Adventures in local elections, Ashford Borough 1981-2005

[yellowperil]

While we wait all agog for Pete's thematic maps to appear, I will make a start on the next theme which will be one beloved by many a punter on here. Yes, folks, the next bit of excitement will be a review of Ashford's boundaries at both county and borough level. And some time later the constituency review , which will then mean the Borough and constituency will cease to be coterminous.

One immediate consequence will be, unfortunately, that not all Borough wards will from now on fit wholly into the County divisions- there will now be from this point three cases where wards are divided between different county divisions. I will still deal with the Borough wards by the county division as far as I am able, by ascribing the wards to the division they are mostly in, but clearly that will be a bit messier.

The reviews bring pretty massive changes, with the county divisions going up from 6 to 7, while the borough places are reduced from 49 to 43. There will be a change away from the Ashford peculiarity of being almost entirely singe member wards. Up to now there had been just four 2-member wards and 41 singles. From now on we had eight 2-member wards and only 27 singles, and the really small ones like Appledore and Pluckley were gone. Ashford will never be quite the same.

Oh and surprise, surprise , the new boundaries at both borough and county levels were  very well suited to Conservative strengths and extremely bad for the Lib Dems. One might think fairly neutral for Labour because their support was much more geographically concentrated than that of the Lib Dems. I will explore each of the seven new divisions and the borough wards within (or sometimes partly within)them in the next few posts.

[yellowperil]

Ashford Borough Council Wards by County division,from 2003- Ashford Central

Oddly enough, this was the sort-of successor to Ashford North, minus the furthest northerly  and easterly bits which had previously been in either Kennington Lees or Spearpoint, plus Henwood from the old South-East division. In other words it included the old Ashford wards of Bockhanger,  Bybrook, Queens, Warren ,Henwood and Central - the principal bit missing from that being ,even more oddly, the actual town centre.  So whereas the town centre had previously been in North,  now that we had a division called Central the town centre itself was relocated ...into South.  Just what you'd expect.

The new borough wards were 4 - Bockhanger, Bybrook, Godinton(2) and Stour(2),so  6 seats in total.

Bockhanger was a single-member ward,yet approximated to the two former wards of Bockhanger and Warren added together. Bybrook had taken a few bits from the old Bockhanger but was largely unscathed.  Godinton was largely the old Central ward shorn of the Town Centre PD, i.e. it was largely the old Godinton and Repton PDs, but with substantial growth in the Godinton estate itself justifying it remaining a 2 -member seat. Stour was basically the amalgamation of Queens and Henwood , so across the old divisional divide which had been the eponymous river.

Ashford Central had approximately 10, 700 electors.

[yellowperil]

Ashford Borough Council wards by County division from 2003 -Ashford East


Ashford East is the new South- East!

Compared with South East , it has lost Henwood but gained Hampden instead- in both cases the Commissioners choosing to ignore the river, or maybe seeing it more as a unifying factor than a divide- those shared flooding experiences, perhaps. Give or take a few minor adjustments of boundaries, that's it. The change in the Borough wards is quite a bit more extreme, though.There are 5 new wards and only one name will sound  familiar- South Willesborough, but even there the Newtown PD has gone elsewhere. The other 4 wards are Aylesford Green,  Highfield, Norman and North Willesborough(2) - a total of 6 seats
 
South Willesborough was just the old PD of that name but with a lot of new development quite big enough to qualify as a single ward inits own right. Aylesford Green is the old Twelve Acres , plus Newtown : another key boundary marker ignored,not the river this time but the main-line railway. Highfield was a PD within the old Willesborough Lees ward:; now it gets promoted to be a full single ward in its own right. Norman is the amalgamation of Eastmead and Hampden. The name by the way does not commemorate the Conquest  but much more modern history - it was where the bike factory  was. North Willesborough  took in two pre-existing wards in Waterside and  Windmill, plus the Lees PD of the old Willesborogh Lees ward, i.e the bit not in Highfield.

The East division had about 11,700 voters 

[yellowperil]

Ashford Borough Council Wards by County Division from 2003- Ashford South

Ashford South is of course the new Ashford South- but there are changes nevertheless. The main differences will be the inclusion of the town centre already referred to and the transfer of the old Hampden ward, now in Norman and therefore into the Ashford East division, plus one other small change affecting Stanhope, referred to below..

