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Post by yellowperil on May 9, 2018 8:09:27 GMT
Ashford Borough Council wards by county division 1987- Ashford South
South Ashford had of course been the been the Labour heartland and by 1987 Labour were very much on the defensive but they had a strong core team who would take a lot of shifting. The Alliance had by now made their breakthroughs in Singleton, Victoria Park and Stanhope- could they hold on there and build out from there? The main targets were the second seat on Stanhope, Woolreeds and maybe Hampden where the battle between Labour and Independent offered a chance to come through the middle. Brookfield and Musgrove were almost certainly now seen as the Labour core and unlikely to fall to the Alliance, while holding Victoria Park after the defection of Jo Hawkes to the Tories was the biggest challenge of all.
Brookfield
L Lawrie (Lab) 287 (50.1%)
M Knight (Con) 150 (26.2%)
J Nineham (SDP All)136 (23.7%)
Hampden
M Hayes (Lab) 185 (35.7%)
K Roberts (Ind) 147 (28.4%)
V West ( SDP All) 106 (20.5%)
M Kenyon (Con) 80 (15.4%)
Musgrove
D Madgett ( Lab) 273 (42.1%)
W John Longshaw ( Lib All) 206 (31.8%)
D Horn (Con) 169 (26.1%)
Singleton (2)
M Babs Holloway (Lib All) 440 (53.5%)
R Smith (Lib All) 387
A Froude(Con) 287 ( 34.9%)
S Johnson (Con) 281
A Rogers (Lab) 95 (11.6%)
B Naughton (Lab) 94
Stanhope (2)
P Laughton (SDP All) 393 (45.6%)
R Small ( Lab) 349 (40.5%)
R Hughes (Lab) 327
J Scanlon (SDP All) 292
P Powderham (Con) 119 (13.8%)
A Weighill (Con) 101
Victoria Park
J Hawkes (Con) 341 (58.7%)
A Tippett (SDP All) 135 (23.2%)
F Smith (Lab) 105 (18.1%)
Woolreeds
F Norton ( Lab) 259 (42.6%)
A Coleman (Lib All) 238 (37.1%)
V Powney (Con) 111 (18.3%)
So in the end 5 Labour, 3 Alliance (2 Lib ,1 SDP) and 1 Conservative elected. Palma Laughton now firmly in command in Stanhope, but although she was able to bring her running mate up to a respectable score not enough to get up to the two Labour candidates. The lead Labour candidate, Ron Small was by the way another of the disability campaigners standing in this election, quite a feature of 1987, and this one successful. Singleton was now looking pretty solidly Liberal and one might begin to forget it had ever been a Labour ward.Jo Hawkes had no difficulty in holding Victoria Park largely I guess on a personal vote regardless of political colours. A bit of a disappointment for Arthur Coleman in Woolreeds , the veteran campaigner and local historian just missing out on what might have been his best chance - a close parallel to what had happened to Paul Burnham over in Kennington. Hampden was ...interesting, but in the end Mike Hayes had had too much fire power for the True Ashfordian, who lost his seat.1987 was not on the whole a good year to be an independent. As expected the sitting Labour councillors in Musgrove and Brookfield were able in the end to hold on reasonably comfortably, but not before John Longshaw a liberal from Singleton, had given Derek Madgett a bit of a scare in Musgrove- Singleton was now reaching the point where it exported activists into neighbouring wards.
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Post by yellowperil on May 9, 2018 10:47:25 GMT
Ashford Borough wards by county divisions 1987- Ashford South East
South East was of course the Liberal stronghold and with the Alliance getting stronger it was time to show just how strong it could be - at least in the six wards that wasn't the True Liberal stronghold of South Willesborough and Newtown. With Gordon Turner firmly in the Alliance camp if more SDP than Liberal, this was no time to cause problems so he would get a clear run. The other six wards included a number of new strong candidates to join the Liberal establishment of Clive Dennis, Deryck Weatherall, and by now we might say Fred Winslade. In Eastmead, Barbara Simmons who had made a name for herself as a campaigner on flooding issues. In Willesborough Lees, Rob Tovey, a highly political, youngish and energetic who really wanted to be a councillor and reverse the Tory breakthrough in the Lees, and in Waterside the first Ashford Liberal BME candidate, a male nurse from Mauritius called Serge Georgie Koowaree. (spoiler alert- 31 years later George is still a Lib Dem councillor at both Borough and County level, and has never lost an election in his life. I think he's now on 12-0).
Eastmead
B Simmons (Lib All) 408 (50.3%)
M Brennan (Con) 262 (33.0%)
M Jeremiah (Lab) 133 (16.7%)
Henwood
F Winslade ( Lib All) 365 (58.0%)
H Evans (Con) 186 (29.6%)
D Reynolds (Lab) 78 (12.4%)
South Willesborough
G Turner (True Liberal) 646 (76.6%)
R Stone (Lab) 118 (14.0%)
A Brown (Con) 79 (9.4%)
Twelve Acres
D Weatherall (Lib All) 606 (86.3%)
J Jeremiah (Lab) 53 ( 7.5%)
A Clatworthy (Con) 43 ( 6.1%)
Waterside
SG Koowaree (Lib All) 386 (64.7%)
S Cass (Con) 158 (26.5%)
M Read (Lab) 53 (8.9%)
Windmill
C Dennis (Lib All) 504 (70.1%)
H Matthews (Con) 173 (24.1%)
J Selwyn (Lab) 42 ( 5.8%)
Willesborough Lees
R Tovey (Lib All) 649 (51.6%)
J Ransley (Con) 568 (45.2%)
M Bland (Lab) 41 (5.8%)
So 6 Alliance (all liberal) and 1 True Lib- a clean sweep you might say. The previous defeats in Willesborough Lees, Eastmead and Henwood could now be forgotten, and there were several councillors who were going to have a significant role in Ashford politics for years to come- among those returned here were a future council leader and mayor( Deryck), a future planning chair and mayor ( Barbara),and two county councillors (Fred and George) and another Mayor (Gordon). Only Clive was coming towards the end of his career, and Rob was to serve for a relatively short time and then move away.
George, lovely man that he was (is), after being a councillor for a few days, said how impressed he was by the officers, that they all seemed immediately to know who he was. The fact that he was immediately recognisable because he was a different colour to everybody else totally passed him by.
