East England
Con    661, 931  (44.4%)
Lab     292, 146  (19.6%)
LD       228,136   (15.3%)
UKIP   144,514    (9.7%)
Green 110,571    (7.4%)

This therefore gave the Conservatives 5 seats, Labour and Lib Dems 2 each and UKIP and the Greens 1 each I havent bothered to list the minor parties and independents who between them got I think 3.6% of the vote and no MEPs.

Ashford Constituency

Con      9432      (47.2%)
Lab      4157       (20.8%)
LD        2684       (13.4%)
Ukip    1708        (8.5%)
Green 1298        (6.5%)
Others  728         (3.6%)  

Thoughts that strike me:
1)how very close Ashford is to being typical of the whole constituency Tories about 3% up,Labour 1% up, LDs 2% down, UKIP and Greens each about 1% down, but the  pattern is very similar and the numbers really close.
2) how pathetic the turnout is, not just compared with general elections but even local elections. 20.000 votes for a whole constituency is really shameful. All our efforts to turn out a decent vote for the Lib Dem list in Ashford netted just  2684 votes across the whole constituency... heartbreaking!

The problem was of course voting for a list rather than an individual, not in itself too much of a problem in my view, but pretty lethal when the whole constituency was as big as it was and the list that long. 11 names  What were the chances of seeing a candidate anywhere in our own constituency who was in a prime position on the list? I  know I met both Chris Huhne and Emma Nicholson during that campaign, but how many other of my fellow Ashfordians did so? If they saw sight of anyone it would probably have been someone low on the list who wasn't going to be elected anyway. ( (I haven't examined full lists for each party for this election, btw, so I will explore the list issue a little more fully for 2004  - I do wonder though what the negative effect of the candidate at no 4 on our list  had on our vote in some quarters though- David Bellotti had the capacity to arouse virulent hatred in certain quarters)

[yellowperil]

European Parliamentary elections 2004- South-East England

In 2004 the number of places available for the South East England constituency had been reduced from 11 to 10, so just a bit tighter on the margins for some parties , eg for Labour and Lib Dems where the issue might be expected  to be whether they got a second member in or not. By 2004 I was retired as a councillor and was fully engaged once more in this particular battle,including the internal party elections which determined the crucial order on the ballot paper for candidates. I  have been looking at the results of these elections for 2004 (positions compared with 1999 in brackets) :
1. Chris Huhne (2)
2. Emma Nicholson (1)
3. Sharon Bowles (3)
4. Catherine Bearder (9)
5. James Walsh (5)
6. Ann Lee (-)
7.John Vincent (-)
8. John Ford(-)
9. Charles Fraser-Fleming (-)
10. James Barnard(-)
 You will notice all the top 5 had previous! The rise of Catherine Bearder was the most marked , though nobody would have expected the eventual outcome that  she would become the last Lib Dem MEP in the country. A number of the candidates turned up in Ashford  to elicit support- John Vincent particularly, and at some point we have seen all of the top 5, though I cannot now quite remember whether all of those were before the nominations were decided or afterwards, during the actual campaign. I know for some getting the members votes which decided the place on the ballot paper was more important than getting out votes in the actual campaign proper - and indeed it was, for your chances of being elected was down to where you were on the ballot paper. In the event of course Chris Huhne had resigned within the year on becoming MP for Eastleigh, and Sharon Bowles as next in line had succeeded and so started on a career which made her one of the most powerful women in Europe.That moved Catherine up to the next-in-line position!

I looked at the top 4 in each of the other "main parties", i.e.those getting members elected, which I suspect were the only  names which  even reasonably involved  voters might have taken in, the only ones where there was the remotest chance of actually getting in,  to see who they were.

Conservatives: Daniel Hannan, Nirj Deva, James Elles, Richard Ashworth- all elected
UKIP: Nigel Farage elected , Ashley Mote elected (but subsequently lost the whip), David Lott, Craig Mackinlay (now whatever happened to him?)
Labour: Peter Skinner elected- but this time only 1 member elected, so Mark Watts in 2nd spot missed out, as did  Ann Davison and Simon Burgess.
Green: Caroline  Lucas elected, Mike Woodin,Miriam Kennett, Keith Taylor ( Keith has now been an MEP since 2010, but a certain member of this forum is on record as never having heard of him!)

And the actual votes:
Con     776,370 (35.2%)
UKIP   431,111  (19.5%)
LD       338,382  (15.3%)
Lab      301,398  (13.7%)
GP       173, 351 (7.9%)
Others 186,845 (8.4%)
notice that very strong showing for "others"- a doubling of those votes since the time before, Quite a few parties were forming and getting quite a few votes, though nothing like enough to get anyone elected.  The bigger performers were the BNP , the Senior Citizens  and the English Democrats,  while the real minnows remained Respect, Peace, the CPA, Pro-life and the sole Independent.

I have not so far located the Ashford constituency figures for 2004, but if and when I find them they will be added here.

Here they are (thanks Pete)
Con     11,148     (40.2%)
UKIP     5,621      (22.7%)
Lab       4,002      (14.4%)
LD         2,973       (10.7%)
GP         1 ,897      ( 5.6%)
Others  2,090       (6.4%)

Very much in line with national and regional trends!