The division has 4 new wards- Beaver (2),Singleton South, Stanhope, and Victoria(2), so 6 members in total. 

Beaver includes a lot of the old Musgrove and Brookfield wards, plus the Singleton Farm PD of the old 2-member Singleton ward, but there are slight boundary changes to even up the numbers, which is relatively easy to do in a dense urban area with no obvious boundaries -if you want a bit of evening up of numbers just move the boundary to the next street.

 Singleton South was basically the old Singleton Village PD  of the old Singleton ward.

Stanhope was a separate parish so you might think would be kept intact, but one road, Speldhurst Close, was removed from the ward and went into the new Ashford Rural South division as part of Washford ward, to keep the numbers down to the point where Stanhope became a single-member ward. One odd thing about that was that if Stanhope was seen as a bit rough by the rest of Ashford, Speldhurst was the bit that Stanhopers thought was a bit rough. If Stanhope was the pimple on Ashford's bum, then Speldhust was somehow considered to be the pimple on Stanhope's bum. Speldhurst, rural? Don't make me laugh. Speldhust now was a separate PD for Stanhope PC elections. It would be interesting to look up and see if anyone voted there.

Victoria was a much enlarged version of the old Victoria Park ward , adding on not only the town centre but odd bits of Brookfield and Musgrove, even a little bit of the old Eastmead, to get it up to the size where it made a 2-member ward. It had a rather odd star-like shape looking like the gerrymander from hell, but rather it was all the bits nobody wanted.

South had about 12,100 electors for their 6 members.
.

[yellowperil]

Ashford Borough Council wards by County Divisions from 2003- Ashford Rural West

The new Rural West is quite a bit different to the old Rural West- eg  it includes Boughton Aluph from the old Rural East  and High  Halden from the old Tenterden  division - quite a wide spread. There were 6 new wards - Boughton Aluph & Eastwell, Charing, Downs West, Great Chart & Singleton North, Weald Central and Weald North. Weald Central  was a double, so 7 members. 

The new Boughton Aluph & Eastwell ward included the parishes of Boughton and Eastwell, of course but that only provided about 850 voters, and Challock and Molash was not included this time, and the difference was made up from an area within the Ashford urban area which would have been within Bockhanger - rapidly expanding estimated at about 500 voters in 2002 but 900 by 2007, so soon the urban bit will outnumber the rural bit.

Charing ward was just the main village, without Charing Heath, which brought the population down to within the top end of the range for a single member ward. There seemed to be a desire to turn the former double wards down into singles -certainly Stanhope and Singleton also went down to one member.

Downs West was a new version of the old Hothfield ward, which had added Challock to Westwell and Hothfield parishes.

Great Chart & Singleton North was in fact the same as the old Great Chart ward - all one parish,but the change of name perhaps signifying that the growth in the population at the Singleton end of the parish now made that the dominant partner.

Weald Central was a preposterous name for a preposterous ward. The two- member ward is boomerang shaped comprising the old wards of High Halden, Bethersden and Pluckley. including Little Chart of course, plus Charing Heath, so 3 full wards on the old system before adding the Charing Heath bit, and there was no road connection between Charing Heath and the rest of the ward without passing through Egerton to get there- quite absurd.

Weald North was the old Smarden ward, unchanged except for being saddled with another absurd and meaningless name. Actually there was a slight redrawing of the boundary but that was a reworking of the perimeters of Egerton parish and the ward still consisted of the two parishes of Smarden and Egerton. I would have supported a name change to the ward if it had named both parishes but these fancy made up "Weald" names with alleged compass points were extremely silly. North of what? Central to what?

Altogether the new Rural West had about 13,100 electors for its  7 members.

[yellowperil]

Ashford Borough Council wards by County division from 2003- Ashford Rural South

Rural South is most clearly the completely new division which takes Ashford up from 6 divisions to 7, and it focuses particularly on the area of most rapid population growth. Some of that growth had gone into the new Rural West especially in Boughton Aluph and Great Chart, and some into the new Rural East, especially Little Burton Farm, but the lion's share went to Rural South in Park Farm, Washford Farm  and Kingsnorth- huge areas of new estates built during the nineties and naughties. Rural therefore wasn't quite the word for a good deal of this unless it was describing the recent past.

