By-elections - 9th January 2014

[countryboy]

The winning candidate for Haverhill East, Tony Brown UKIP said a few words


"Would just like to say a big thankyou to the people of our great town for putting their trust in Paul and myself to represent you at the town and borough , this result will send a massive shock wave through the conservative led borough council , the message that it sends out is that the people of our town are fed up with being treated as second rate citizens in this unequal relationship that is called st edmundsbury. Thanks again" !!

[Tony Otim]

Very good performance from UKIP in Haverhill.

The Tonbridge result is a bad one for the Tories.

[marksenior]

The Oxted South result was a LD gain from Conservative LD 329 Labour 270 . Bit of a surprise to me as I was expecting a Labour win .

[Pete Whitehead]

Labour haven't been able to win this ward for quite a while and while the LDs have tended to be weak there the absence of a Tory candidate obviously provides plenty of tactical anti-Labour votes

[Deleted]

It was a terrible result for us, but most of the rest of the seat is not UKIP friendly to anywhere near the same extent.

[Pete Whitehead]

That isn't really true.
Looking at the divisions that are wholly or mostly within this seat in May the UKIP share was as follows:

Brandon 45.9% *
Haverhill East 39.1% *
Mildenhall 38.9%
Row Heath 34.7%
Clare 31.6%
Exning & Newmarket 30.7% *
Blackbourn 30.3%
Haverhill Cangle 29.8% *
Newmarket & Red Lodge 28.4%

* = UKIP councillor elected
Average is about 34%

Haverhill East was clearly one of the better results, but its hardly true to say the rest of the seat is nowhere near as UKIP friendly. If anything the northen part of the seat (Brandon, Mildenhall etc) is even more UKIP friendly than Haverhill and the weakest part of the seat which appears to be the Newmarket area is hardly an electoral desert for the party

[carlton43]

Jan 10, 2014 11:59:03 GMT joe said:

It was a terrible result for us, but most of the rest of the seat is not UKIP friendly to anywhere near the same extent.

YET!!!

[The Bishop]

Jan 10, 2014 11:41:26 GMT @trident said:

Jan 9, 2014 23:43:39 GMT timmullen1 said:

Sorry but I think it's got to be concerning that Labour are under-performing from where they were in 2003; whilst we are not looking at a 1997 landslide in 2015, I do think we need to be at least where we were pre-2005 in areas outside the urban heartland.

I am somewhere in between these two views. I do find it disappointing that we have not shown any real signs of revival in places like this - traditional pockets of support in our weaker areas. I would like us to have as broad a base as possible and unlike Mike I don't think we can or should write off whole demographic categories or regions of the country because they don't share all of our culture and attitudes. I actually want people in Haverhill to vote for us.

However, in response to Tim I would point out that it's a FPTP system and the name of the game is getting the votes in the seats where we need them to form a government - West Suffolk, with a 13,000 Tory majority and Labour in third place, isn't one of them.

This result fits in with last year's CC elections in that a lot of UKIP's best results came in formerly Labour areas where we haven't recovered our lost strength. Like you I want us to be winning in as many places as possible, but I think part of the problem is that our organisation atrophied in places like Boston and Haverhill when we were in power. As it did in many other places of course, but I suspect that rebuilding has been easier in the bigger cities/towns (as EAL has said, being somewhere that has a significant possibility of electing a Labour MP in the forseeable future is a major factor too)

Let's not lose sight of the big picture, though. Both this and the Tonbridge result were disappointing for us, but *dreadful* for the Tories.

[Deleted]

Jan 10, 2014 12:39:33 GMT The Bishop said:

Jan 10, 2014 11:41:26 GMT @trident said:

I am somewhere in between these two views. I do find it disappointing that we have not shown any real signs of revival in places like this - traditional pockets of support in our weaker areas. I would like us to have as broad a base as possible and unlike Mike I don't think we can or should write off whole demographic categories or regions of the country because they don't share all of our culture and attitudes. I actually want people in Haverhill to vote for us.

However, in response to Tim I would point out that it's a FPTP system and the name of the game is getting the votes in the seats where we need them to form a government - West Suffolk, with a 13,000 Tory majority and Labour in third place, isn't one of them.

This result fits in with last year's CC elections in that a lot of UKIP's best results came in formerly Labour areas where we haven't recovered our lost strength. Like you I want us to be winning in as many places as possible, but I think part of the problem is that our organisation atrophied in places like Boston and Haverhill when we were in power. As it did in many other places of course, but I suspect that rebuilding has been easier in the bigger cities/towns (as EAL has said, being somewhere that has a significant possibility of electing a Labour MP in the forseeable future is a major factor too)

Let's not lose sight of the big picture, though. Both this and the Tonbridge result were disappointing for us, but *dreadful* for the Tories.