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Post by yellowperil on May 9, 2018 15:07:13 GMT
Ashford Borough Council wards 1987 by county division- Ashford Rural West
The Alliance parties were anxious to have candidates more or less everywhere- and necessary in view of the PPC's ambition to win the parliamentary seat, which was probably partly behind the targeting problems noted in North particularly. So there was also quite a lot of effort going into what looked pretty hopeless rural seats when maybe we should have been concentrating on the one which maybe looked genuinely winnable, i.e Pluckley. The only seat not tried was Reg Harrington's Kingsnorth but there was a candidate against the other sitting independent, Winnie Swaffer in Great Chart, in retrospect an error perhaps. The Liberal party had never shown much interest in Rural West and had hardly ever stood a candidate there. The only Liberal standing this time was Keith Brannan in Bethersden who had past experience of standing as an Independent- when he came to the Borough -wide adoption meeting/ rally which was a much higher profile event than the parties had ever attempted, he commented it was the first time in his life he had ever been to a political meeting. I got the impression ( and I was co- chairing the meeting with the Liberal chair) that he had every intention of making it his last. That made 6 SDP candidates in the division with 8 places up for grabs. The Conservatiives were fighting everywhere and definitely expected to win all 8, as they went hard for the independents Reg Harrington and Winnie Swaffer, and had maybe forced the retirement of Jo Winnifrith in Charing. One other feature was the retreat of Labour. Before they had paper candidates in most places , now only Great Chart remained, on the face of it an odd decision as most people regarded Winnie Swaffer as a closet socialist standing as Independent,and she now faced a 4-way split.
In Pluckley the retiring Merrial Carr had been replaced for the Tories by a much younger and energetic farmer called Jim Rogers, prominent in the NFU and living in Little Chart, who attempted a full canvass of this deeply rural patch mostly on his bicycle. The Tories had taken in the threat and planned carefully to overcome it.For Eileen this was to be a very different challenge from last time. I divided my time between Pluckley and Central, but mostly I was in Pluckley ( I did also spend a few hours with June Tower the doctor's wife standing in Smarden and with Keith Brannan in Bethersden). On the Charing SDP candidates the lead candidate is Grace Thomson lest anyone think it was her husband who was still excluded from party politics because of his involvement with running the IBA, while I thought it was John Sherwood who was my running mate in Central and Joan who was Grace's running mate in Charing (elections centre have them the wrong way round) Edit- I find unbelievably that I am wrong on this last point and the good folk at Elections Centre were right- teach me not to rely on my dimming recollection and not on printed sources. I think the issue was that it was mostly John who came with me canvassing in Central while Joan went out with Grace in Charing, but it was definitely Joan on the ballot paper with me and I have now found an obit notice for Joan written by me a good few years later where I said she was my running mate in this election. I have left my original statement in place above though as an object lesson to teach everyone not to rely on memory- it's a fragile thing.
Bethersden
R Oliver (Con) 386 (65.6%)
K Brannan (Lib All) 202 (34.4%)
Charing (2)
G Tottey(Con) 877 (65.9%)
J Williams (Con) 641
G Thomson (SDP All) 453 (34.1%)
J Sherwood(SDP All ) 293
Great Chart
P Wynn Green (Con) 295 (46.8%)
A Fagg (Lab) 121 (19.2%)
W Swaffer(Ind) 116 (18.4%)
K Cornhill (SDP All) 98 (15.6%)
Hothfield
C Oliver (Con) 362 (60.3%)
C Ruffle (SDP All) 238 (39.7%)
Kingsnorth
R Harrington (Ind) 828 (69.8%)
R Dixon (Con) 358 (30.2%)
Pluckley
E English (SDP All) 334 (52.8%)
J Rogers (Con) 299 (47.2%)
Smarden
H Hilder (Con) 590 (69.1%)
J Tower (SDP All) 264 (30.9%)
So 6 Conservative seats out of 8, but the SDP had taken their principal target seat and Reg Harrington had shown that a determined Independent could do far more than just hang in there. The Alliance vote share was generally pretty good which satisfied Neil Macmillan as our PPC- the solid votes in Charing, Hothfield, Smarden and Bethersden really quite encouraging in what the Tories thought was their territory, and their anti-independent onslaught had only partly worked for them.But above all we had shown that with balanced targeting we could actually win rural seats and I don't think the old Ashford Liberals had ever really thought it could be done. The interventions of Labour and to be honest Alliance candidates in Great Chart though had handed an independent seat to the Conservatives, and before long everybody including the other Tories were to have reasons to regret the election of the appalling Peter Wynn-Green as the councillor for Great Chart. There was a rumour that a significant number of Great Chart voters thought they were voting for Alan Wyndham-Green who was the noted philanthropist who lived in Godinton , the local great house and effectively Lord of the Manor. If they did, they made a great mistake.
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Post by yellowperil on May 9, 2018 18:54:04 GMT
Ashford Borough Council wards by council division 1987- Ashford Rural East
Rural East was always a lot harder for non-Conservative parties to make an impression, although I always thought this was simply not having more than a handful of people to get things going. Certain wards had shown some promise -Brabourne for the Libs, Hamstreet for the SDP and Wye for the Greens, but the Conservatives were really dominant and some wards looked really hopeless -Boughton Aluph, Chilham, Mersham and Aldington. When it came to 1987 there were SDP candidates in Hamstreet (John Hallett was really well established) and Brabourne ( Peter Rossiter trying to build on the earlier Liberal work) and the Liberals had Dorothy Buckingham from Willesborough standing as a paper candidate. Nobody in the other 4 but they weren't competing with two independents in Mersham and Wye ( Edith Stickells in Mersham was later to be a Lib Dem candidate, and Andrew Porter was the Green PPC). However that meant that two Conservatives (Julian Nicholson in Boughton Aluph and Jim Smith in Chilham) were unopposed, and of course that realised the Conservative activists from those wards were free to go off and help elsewhere.
oh and of course, no sign of Labour anywhere in the division.
Aldington
P Boulden (Con) 345 (67.3%)
D Buckingham (Lib All) 168 (32.7%)
Boughton Aluph
J Nicholson (Con) unopposed
Brabourne
C Goodall (Con) 560 (72.0%)
P Rossiter (SDP All) 218 (28.0%)
Chilham
J Smith (Con) unopposed
Hamstreet
P Stutchbury (Con) 513 (58.2%)
J Hallett (SDP All) 369 (41.8%)
Mersham
J Simpson (Con) 584 (63.1%)
E Stickells (Ind) 342 (36.9%)
Wye
JC Coey (Con) 504 (54.9%)
CA Porter (Ind) 414 (45.1%)
So predictably Conservatives 7 out of 7 in Rural East, some reasonably competitive challenges from assorted opposition forces in various wards but nobody really close to a breakthrough. At least there was nowhere the Great Chart mistake of a divided opposition here, one might say!