Rural South  included the three new wards of Park Farm North, Park Farm South  and Washford- three wards carved out of Kingsnorth to accomodate the new estates lying between Ashford and Kingnorth village, and that still left more estates to the west of Kingsnorth village as part of Kingsnorth, now reduced to a polling district of another silly "Weald" ward, this time Weald East. The rest of Weald East was now  in Rural East - remember Kingsnorth had previously been part of Rural West- you couldn't make this up!  And then there were parts of Weald South (yes really)which included some few genuinely rural bits-  and the some quite remote bits  of the new Saxon Shore ward and just to add further to the confusion in due course Saxon Shore was to be be taken out of the Westminster constituency and added to Folkestone &  Hythe. So this is where it really gets messy!So Ashford Rural South had just 3 borough wards wholly within its bounds, but more than half  of another double ward and smaller  bits of two others. 

That was just the overview. If that has confused you (and it's certainly confused me) I will try to put a bit more detail on, by going through all 6 wards wholly or partly involved.Park Farm North was the slightly older and more completely established part of this big new estate, the largest addition to Ashford since the building of Stanhope, eventually to be bigger even than Stanhope, and in this era of course private as against the local authority development at Stanhope. I would say these two developments would make a good case study of the strengths and weaknesses of each approach but both exemplify the problems of very rapid development on a massive scale. Park Farm North before becoming a ward in its own right had been a few fields with no residential buldings on it at all- now it was fast approaching 2000 electors. But that seemed venerable compared with much of Park Farm South much of which was a few years later in construction,  but was also scheduled to reach 2000 electors before long. Washford, previously usually called Washford Farm , was a similar but slightly older and more established estate, eighties mostly, and as mentioned before, had had Speldhurst Close from the Stanhope estate tacked on to it All three of these  wards were part of Kingsnorth civil parish, as indeed had Stanhope been before being given its own parish status, a privilege not extended to Washford or Park Farm.

Now to Weald East, or at least that bit of it that was placed in the new Rural South division, which was that part of Kingsnorth parish that had not been hived off into something else- basically the original village of Kingsnorth itself and few modern estates lying to the west of the village and south of Washford,, adding up altogether to about 650 voters, together with the outer bits of the parish of Sevington, a very important commercial fringe of Ashford with very few actual residents- only about 30 of those- the populated bit of Sevington had gone into Highfield.  Taken together, the Kingsnorth and Sevington bits amounted to less than half of the Weald East ward, while the parish of Mersham took about 900 voters into the Rural East division.

Weald South was no less messy!  The largest parish in both Weald South ward Rural South division was Orlestone  (about 1100 electors) and the (non-parochial) village of Hamstreet is almost synonymous with Orlestone, except Hamstreet also sprawled over into the neighbouring parish or Warehorne with another say 300 electors. The rest of Weald South/Rural South was made up of two more areas that had been in the old Kingsnorth ward, the parish of Shadoxhurst with about 800 electors, and the hamlet of Stubbs Cross , a PD of Kingsnorth parish with about another 200 electors. It was this Shadoxhurst/Stubbs Cross area that I had found so supportive when I had been doing my two Rural West election attempts in the past. So all of that together added up to about 2400 electors,more than enough to make a single ward, so it had the large parish of Woodchurch added to it with about another 1500 voters, but that was left in Tenterden division!

Finally, Saxon Shore. Another weird name, and I know exactly who to blame for this one- it was the invention and particular hobbyhorse of the Labour councillor Les Lawrie. Those of you who know your Roman history will know that late in the Roman era the Romans were building a series of major forts along the  south -east coast to repel marauding invaders from the European continent, and before the kipperish tendency on here get too excited, I should remind you these pesky outsiders were the Anglo-Saxons. The so-called Saxon Shore extended from Hampshire right up to Norfolk - Portchester the most westerly of these great Roman forts and Brancaster,possibly,or Burgh, certainly, I think the most northerly. So yes the south easterly corner of Ashford borough from Ruckinge round to Aldington might be regarded as part of the Saxon Shore,though now some way inland because of the growth of the Dungeness peninsula and Romney Marsh. The Saxon Shore long distance footpath does indeed pass through, those villages  and the nearest of the great Roman forts, Portus Lemanis or Lympne, is only just over the border into Shepway district. Nevertheless it was extraordinarily perverse to refer to the whole of the south eastern segment of Ashford Borough including quite large bits miles from any conceivable interpretation of Saxon Shore, like Brabourne, Brook and Hastingleigh, as Saxon Shore. In any case the Ashford bit of the Saxon Shore was a minor insignificant bit of the whole thing, rather as the so-called Weald wards in Ashford ,North, East, South and Central, were a minor insignificant bit of the whole Weald.

Okay,rant over.  Anyway,as far as Rural South is concerned only Ruckinge and Bilsington went into the new county division, maybe 750 electors , and the rest of Saxon Shore ,well over 3000, was in Rural East.

The starting point electorate for  Rural South would be well under 10,000 but it was expected to grow rapidly. Only the 3 wards were wholly in the division, but the parts of the other 3 probably added up to the equivalent of about 5-6 wards in total, perhaps.

[yellowperil]

Ashford Borough Council Wards by County division- Ashford Rural East

In the past, we knew what Ashford Rural East was- the successor to the old East Ashford RDC, it was everything beyond the urban limits to the east of Ashford until you reached the border of the next district , which was Shepway, or northwards into Canterbury. Now that some of that- like the Hamstreet-Ruckinge area- had gone into the new Rural South, and some more-Boughton Aluph and Challock- had literally gone West, and given that the old Rural East was if anything already a bit light on numbers, something had to be made up somewhere. The answer it seemed was to take a big chunk out of the urban area- or at least what had always been accepted as urban- and add it to Rural East, with some rather odd consequences.

The new wards making up Ashford Rural East were Downs North (" Downs "as a part of a ward name was only marginally better than "Weald" - at least one couldn't argue that Downs North was in the North Downs, but just a tiny part of it!), Kennington, Little Burton Farm, Saxon Shore but minus Ruckinge and Bilsington,  the parish of Mersham from Weald East, and Wye. So the whole of four wards, the greater part of one more, and the lesser part of a sixth. Two of the whole wards were entirely within what had for a long time been accepted to be part of Ashford town, but it seemed almost to be a matter of policy to marry together bits of established urban areas, with bits of new suburbs, with some deeply rural countryside. It was a formula which certainly seemed to work in the favour of the Conservatives, but maybe that was just coincidental?

Downs North was basically the old Chilham ward , comprising Chilham with Godmersham and Crundale, with yet one more little hilltop community added, in Molash. That was certainly the deeply rural bit. Kennington was the old Lees ward plus a great deal of the old Spearpoint, and although Kennington had been a separate village in the nineteenth century- possibly into the early twentieth century, it had long been part of the urban fabric of Ashford, and the older parts of Spearpoint ward had been part of that. Little Burton Farm was within the old Spearpoint ward and were big new private estates very similar to Park Farm or Singleton on the other side of town. It was that changing demographic which maybe defeated Bob Graham on the last Spearpoint  election- Norman Ayres, his successor, was living on LBF and was part of that demographic. Each of these wards wholly in Rural East were close to 2000 electors each so Kennington and LBF had added nearly 4000 urban voters to this Rural division.

Saxon Shore we have already discussed- the remaining bits that stayed in Rural East were Aldington,  Bonnington, Brabourne, Brook,Hastingleigh and Smeeth  of which Brabourne and Smeeth contributed roughly another 2000 electors, Aldington another 800 and the three small villages another 500 between them.  Weald East contributed Mersham, about another 800 electors, so it is obvious that the bulk of electors in the division were eithe in Ashford or were coming from the bustling M20 corridor villages like Brabourne, Smeeth and Mersham, not the genuinely Saxon Shore villages like Aldington and Bonnington perched high above the old cliff line looking down on Romney Marsh.

Wye was the final component in the Rural East jigsaw, and was at the heart of the division as it always had been and always having a distinctive voice and had grown to over 2000, electors, just the right size to stand on its own without need of an arranged marriage.  