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Post by yellowperil on May 9, 2018 21:26:03 GMT
Ashford Borough Council wards by county division 1987- Tenterden
Tenterden division was always pretty detached from the rest of the Borough - one might say sometimes they were rather reluctant partners. which always produced an interesting dynamic- the council members were overwhelmingly conservatives (even when they weren't Conservatives) who often had a rather different outlook on life to the rest of the borough and especially Ashford town, so they might have preferred to be somewhere else in terms of the Borough and the parliamentary constituency, but the more political Conservatives realised that without Tenterden the Ashford political entity would have been so much more marginal -Ashford Tories needed Tenterden to keep them safe. The Alliance too had a rather distinct take on things in Tenterden and here the fact that both parties were small meant that they huddled together far more, and by 1987 the Alliance in Tenterden seemed more like a single political party (Liberal Democrats?!)and less like two parties cooperating with each other.
For 1987, the Conservatives were determined to cut out the independents from the council, a boroughwide policy, so they were even aggressively going after Tom Richards in Biddenden when he refused to join them. That meant they were standing to win in all 10 seats and in Rolvenden Jim Hoad the manufacturer of the famous Korker sausages struck lucky, and was returned unopposed. The Alliance also decided not to oppose Tom Richards to give him the best chance of keeping the Tory out, but had candidates everywhere else. I'm not sure there were clear targets - Tenterden SE, Appledore and Wittersham probably only paper but that leaves 5 candidates they thought had a chance -surely too many. Otherwise there were 3 Labour candidates all it seems of the flimsiest paper variety and one other Indy in the form of Scilla Greenfield in South East , HoC worker, sometime Tory councillor and once later to be a Lib Dem quite briefly , but here trying her luck as an independent in a very bad year for Indies.
Appledore
CA Harper (Con) 380 (84.6%)
H Sidle (SDP All) 69 (15.4%)
Biddenden
B Bowyer (Con) 500 (60.8%)
T Richards (Ind) 323 (39.2%)
High Halden
H Apps (Con) 432 (75.8%)
C Anthony (SDP All) 138 (24.2%)
Rolvenden
AJ Hoad (Con) unopposed
Tenterden St Michaels
E Barrows (Con) 505 (63.0%)
A Pickett (SDP All) 271 (33.8%)
B Penny (Lab) 26 (3.2%)
Tenterden East
H Blake (Con) 643 (69.9%)
M Le Poidevin (Lib All) 277 (30.1%)
Tenterden South East
A Hale (Con) 337 (47.9%)
J Roylance (SDP All) 262 (37.3%)
S Greenfield ( Ind) 82 (11.7%)
J Howlett (Lab) 22 (3.1%)
Tenterden West
C Rosson (Con) 390 (66.4%)
R Davies (SDP All) 197 (33.6%)
Wittersham
E Sweatman (Con) 472 (70.7%)
D Whittingham (SDP All) 139 (20.8%)
M Honeysett (Lab) 57 (8.5%)
Woodchurch
G Weller (Con) 608 (70.6%)
E Anthony (SDP All) 253 (29.4%)
So the net result of all that was that the Conservatives finished up with 10 out of 10 as planned, and the Tenterden Alliance had picked up quite a few strong(ish?) second places. Quite a good result in terms of getting a message out for the coming General Election, and some handy fodder for future bar charts(!) but in the short term the Conservative strategy had triumphed as it gave them unquestionable control of the council. Overall Ashford BC now looked like this : Con 31, Alliance 10, Lab 6, Others 2, ( the surviving" others " being Gordon Turner and Reg Harrington, leaning towards Alliance but any Con-leaning independents gone. Without the 10 Tenterden Conservatives this would look much more balanced though there still would have been a Conservative overall majority, and of course if you looked at the 24 seats that made up Ashford Town, then the story was very different(Alliance 9, Con 8, Lab 6, others 1).
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Post by Pete Whitehead on May 10, 2018 10:59:07 GMT
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Post by yellowperil on May 10, 2018 17:12:04 GMT
Great Maps Pete- I do like the big yellow blob which is my wife, if you see what I mean.
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Post by yellowperil on May 11, 2018 20:29:04 GMT
General Election 1987
As soon as we were past the Local Elections we were into the June General Election - a silly idea which nobody would do nowadays. The Alliance went into these elections a good deal more confident and more organised than in 1983, and Neil Macmillan was putting a huge amount of effort in. He had a lot of drive and the resources of being a successful businessman, although by the time he got through this election he was really struggling to re-establish his business from the weeks of neglect- it seems to me that is quite a common problem with deeply committed self-employed parliamentary candidates. We had come through the locals with a greatly extended presence across the constituency, and one of the priorities was to build voter identification in those wards where we hadn't had Borough candidates- the white bits on Pete's excellent map of the Alliance vote share above this. I remember quite extensive canvassing sessions in Chilham and getting an earful from an irate resident in Boughton Aluph when we were noisily making our presence felt - blaring loudspeakers from Neil's battle bus (so-called, it was actually his Range Rover)on one of the prettiest village greens in England, but we were making an unabashed attack on areas considered so Tory nobody else would dream of setting foot there. We did also make our presence felt in our newer areas of strength like Eastmead, Henwood, Stanhope and of course Pluckley. I remember Neil using the bank holiday to come out to Little Chart which was in the midst of a grand summer fete ( the two Little Chart residents working together on running that fete were Jim Rogers the recently defeated Tory candidate for Pluckley ward, and Chris Ruffle the recently defeated SDP candidate for Hothfield ward, and Eileen and I took Neil round the crowds of people there we knew introducing him as the next MP for Ashford, to a little polite scepticism.
I think we knew really by then that although we felt we had made great strides we actually weren't doing anything like well enough to really defeat Keith Speed. There were things going on nationally - and internationally- that were going to be too strong for us. But we were beginning to meld as a team and the us-and-them divide between SDP and Liberals was diminishing. So I was there as SDP chair and campaign manager but Clive Dennis was doing the technical agent stuff, Gordon Turner was doing the Razzmatazz bit he loved so much, and all our new 10 strong council team were all doing their bit canvassing and delivering in their ownwards.. Grace Thomson and Joan Sherwood had worked on getting us and then manning a town centre HQ which was a step up from the caravan in 1983. Unfortunately it was literally that -a first floor office over the big music shop on Bank Street, so not ideal in terms of disability access, but we did get a lot of attention. We could probably get a majority in Ashford Town or somewhere near it, given that Labour was just about at their weakest, but although we were beginning to make an impact in the country areas, in the end with the much higher turnouts in a general election there were far too many solidly conservative votes out there to make the difference.
K Speed (Con) 29,978 (56.5%)
N Macmillan (SDP All) 14,490 (27.3%)
M Wiggins (Lab) 7,775 (14.7%)
CA Porter (Green) 778 (1.5%)
So Neil was left terribly disappointed and struggling to get his business back together again, but the rest of us were quite heartened and felt we had something to build on. Labour and the Greens must also have been quite concerned with what really had been quite a poor return for the effort they had put in, but Keith Speed must have felt mightily relieved to come through so strongly in the end. In the RIP thread for January this year Carlton had remembered that Keith was a man who had sweated profusely, and we had made him sweat for a bit before finding that extra gear and storming ahead. The national scene, the change in the national mood over the Falklands etc, had helped him of course, but his own local work especially in relation to the Channel Tunnel and Ashford station had also been significant. Never forget Ashford was a railway town through and through
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Post by Andrew_S on May 11, 2018 21:10:20 GMT
I thought Keith Speed was still with us but in fact he died in January this year. I must have missed the news in the RIP thread.
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Post by yellowperil on May 12, 2018 9:09:16 GMT
The SDP on the Brink, 1987
I said at the outset that this thread would, inter alia, discuss the rise and fall of the SDP and that might be of interest to others in small parties which rose and fell in similar manner and UKIP is the most obvious parallel.Looking back I am astonished at how quick the unravelling came after the results of the general election were known. The letter from Shirley Williams as party president to all area parties asking for debate on the future relationship with the Liberals went out a week after the results were in, and the wording of the ballot on merger was out by July 3rd, only 3 weeks from election. And for those not familiar with the details of this the options were 1)"a closer constitutional framework for the Alliance short of merger" and 2)" a merger of the SDP and the Liberal Party into one party". You will note that neither the status quo nor complete separation and going their separate ways, were considered viable options. I had formed my view that merger was indeed the only viable option and that was clearly the majority view nationally and locally. This is a local history so I will try to keep my discussion of the debate essentially to Ashford. I am told we had 3 resignations from the party immediately, which was quite high- the estimate was only 100 nationally at this point. The local party had an extraordinary general meeting in the Dr Wilks Hall , the seventeenth century Ashford Grammar School, now part of Ashford Museum, a suitably historic meeting place for the most momentous assembly in the young party's history, and it took the form of a debate between two national politicians- Rosie Barnes for Option 1 and Tom McNally for Option 2. I chaired that meeting , but asked to vacate the chair for a few minutes during the ensuing debate and handed over to the vice-chair so I could make my own contribution, which was I hope a reasoned but passionate support for option 2, which was well received by the majority but furiously denounced as unconstitutional by the supporters of Option1. When it came down to it there were only 3 vocal Option 1ers, and I suspect they would have actually preferred a status quo option and only went for 1) with some reluctance, which probably weakened their position further. The three were Alan Pickett, my immediate predecessor. as chairman, Bill Miller, and Rick Nye, who by this point was a national delegate to CSD, the party conference. There was an attempt by Alan at the next meeting of the executive to censure me for my intervention in the extraordinary meeting. The minutes say the chairman "received support from the committee", modified by hand when the minutes were later agreed to read" by a majority of the committee"! You can tell things were getting tense!
I notice that by August I had been appointed as substitute for Rick at the CSD meeting due to take place in the Portsmouth Guildhall and Eileen and I duly went off to Portsmouth and stayed in a Southsea B&B chez a certain Mrs Thatcher! That was fine, but the actual meeting was the most poisonous party conference I have ever attended. Didn't quite put me off Portsmouth for life!
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Post by tonyhill on May 12, 2018 13:02:14 GMT
I can't remember the circumstances, but I attended the Portsmouth Conference as a Liberal Party observer. That was a period of my life when, unfortunately, I stopped writing a diary, and my memory is now such that I remember very little about it. I was pleased by the outcome, though, but much less so by the next conference I went to (a Liberal Regional one) in, I think, Oxford, where the main subject for discussion was the name of the new party. There was a substantial lobby for "The Democrats" - didn't Paddy Ashdown favour that? - and I remember one delegate arguing that if we were called the "Liberal Democrats" the public might confuse us with the Japanese party of the same name. "Social and Liberal Democrats" was the cumbersome compromise, and not the name I favoured.
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Post by yellowperil on May 12, 2018 13:56:13 GMT
From Salads to Liberal Democrats 1987/8
The opening few weeks of the new party, what one might call the salad days of the party were interesting, exciting even and extremely frustrating in equal measure, and I imagine that was the case nationally as well as in the local situation which I am concentrating on here. Membership of the old Liberal Party had been a fairly fluid and localised affair with members being recruited and membership subs chased up when people had time to spare from other activities whereas us Social Democrats were used to a computer based listing pouring out of Cowley Street, and that was just one example of two very different ways of thinking about how political parties worked. the Liberals were being modernised and brought into the computerised SDP world but as time went on I could see the value of the interpersonal contacts inherent in the old Liberal way of doing things and indeed we found we spent a lot of time calling round on our members who were failing to renew subscriptions on the automatic computerised system, so we finished up with an amalgam of the shiny new SDP way of doing things and the old muddle-through-somehow ways of the old Liberals. I am using that as a metaphor for how the merger proceeded. One of the early tests of the merger in the local situation was the election of officers to the new local party and the key battle was that for the chairmanship- would it be an old Liberal or a new SDP, and at this stage that's how it would be viewed both from inside and outside? Well as it happens the battle lines for that were to be Clive Dennis v me, and as Clive still had brought a lot of his old" enemies" within the Liberal Party into the new party whereas my"enemies"in the SDP were staying outside, the result was a foregone conclusion and was a bit of a humiliation for Clive which we had to do the best we could to smooth over. I think that was for us the last internal party election where anyone took any notice of which predecessor party we came from.