Altogether well over 12,000 electors , with four full wards, rather more than half of a double ward and then  half of another single.

[No Offence Alan]

May 29, 2018 9:48:46 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

I have not yet done the thematic maps for this year. I will add these later

Ashford council area reminds me of the shape of Germany.

[yellowperil]

Ashford Borough Council wards by county division from 2003- Tenterden

Tenterden is the last of these divisions to update and is relatively straightforward -Tenterden as always changes a lot less dramatically than most of Ashford. That said, some of the smaller wards like Appledore, High Halden and Tenterden West were bound to go, especially as the average ward size across the borough was going up from about 1500 to nearer 2000, so villages like Woodchurch that was just about right are now too small on their own. High Halden as we have already seen, left the Tenterden vision to go into rural west and Weald Central ward, while Woodchurch stayed in Tenterden division but strayed over into Weald South ward.Within Tenterden town council area the wards of East and South East, with some of West as well , changed into the two wards North and South- it pays to have a compass with you when working Tenterden it seems.

So there are 6 whole single-member wards, plus Woodchurch in Weald South.The six whole wards are Biddenden, Isle of Oxney, Rolvenden & Tenterden West, St Michaels, Tenterden North, and Tenterden South. 

Biddenden is that relatively rare beast, a village that was a bit oversized before and now right-size  (just under 2000)for the new set-up - Easy!

Isle of Oxney is about the right size too, but was newly created by amalgamating two existing wards Appledore with Kenardington (about 750: easily the smallest of the old wards),and Wittersham with Stone (about 1300), to create a ward fractionally above quota but where little expansion was likely and indeed the population might be expected to fall. Strictly, only Wittersham  and Stone are on Oxney, by the way but you get a good view of the island from Appledore. Oh and it hasn't really been an island since the river estuaries silted up in medieval times, but they're slow to notice these things round these parts.

Rolvenden needed to be added to somehow to get it up to the new size and the easiest way to do that was to create a hybrid ward , part in Rolvenden  and Newenden parishes and part in the Tenterden Town Council area.  Rolvenden continues to have the two PDs called Strete and Layne- they're a bit behind with their spelling in these parts too. Rolvenden is the main bit though -about 1200 fairly evenly divided between Strete and Layne, Newenden adds less than 200 and the bit of Tenterden West only about another 600- most of the old West ward is redistributed, but that gets Rolvenden up near the 2000 mark.( Eileen  incidentally is currently residing in that small bit of Tenterden West in this ward- its where she goes for respite care and indeed for day care twice a week when she isn't in respite, so we know this little patch quite intimately)

St Michaels is more or less unchanged although I think there are very minor boundary adjustments. But exactly the right size!

Tenterden North  is broadly similar to the old East ward of by-election fame but adds some bits of the old West.  It's slightly on the low side at about 1800 but would grow.

Tenterden South is similar to the old South-East, again adding a bit of  West. Also slightly undersized with room for growth.

As we have already observed, the parish of Woodchurch stays in Tenterden division  even though it is in Weald South

 About 11,700 voters for six wards and almost half of another double.

[yellowperil]

May 30, 2018 19:34:12 GMT No Offence Alan said:

May 29, 2018 9:48:46 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

I have not yet done the thematic maps for this year. I will add these later

Ashford council area reminds me of the shape of Germany.

Find that quite difficult to make fit  but where I live in Pluckley would probably be quite a good fit in that case  for Bad Munstereifel, which is Ashford's twin town and somewhere I have also lived from time to time.

[yellowperil]

Most  of my recent posts on this thread have been pursuing the changes in borough wards and county divisions post 2003 , a highly necessary study if you want to compare the earlier results with the ones coming later (after I intended to close down this history,when I had stopped being a main player in it). All those changes were also preoccupying us in the years before they came into play - really from about 2000 onwards, and I do have documents discussing various possibilities for the reviews from 2001/2 particularly. However these are in a sense side issues in a thread which was always intended to be primarily about election results, so I am now going to go back to dealing with the two main sets of elections in 2001- the county council elections of May that year and the subsequent general election - two sets of elections so dispiriting personally for me that it soon after began my process of partial withdrawal from political activism. Maybe I have been putting off facing up to the realities of all that. As I have already explained , I did not stand or play much of a role in the 2003 elections, so can look at those as an outsider, but did return for one final try in the county elections of 2005, by which time I was 66 and had other things to worry about. 
Edit- well did anyone spot the error there? What I had meant to say, of course, was the county council elections scheduled for May that year but of course both county elections and general elections were rescheduled for June because of a certain well known bovine problem- how could I forget?So the elections ran together with a quite unprecedented degree of apathy- national general election turnout down to 59%. Bear that in mind as we consider the 2001 campaign.