Then there was the issue of the party name. I notice in the minutes of the final meetings of the old SDP, there was a memo about the conditions we imposed on going forward to merger which included "a neutral title" and the suggestion was the " Democratic Alliance" which looking back at it 3 decades on was hardly likely to be seen as a neutral title by any of the Liberals around. The first choice nationally was the much derided Social and Liberal Democrats , the so-called Salads, and the Blackpool conference, the first of the new party, actually voted for Democrats (and I spoke from the rostrum at that conference in support of that, although it was Shirley Williams' speech that won that one), and it took a few months of turmoil before the eventual choice of Liberal Democrats stuck and by hindsight I don't think there was any doubt that that was right. If I look at the notes of the early local by elections we do have ones in which the candidates'descriptions were as SLDs and others as Democrats, before the Lib Dem description stuck. It's something (one of the many things) we owe to Paddy Ashdown to get sorted out.
The big local issue affecting us in Ashford through these years was the whole question of the railways the status of Ashford International station the course of the Channel Tunnel Rail Route aka HS1, and all the spin offs from all that. I am not going to get into detail on the various debates to be had at each stage in the development of this process, or it could totally take over the thread. Suffice to say it dominated a lot of our thinking through these years and at the same Blackpool conference referred to above the Ashford Local Party had a policy motion before conference and I spoke to that, I know ,though 30 years on I'm a bit hazy on the detail of that experience. I haven't proposed a policy motion at a Lib Dem national conference since, though I've spoken at a few. I know after I had spoken at this debate I was asked by Clive Dennis , who was also there, if I would put myself forward as a potential parliamentary candidate. I am happy to say I said no and continued to have a life.
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Post by yellowperil on May 12, 2018 16:30:59 GMT
Ashford Borough By-Elections 1988/9
I will now include the results of the next five by -elections in Ashford Borough which are what we have by way of local elections in the first two years of the Liberal Democrats-or whatever they were calling themselves at the time. Just to underline the point about name confusion on three they were on the ballot paper as SLDs and two as Democrats, and just to really show how silly that was (a) we had one SLD and one Dem even when they were on the same day , and (b) we had one SLD and one Dem even when they were husband and wife in the same party. There were mixed fortunes as we shall see.
Singleton 24/5/88
A serious blow for the new party when the Holloways, two of our brightest stars, decided to depart for Wales and especially serious to lose Babs, the person who more than anybody had made Singleton into a Alliance? Lib Dem stronghold. We put up Ken Corrnhill who had stood as a paper candidate in Great Chart and had some strengths( bags of self confidence) but frankly was not in the same class as a potential councillor as Babs had been. First test of strength for the new party!
K Cornhill (SLD) 367 (43.6%)
J Buffit (Con) 343 (40.7%)
B Naughton (Lab)129 (15.7%)
So the first test of strength negotiated but to be honest I think that was mostly down to the good reputation of the departing councillor than anything else, and this would be a diminishing asset. Brendon Naughton by the way was an excellent candidate for Labour and we shall hear more from him anon.
Kennington Lees 16/3/89
Woolreeds 16/3/89
Waited another year and the two came along together so a Tory seat in Ashford North and a Labour seat in Ashford South, and both looking very winnable on a good day. This was a real headache to work out the best strategy. Which was the better bet? We had held Kennington not so long before, and in terms of increasing our position on the council taking the seat off the party of government could be argued to be more significant than taking one off Labour. The Tories were defending a majority of just 7 votes. On the other hand Woolreeds now looked to us a closer call even than Kennington, and the Labour majority there had been only 23. Did we have sufficient resources to go flat out for the double whammy, taking one of each rival party in the same night? It may have been hubris but we decided we had to go for it. For Kennington Lees we selected Eddie Gerrard, a lecturer at the same college where Eileen and I both worked , who had polled reasonably respectably in 1987 in next door Bybrook. Paul Burnham for personal reasons didn't want to go for it, unfortunately, even though he had been the one so close to taking it two years before. In Woolreeds our doughty old warrier Arthur Coleman was prepared to have what was likely to be his last serious crack at getting on to the council. We certainly found the resources to have a serious go at it, but of course the other two parties put all their fire power into their one defence and let the other one go. It was all looking pretty good but the whole day was atrocious weather which only got worse as the day went on - from early evening to past close of poll the rain just came sheeting down. We had enthusiastic teams of knockers up who just kept going regardless but it really was getting quite desperate and I had to ask myself what any normal person would do on a night like that If the bell rang and some raving lunatic was standing there dripping over everything and beseeching them to go out in that lot and vote. I have vivid memories too of the count which for both wards took place in a church hall in Woolreeds. The carpark was full of potholes and on my way in already dog-tired and soaked through I tripped and measured my length in one of them. And then to complete the humiliation, the results:
Kennington Lees
J Kemp (Con) 242 (46.8%)
E Gerrard (Dem) 206 (39.5%)
A Lawrie (Lab) 70 (13.7%)
Woolreeds
A Wells (Lab) 252 (51.2%)
A Coleman (SLD) 195 (39.6%)
D Horn (Con) 45 ( 9.2%)
So a double whammy of the wrong sort and both successful parties had actually elected men who would considerably strengthen their own ranks - both future mayors, committee chairs and Allen Wells a future group leader ( like a lot of other political folk in Ashford, I have to admit yet another ex-student of mine).
Central 4/5/89
Ok this is the one where Michael Ryan resigned and the attack was on his record as a councillor which I got muddled with earlier on. No excuse for that mistake really given that this time I was actually the candidate. Central was always a difficult ward to work because it was a double ward with a larger and more mobile population and the three very different polling districts, but I had been the lead party candidate last time as little more than a paper candidate, so it was seen as my duty to see it through in this by-election. It wasn't really seen as winnable, more a question of putting up a high profile, if I could do that please without taking anybody from anywhere else. The reason for that of course was that the County Council elections were on the same day and so everybody was doing their own thing in the six county divisions. North was however seen as our best hope of a County gain this year and Central ward was a quarter of North county division, and by far the most difficult quarter. So the other bit of this difficult job while looking for my own votes was to get a load of people to vote for Paul Burnham for county at the same time. Still I had an interesting time going round on my own mostly and managed quite a lot of canvassing in the circumstances and among other things found and resurrected a couple of people who had been Liberal councillors many years before who had been allowed to lapse and had lost all contact and got them working for us again. By the end of this time I had quite a little team of deliverers and other helpers where previously there had been nothing.
M Claughton (Con) 414 (39.7%)
G English (SLD) 373 (35.9%)
M Smith (Lab) 254 ( 25.4%)
Probably the Tory and Labour votes, and even to some degree mine but probably to a lesser degree, were inflated by the fact it was a County election going on at the same time rather than just a stand-alone by-election, so I was quite heartened to get within 50 votes of the new Conservative, but the new councillor Mike Claughton, professional actor and amateur cricketer, was another new entrant who would be hard to beat, and I remembered all this when years later I got the job in council of moving the election of Mike as Mayor...the other candidate who did quite well was the Labour candidate Mary Smith , and the galling thing is that she was a colleague who worked under me. Through gritted teeth I congratulated her on her performance.
Stanhope 4/5/89
Another by- election timed to coincide with the counties which was bad news for the fledgling party and hugely likely to help Labour in their quest to hold on to South Ashford at county level. This was because Palma Laughton after the merger had found herself in the Liberal Democrats and wasn't entirely happy- she was coming under a lot of pressure from other members of her family who were tribal Labourites, and in the end had crossed the floor to Labour ( well actually she didn't have to cross the floor in a hemispherical chamber, just shift along a bit). And now the disabled Labour councillor Ron Small departed and Labour put up Frank Laughton to be her running mate, and the result of that would be a foregone conclusion. We put up Ken Cornhill's wife Jean, who was of course a Singleton resident not Stanhope and they were different as chalk and cheese. Jean was a candidate as a token that we still had an interest in Stanhope, but the real battle was to stay ahead of the Tory, and the fact that the Tories had bothered to put up a candidate was almost entirely due to the fact of the county struggle for South Ashford (with Jo Hawkes as their candidate)was going on alongside.
F Laughton (Lab) 412 (72.4%)
A Pantling (Con) 104 (18.4%)
J Cornhill (Dem) 52 (9.2%)
Well that was emphatic enough!
Edit- it strikes me I have not explained who the Labour candidate in Stanhope was. It would be an easy assumption to think that it was Frank Laughton senior, and that this was establishing another of those husband -wife partnerships that are common enough. This however was Frank junior who was Labour through and through and exerted great pressure on his Mum to conform. Palma was liable to give in whereas she would never have done so to her husband!
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Post by yellowperil on May 13, 2018 7:56:50 GMT
fairly faint praise for a guy who won. I suspect his name will return in future missives with some question marks. For anyone reading through later, I may need to explain this comment referred to Ken Cornhill in Singleton and was made before I added the other 4 by-election details to the previous post. Boog's wasn't wrong, though! |
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Post by Pete Whitehead on May 13, 2018 11:09:36 GMT
I like the symmetry of the two by-elections held on the same day in Kennington Lees and Woolreeds. I expect it was rather small comfort that you won over 400 votes across the two wards with the other parties on only around 300
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Post by yellowperil on May 13, 2018 11:20:44 GMT
I like the symmetry of the two by-elections held on the same day in Kennington Lees and Woolreeds. I expect it was rather small comfort that you won over 400 votes across the two wards with the other parties on only around 300 Yes, we were well aware of that and no, it was no consolation whatsoever.  |
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Post by yellowperil on May 13, 2018 11:42:42 GMT
County Council Elections 1989
( Actually I had entered a load of this already including all the results and comments, and the lost it all just as I was about to save it in one go, so starting again with firm memo to self to keep saving it in small chunks!)
Having dealt with the by- elections which ran alongside the County Council elections of May1989, it is now time to turn to the County elections themselves. On the face of it, the strategy for these should have been fairly straightforward for the LibDems (let's start calling them that) this time. We could be pretty confident that Fred Winslade was safe in South East so a perfectly standard campaign, just enough to show we were serious, should have sufficed there. North looked definitely winnable so all the extra effort needed to be inserted there, and as already made clear my contribution to that was to do what I could to close the gap on the Tories in Central. Most other available spare capacity was to pour into the 4 Kennington wards (Bybrook,Bockhanger, Spearpoint and Lees) where most of our vote was concentrated. I think the view was that Queens and Warren were much more difficult to squeeze many votes from. The other 4 divisions (South, the two rural Ashford divisions and Tenterden) must get by with minimal support. These sort of targeting decisions look sensible when they come off and rather silly when they fail.
For the Conservatives the principal task was to defend North for Jeanne Brinton, which was likely to be challenging, while there was no threat to the other three divisions they held. Of course they undoubtedly faced demand from Jo Hawkes to go all out for a win in South and they probably had the numbers in depth to support her there if the average Tory foot soldier was prepared to spend very long in South Ashford which might be a matter of doubt- a bit far off their comfort zone. We all thought Labour would be fully occupied defending South but the fact that they selected Mike Hayes , a man of great determination, to fight North might have filled us with a realisation that Labour actually had greater ambition than that. And then there was the added complication of the intervention of the Continuing SDP with Rick Nye standing in South and Bill Miller in Tenterden.
Oh and I have used LD for all our candidates as that's what several different sources I have used said. I suspect that is anachronistic and I don't know what was on the ballot paper- I suspect it was Democrat.
Ashford North
J Brinton (Con) 1879 (40.7%)
CP Burnham(LD) 1514 (32.8%)
M Hayes (Lab) 1226 (26.5 %)
Ashford South
M Bland (Lab) 1881 (55.8%)
J Hawkes (Con) 905 (26.8%)
A Coleman (LD) 307 (9.1%)
R Nye(SDP) 278 (8.2%)
Ashford South-East
F Winslade(LD) 2206 (55.3%)
M Jeremiah (Lab) 982 (24.6%)
H Matthews (Con) 798 (20.0%)
Ashford Rural West
J Grugeon (Con) 2406 (58.3%)
R Rawlings(LD) 1165 (28.1%)
A Lawrie (Lab) 561 (13.5%)
Ashford Rural East
R Balicki (Con) 2511 (59.5%)
M Shea (LD) 934 (22.1%)
D Reynolds(Lab) 778 (18.4%)
Tenterden
C Carr (Con) 2839(60.8%)
E Anthony (LD) 665 (14.2%)
F Smith (Lab) 643 (13.8%)
CW Miller (SDP) 523 (11.2%)
In the end, after all the excitements a no change set of results. The big surprise, however, was the scale of the Labour fightback. Once they were sure they were going to win in South they switched the attack to North and that might explain both Mike Hayes relatively strong showing and that of Mary Smith in the Central by-election. In both cases of course they came third, but far from being squeezed at this juncture the momentum in the last day or two was with them. It did mean that their intervention was principally helping the Tories. We of course took some comfort from Fred's emphatic win, but failing to get North was a real disappointment and we didn't get the votes we expected from the Kennington wards ( if anything we did rather better in the "weak" Central ward where I had been working). Rural West was also rather sad as we went backwards there as Bob Rawlings ,our excellent candidate, spent much of his time (under orders) in Kennington helping Paul.