[yellowperil]

Preparations for the 2001 elections. 

We approached the 2001 elections with a degree of lethargy unlike any recent ones and that probably reflected the national mood. We needed in place- a parliamentary candidate, an agent, a campaign director and 6 ( still 6, remember -we are still fighting on the old boundaries)county council candidates.

We had advertised for a PPC and in the end after various possibilities turned us down, no takers. We had no internal potential candidates although one, Tony Hardwick, had made tentative enquiries but hadn't in the end followed it through- a pity as I think he would have been good. With a general election looming, we got to the point where we would get a parachute landing on us. We were lucky to get Keith Fitchett, a senior councillor in the London Borough of Lambeth. Keith quite understood we were fighting this time for a reasonable third place, as we were unlikely to shift Damian Green and Labour in these days of the Blair hegemony was also now out of reach - the challenge was to stay in a different league from UKIP or the Greens, and to improve our fighting skills for the local elections and for the future. Keith was just the man for that and he taught us a lot about campaigning skills, especially mass canvassing techniques. He was continuing to live in Brixton though and rely on the trains to get him to  commitments in Ashford, and as he was using the notoriously bad line from Victoria through Maidstone to Ashford he was often delayed. I remember all too vividly a scheduled meeting with the NFU where Keith was hopelessly delayed by some holdup on the line and the NFU members were not overly impressed by a candidate living in London- but then the time before we had had to cope with John Williams being delayed in Germany...

I had decided that as group leader I had too much to do to do the campaign manager job in the way I had done it before, and also too busy to fight the counties, so I had limited my role to that of agent, which was supposed to be just looking after the paperwork and the legal side of things while somebody else would take on the far more time consuming role of managing the campaign, and that role fell to Bob Davidson. That proved to be a disaster and I still really don't know why, but to my mind Bob just didn't step up to the challenge and whether that was his fault or mine, or just one of those things I just don't know. I certainly felt that the campaign was pretty rudderless. Anyway the results of the general election campaign when they came showed us going backwards, but maybe that was only to be expected, and in line with what  I had indicated above.

General Election 2001
Damian Green  (Con)   22,739  (47.4%)
John Adam(Lab)            15,380  (32.6%)
Keith Fitchett (LD)           7,236  (15.0%)
Richard Boden (Green)  1,353   (2.7%)
David Waller (UKIP)        1,229   (2.3%)

[The Bishop]

May 30, 2018 22:20:06 GMT yellowperil said:

Edit- well did anyone spot the error there? What I had meant to say, of course, was the county council elections scheduled for May that year but of course both county elections and general elections were rescheduled for June because of a certain well known bovine problem- how could I forget?So the elections ran together with a quite unprecedented degree of apathy- national general election turnout down to 56%. Bear that in mind as we consider the 2001 campaign.

59%, but yeah the lack of interest was pretty palpable and definitely took the shine off Labour's otherwise stonking result for me.

[yellowperil]

May 31, 2018 9:19:33 GMT The Bishop said:

May 30, 2018 22:20:06 GMT yellowperil said:

Edit- well did anyone spot the error there? What I had meant to say, of course, was the county council elections scheduled for May that year but of course both county elections and general elections were rescheduled for June because of a certain well known bovine problem- how could I forget?So the elections ran together with a quite unprecedented degree of apathy- national general election turnout down to 56%. Bear that in mind as we consider the 2001 campaign.

59%, but yeah the lack of interest was pretty palpable and definitely took the shine off Labour's otherwise stonking result for me.

slip of the fingers, sorry-and  didn't spot it - corrected now, thanks,  but as you say the general feel was right. If you weren't winning it felt pretty dismal.