The Conservatives had the satisfaction of holding North but probably faced the wrath of Jo Hawkes - a second Party had let her down in her target of becoming the County Councillor for South Ashford. The Conservatives however were in a position to sweeten the pill by offering her theTenterden division,her home patch after all, for next time,and a guaranteed County Council place.
The two SDP candidates found that they were in last place in each case and that was likely to be the end of the road for them. Neither of them were the sort of people to sit around for years hoping for a little upturn in their fortunes. You had to be a Liberal for that.
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Post by yellowperil on May 14, 2018 16:57:41 GMT
Ashford Borough Council Wards by County Division 1991 -Ashford North
We now come into the nineties and what I think of in Liberal Democrat term as the Paddy Ashdown years. They were more confident than the late eighties when the party was feeling its way after the traumas associated with the merger, and the confidence was born out of some informed planning rather than wishful thinking. That is not to say we had entirely left all that behind! In Ashford we were already beginning to forget who had been Liberals and who were Social Democrats before the merger. My own role was changing in that I had passed the chairman's gavel on to others (there was a limit of 3 consecutive years and I cunningly counted in my years chairing the SDP before). Now I had a rolling position as campaign manager, which included a lot of the planning for these 1991 Borough elections- which included finding and training up candidates and writing quite a lot of the literature for them-including some of our old- hand councillors, but some of those I left entirely to themselves!And as you will see from the results, some you win and some you lose!
North had always had some promise for us although it always tended to fall frustratingly short of potential. We had some difficulty recruiting candidates of the quality we wanted and we were now a bit more prepared to let wards stay uncontested if we didn't have the right candidate. In the end in North we finished up leaving Bockhanger and Warren empty, and therefore a straight Con/Lab fight and just fought the other six seats.
We had found David Broughton who was one of my younger colleagues at the College where I worked, and who had started a residents group covering the Victorian terraces close to the shopping centre in Ashford and who was raising issues with anyone who would listen -all the predictable ones- noise, traffic late night rowdyism in the car parks, and, yes, potholes. He joined the party and was a natural fit for the Lib Dem candidate for Central, working the Town Centre while I spent more time in the Godinton electoral district I had been working for nearly 4 years. Central Ward covered.
Then we found Bob Graham, a real old fashioned gentleman along time Ashfordian who knew everybody,with a military background which meant , we discovered, he was a real fan of a certain ex-SBS commando and who was anxious to stand in his own ward which was Spearpoint. I signed him up with alacrity. For the other 4 places we had to bring in people we thought had the potential to be good councillors but for one reason or another couldn't stand in their own patch, usually because we already had someone in place there. The first of those was me! Then also, Bob Cowley an agreeable and energetic young man who lived in South Willesborough, Gordon Turner's patch . We offered him Bybrook.
Dorothy Buckingham from South Willesborough, who had done pretty well when she had only been a paper candidate in Aldington last time, we asked to go after Harry Lavender in Queens.Edith Stickells, the chair of Sevington PC which is part of Mersham, had stood as an independent against John Simpson had now joined the party and wanted to stand but definitely not in her own patch where she kept a low political profile- we offered her the Lees and she accepted. All of these would make good councillors if they could get elected, and it was quite hard to tell who had the best chance.
The Conservatives were definitely not at their strongest, and on the defensive. Where they had newish councillors, especially from the by-elections they were at their best, notably with John Kemp in Kennington Lees and Michael Claughton in Central. Labour were going all out for Bockhanger, and surprisingly as it looked unpromising territory for them, for Warren, the poshest of the Ashford urban wards , but where they had someone who looked a strong candidate called Mick Hubert. Otherwise most of their candidates looked like paper. The Greens were also fielding a candidate, in Central of all places.
Bockhanger
M Levy(Lab) 517 (52.0%)
H Henderson ( Con) 477 (48.0%)
Bybrook
C Findlay(Con) 312 (45.3%)
R Cowley (LD) 237 (34.4%)
W Watson(Lab) 140 ((20.3%)
Central(2)
M Claughton (Con) 488 (45.1%)
R Kegos (Con) 471
G English (LD) 324 (29.9%)
D Broughton (LD) 320
T Heath (Lab) 193 (17.8%)
V Bonaccorsi(Lab) 159
S Marsh (Green) 77 (7.1%)
Kennington Lees
J Kemp (Con) 400 (50.7%)
E Stickells (LD) 239 (30.3%)
R Tagg (Lab) 150 (19.0%)
Queens
H Lavender(Con) 256 (43.7%)
D Buckingham (LD) 200 ( 34.1%)
T Chicken ( Lab) 130 (22.2%)
Spearpoint
R Graham (LD) 292 (45.7%)
H Moorhead (Con) 226 (35.4%)
J Britcher (Lab) 121 (18.9%)
Warren
G Ford ( Con) 359 (60.7%)
M Hubert (Lab) 232 (39.3%)
So in the end, delight at Bob Graham's famous victory, but quite a lot of disappointment elsewhere. The new Tories from recent by-elections did indeed do well while one established councillor (Henry Moorhead) crashed in flames. Labour was performing quite strongly where they put the effort in and were actually doing better than expected even with their paper candidates.
Overall Con 6, Lab 1 ,LD 1
I was of course disappointed with my own result and after 3 goes at central Ashford from my rural location, was ready to give up on that idea.Mind you I had spent a lot of the campaign in other wards because of my particular role, and as we shall see, some of that time was paying off.
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Post by yellowperil on May 14, 2018 20:53:52 GMT
Ashford Borough Council Wards by County Division 1991- Ashford South
South Ashford was becoming much more settled politically by the 1990's- this was all natural Labour territory, it seemed, and after the great Labour crash of the eighties the natural order was reasserting itself, it seemed, especially it looked as though Stanhope appeared to be back firmly in Labour hands , even though the Laughtons were never going to be simple Labour loyalists. The senior and more orthodox Labour councillors in South Ashford- Les Lawrie and Derek Madgett- had been joined by Mike Hayes and Allen Wells and they all looked pretty immovable, giving them a solid block of red on the map. So the real issues here were whether the Lib Dems and Tories could hang on to what they were still holding, i.e the two Singleton seats for the Lib Dems and Jo Hawkes' Victoria Park for the Tories- plus of course there was just the possibility of the Tories pinching Singleton from the Lib Dems.
The Lib Dem strategy was simple. At all costs we had to hold the two Singleton seats. For the rest, even Stanhope which had been ours not so long before, we only needed paper candidates, and when it came to Victoria Park we were decided in our view that we should not put up a candidate, and by now we were thinking we would not object to a Labour gain or two against the Tories. The Conservatives were the party in power and we knew that our best chance of getting change was going to require co-operation with Labour.Our considerations when selecting candidates for South, outside Singleton, were therefore very different from North. We were much less concerned with whether the candidate would make a good councillor because we knew they weren't going to win. We did want people who were prepared to be active campaigners, were hard working foot sloggers- a rather different skill set. And in an area predominantly white working class we selected people who fitted into that milieu. There was a lovely couple with whom I became good friends called Vic and Jean West , real rough diamonds, who took on two of these wards and worked their socks off which gave Derek Madgett and Mike Hayes something to worry about.
Brookfield
L Lawrie ( Lab) 397 (65.3%)
J Cornhill (LD) 124 (20.4%)
M Knight (Con) 87 (14.3%)
Hampden
M Hayes ( Lab) 262 (57.8%)
J West (LD) 103 (22.7%)
A Austen (Con) 88 (19.4%)
Musgrove
D Madgett (Lab) 307 (50.4%)
D Horn ( Con) 140 (24.3%)
V West (LD) 128 (22.3%)
Singleton (2)
K Cornhill (LD) 369 (44.8%)
R Smith (LD) 340
A Crowther (Con) 292 (35.4%)
D Leavey(Con) 287
W Mitchell (Lab) 163 (19.8%)
S Moon (Lab)
Stanhope (2)
P Laughton (Lab) 458 (61.8%)
F Laughton (Lab) 414
B Down (LD) 149 (20.1%)
A Weighill(Con) 134 (18.1%)
Victoria Park
J Hawkes (Con) 316 (52.8%)
B Naughton (Lab) 282 (47.2%)
Woolreeds
A Wells (Lab) 360 (65.8%)
A Findlay (Con) 110 (20.1%)
T Kirton (LD) 77 (14.1%)
The South overall picture remained Lab 6, LD 2, Con 1, but that hid a subtle shift towards Labour. The Lib Dem plan had worked pretty well and the paper candidates had just about delivered what was expected of them, and that was delivery mostly in Singleton. Jo Hawkes now looked pretty vulnerable to Brendon Naughton in Vic Park if that competition was ever to be re-run, but Jo's attention was shifting towards the Tenterden county division.
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Post by yellowperil on May 15, 2018 8:45:52 GMT
Ashford Borough Council wards by county division 1991- Ashford South East
South East looked pretty safe for the Lib Dems (and the only exception the South Willesborough stronghold of True Liberalism, and Gordon was of course an active Lib Dem , just not when it came to the council group) The Conservatives were noticeably weaker than in previous years and nowhere was this more obvious than in South East where they were really struggling to find paper candidates to the extent that they were having to use the Brintons- Tim (ex MP) in Eastmead and Jeanne (sitting county councillor) in Twelve Acres. Only in Willesborough Lees and Windmill did they make any effort and then only up to a point, the rest were definitely paper. Labour any better _ noneof their 7 candidate were much more than paper, the nearest to a serious candidate being Miranda Grugeon (Em to her friends) in South Willesborough. Em, okay , yet another ex-student of mine, was the niece of the Tory leader of KCC but that branch of the family never saw eye to eye politically. Em was later to join the Lib Dems at one point. As far as the Lib Dems were concerned 2 changes in personell, which may explain the faint flicker of interest from the Tories in those two wards . Rob Tovey had left the area for work,and so Willesborough Lees was entrusted to Bill Heaton, a bank executive who was actually Barbara Simmons' boss. Clive Dennis had finally retired and moved away, and his successor was intended to be Bob Davidson whose very Scottish tones would add a new dimension to the voice of LibDems in Ashford. Another potential Lib Dem councillor with a military background, Bob together with Bob Graham and Bill Heaton was to shift the political balance of the Ashford Lib Dems somewhat to the right. Oh, and the time was coming when the Lib Dems would be referred to as the Bob party. Eventually the council group would include Bob Graham, Bob Davidson, Bob Cowley, Bob Rawlings and Bob Packham. Just as well Rob Tovey had left or he would have felt the odd one out...
Eastmead
B Simmons (LD) 446 (68.2%)
A White (Lab) 124 (19.0 %)
T Brinton (Con) 84 (12.8%)
Henwood
F Winslade (LD) 387 (71.7%)
D Puxty(Con) 85 (15.7%)
A Reid (Lab) 68 (12.6%)
South Willesborough
G Turner (True Lib) 578 (68.2%)
M Grugeon (Lab) 198 (23.3%)
C Vavasour (Con) 72 (8.5%)
Twelve Acres
D Weatherall ( LD) 530 (78.1%)
J Jeremiah (Lab) 124 (18.3%)
J Brinton (Con) 25 (3.7%)
Waterside
SG Koowaree (LD) 519 (81.7%)
L Hewings (Lab) 43 ( 6.8%)
P Vavasour (Con) 37 ( 5.8%)
T Golding (Ind) 36 ( 5.7%)
Willesborough Lees
W Heaton (LD) 776 (62.3%)
B Heritage (Con) 389 (31.2%)
B Moon (Lab) 80 ( 6.4%)
Windmill
R Davidson (LD) 455 (58.8%)
G Dodswell (Con) 228 ( 29.5%)
D Reynolds (Lab) 91 (11.8%)
All according to Lib Dem plan and resulting in 6 LD and 1 True Lib. The majorities for the Lib Dems were beginning to look pretty impressive, especially George Koowaree's when you remember this was a black councillor in a WWC ward with three experienced opponents one of whom was his Liberal predecessor in the same ward,now standing as an independent!
Overall the scores in the three Ashford Town divisions were LDs 9, Con 7, Lab 7, 1 True Liberal.
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