[yellowperil]

County Council Elections June 2001

All six county divisions consisted of a three -horse race, at least nominally,  and in practice it generally was so- no paper candidates, and no candidate getting much below 20%  anyway, and as last time  no minor candidates from other parties, which was perhaps a bit odd given that Greens and ULIP  were reasonably serious  contenders for the general election. One might think  they might have thought it was worth putting down a marker in the counties at the same time.  It might even have been one of the things that helped Keith Fitchett to look like a more credible candidate for the Lib Dems than Richard Boden did,say, for the Greens.

The principal concern for the Lib Dems was of course to get Fred Winslade safely back in South -East, and in the climate prevailing we knew there would be a substantial push by Labour this time and nothing could be taken for granted. The other five were there to maximise their vote  and frankly were not expected to win this time. We had experienced candidates in all 5 other divisions- Bob Packham in South, Melvyn Elliff in  North, Len Mickelwright in Rural West, Nick Fawcett in Rural East, and Barry Wright in Tenterden, but some needed a bit more hand-holding than others when they were part of what was in effect a general election campaign and everybody was at full stretch. We did lowver have our minds on elections elsewhere this time and all our county council candidates were expected to put in sessions in Folkestone & Hythe, where we really thought we had a chance of winning the parliamentary seat.

The Tories had Mike Angell in North, Richard King in Rural West, Charles Findlay in Rural East, and Mike Hill in Tenterden three defending councillors and a strong candidate to replace Jo Hawkes, while Jane Marriottwas prepared to seriously challenge Fred in South East even though she was from Chilham -the campaign was a far more serious campaign there than we had seen from the Tories for a very long time. Even Simon Bates in South was by now an established candidate in it to be taken seriously, though I would think he would have been surprised to win at a time when Labour was riding high in the polls.

Labour of course were expecting wondrous things- they thought they could win the parliamentary seat, they thought they could at least add North and South East to give them three of the county seats and they were campaigning quite seriously in the two Rural seats and even Tenterden.. Probably the biggest push was in North where Mick Hubert, never one to undersell himself was sure he would outstrip Mike Angell as he had before in the Borough election.

I have include the change percentages this time as they are I think quite illuminating.

Ashford North
M Angell  (Con)          3395 (41.2%, +3.2%)
M Hubert (Lab)          3142  (38.2%,+4.8%)
M Elliff (LD)                 1693  (20.6%, -8.0%)

Ashford South
D Smyth (Lab)                2886 (53.2%,-1.8%)
S Bates (Con)                  1389 (25.6%, +1.0%) 
R Packham  (LD)             1151 (21.2 %, +0.8%)  

Ashford South-East
F Winslade (LD)                 2621 (36.5%, -6.3%)
R Davies (Lab)                    2475 (34.4%,+3.6%)
J Marriott (Con)                 2093  (29.1%, +2.7%)

Ashford Rural West
R King (Con)                       5209  (54.3%, +7.5%)
J Moriarty (Lab)                2293   (23.9%, +3.2%)
L Mickelwright (LD)          2090   (21.8%,-10.7%)

Ashford Rural East
C Findlay (Con)                   4422 (55.7%, +4.3%)
N Fawcett (LD)                    1856 (23.4%,-7.2%)
V Wheatley (Lab)                1657 (20.9%, +2.9%)

Tenterden
M Hill (Con)                         5607 (59.7%,+5.3%)
B Wright (LD)                       2003 (21.3%, -4.3%)
S Storer(Lab)                        1786 (19.0%, -1.0%)

It is always remarkable that in the end this always turns out as  4 Cons, 1 Lab and 1 LD, whatever exciting trends seem to be going on. As with the general election figures, though , the Lib Dems seem to be going backwards  and we certainly didn't find the expected consolation looking eastwards towards Folkestone.From a personal point of view loss of second place in Rural West was particularly hard to take.Nationally of course this was quite a good day for the Lib Dems with parliamentary seats rising to the dizzy heights of 52 MPs ( though not as good for the counties generally, I think.) It was a pretty dispiriting day for us down in the bottom right hand corner of the country. The post-mortems would be hard, and not terribly good tempered.

[Foggy]

May 31, 2018 8:42:48 GMT yellowperil said:

General Election 2001
Damian Green  (Con)   22,739  (47.4%)
John Adam(Lab)            15,380  (32.6%)
Keith Fitchett (LD)           7,236  (15.0%)
Richard Boden (Green)  1,353   (2.7%)
David Waller (UKIP)        1,229   (2.3%)

It strikes me that this would not have looked entirely out of place as a result from the 2017 general election... although the actual result (on different boundaries) was somewhat different in Ashford on that occasion, in part thanks to a much higher turnout in terms of raw votes. 

[tonyhill]

As you approach the end of this history there are a few observations I would like to make as I think of them. The first is: I don't know the back story of this site, but I have gleaned that there was a predecessor that somehow got trashed. Is there any way that what you have written can be saved for posterity? Digital information seems prone to vanish into the ether. At least if something is written on paper there is a chance that someone in the future will be able to reclaim it from the dusty reserve stacks. At the very least, can you make sure that Kent County Archives have a copy of what you have written?

[yellowperil]

Jun 1, 2018 7:07:52 GMT tonyhill said:

As you approach the end of this history there are a few observations I would like to make as I think of them. The first is: I don't know the back story of this site, but I have gleaned that there was a predecessor that somehow got trashed. Is there any way that what you have written can be saved for posterity? Digital information seems prone to vanish into the ether. At least if something is written on paper there is a chance that someone in the future will be able to reclaim it from the dusty reserve stacks. At the very least, can you make sure that Kent County Archives have a copy of what you have written?

I understand the point you're making and will consider whether I want what I have written to be available in some other form. I would say though that putting it onto an online vehicle like this , which  has this feeling of impermanence, is actually quite liberating. It maybe enabled me to be franker and more open at times than I might have been with a paper vehicle.  We all know the widespread feeling that you can say what you like online because it's only online, and we all know some of the consequences of that, but I do recognise this sense of liberation is quite helpful in this case. It has also helped that I am writing here for a tiny niche market who might appreciate what I am saying and might understand- it's so niche that it's probably only a small subset of members of this forum...

By the way, I'm not maybe as near the end as you may think/hope! I still need to look a bit more at the numbers for 2001, to tell the sad tale of the fallout the resulted when we digested the scale of the disappointment that entailed, the tale of the 2003 local elections, the first for a couple of decades where I stood on the outside and looked on, and I have now confirmed I will go on to the county elections of 2005,the the last time with my name on the ballot paper. (oh and I suppose if I'm doing the county 2005 I will need to cover the GE at the same time, won't I ?) There's probably enough there to keep me going through June! Something else too- in my original prospectus for this I had also included the Euros and so far I've left them out, but had wondered about putting them all together at the end! And I also thought I might have a valedictory what-did-it-all-achieve-was- it-all-worth-it sort of piece here rather than adding it to the what-have-councillors-ever-done- for-us thread  elsewhere! ( Sorry, justlooking !)

[yellowperil]

Comparison between County and General Election voting patterns 2001

I have been doing the same sort of sums for the combined 2001 elections as for those in 1997 and for the same reasons. In the general election this time there were 47, 937 votes cast and in the counties 46,768. The split between the main  parties  for the county elections (general election figures in brackets)was  as follows:

Conservative 22,115 (22,739)
Labour           14,239  (15,380 )
Lib Dem         10,414     (7,236)

In other words, although the Lib Dems were still doing much better in the Counties than in the General, the difference was much less pronounced than last time , and the Labour party was now making their lead over the Lib Dems in the Westminster election tell at County level as well, to take a comfortable second place. Lib Dems were now  down to a little over 22% of the vote in a local election where they should have been riding much higher and Labour at well over 30% were doing remarkably well even though not managing to translate that into actual gains.

[tonyhill]

OK - maybe I'll leave any other thoughts for a few more weeks then! It would be interesting to know whether you are right about the Ashford saga only being read by a small sub-set of people on the Forum. I don't necessarily think that a lack of response is due to a lack on interest in what you have been writing - it is not the sort of subject that lends itself to intervention about pubs, railways and other irrelevancies, but it it has been fascinating because the texture is both universal (at least for people involved in English politics of the period) and place and person specific.