True, but next weeks by election is the sort of place that we need to be beating you in - not here.

[Deleted]

Jan 10, 2014 14:58:24 GMT @trident said:

Jan 10, 2014 13:29:14 GMT joe said:

True, but next weeks by election is the sort of place that we need to be beating you in - not here.

Broadheath ward in Trafford?

The by-elections to which I pay most attention are red-blue contests in marginal seats, so we will both be following that one with interest.

By-elections in safe Labour wards are mostly a formality in the current political climate.

Red-yellow contests just tell us what we already know - occasionally the LibDems can pull off a result if they have a strong local candidate or issue, but in most cases the LibDems' fate was sealed the moment they went into coalition with the Tories.

Blue-yellow contests can be interesting but the results are all over the place and I don't think they tell us very much about the national state of those two parties.

Blue-purple contests in strong Tory areas can be quite entertaining but for me it's like watching politics in another country - they just don't affect me one way or the other and I don't have a stake in the outcome.

Red-purple contests can be fun too. I think Broadheath, like my ward - Tynemouth, will be increasingly tory with lower turnouts. In a by-election I therefore think we will marginally gain it.

[East Anglian Lefty]

There are relatively few real red-purple contests. There are strong UKIP performances where once you had strong Labour performances, and you have strong UKIP performances where they hoover up the anti-Labour vote but the Labour base vote is strong enough for us to win by a fairly comfortable margin, but there are not many areas where it's genuinely unclear whether Labour or UKIP will win.

[Merseymike]

Jan 9, 2014 23:43:39 GMT timmullen1 said:

Jan 9, 2014 23:33:54 GMT Merseymike said:

There's little sign that Labour have recovered in some of these type of areas, and frankly we have rarely won them other than in the two landslides. This sort of ward would have loved the Iraq war!

Sorry but I think it's got to be concerning that Labour are under-performing from where they were in 2003; whilst we are not looking at a 1997 landslide in 2015, I do think we need to be at least where we were pre-2005 in areas outside the urban heartland.

I think that we have improved our position in some areas, and declined in others - and actually, these are the areas where we had started to decline before in any case. Its inevitable - politics is bound to be fluid. The South is an area we have not fone well in for a long time other than in 97, and 01 by default because of the low Tory turnout, and this is essentially a lower-middle class town surounded by a rural hinterland. Tory territory.

[Merseymike]

Jan 10, 2014 11:41:26 GMT @trident said:

Jan 9, 2014 23:43:39 GMT timmullen1 said:

Sorry but I think it's got to be concerning that Labour are under-performing from where they were in 2003; whilst we are not looking at a 1997 landslide in 2015, I do think we need to be at least where we were pre-2005 in areas outside the urban heartland.

I am somewhere in between these two views. I do find it disappointing that we have not shown any real signs of revival in places like this - traditional pockets of support in our weaker areas. I would like us to have as broad a base as possible and unlike Mike I don't think we can or should write off whole demographic categories or regions of the country because they don't share all of our culture and attitudes. I actually want people in Haverhill to vote for us.

However, in response to Tim I would point out that it's a FPTP system and the name of the game is getting the votes in the seats where we need them to form a government - West Suffolk, with a 13,000 Tory majority and Labour in third place, isn't one of them.

I'm not saying I don;t want them to vote for us, but I don't think we have the message they want to hear at the moment - and in all conscience I wouldn't want to change our stance on those issues. There have to be some principles along with pragmatism

We are doing OK in some of our weaker areas - Banbury, for example, but these areas haven't really been enthusiastically backing us for quite a while. I think its also fair to say they may be gaining 'white flight' voters from London and they're not likely to favour us either.

[timmullen1]

Jan 10, 2014 11:41:26 GMT @trident said:

Jan 9, 2014 23:43:39 GMT timmullen1 said:

Sorry but I think it's got to be concerning that Labour are under-performing from where they were in 2003; whilst we are not looking at a 1997 landslide in 2015, I do think we need to be at least where we were pre-2005 in areas outside the urban heartland.

I am somewhere in between these two views. I do find it disappointing that we have not shown any real signs of revival in places like this - traditional pockets of support in our weaker areas. I would like us to have as broad a base as possible and unlike Mike I don't think we can or should write off whole demographic categories or regions of the country because they don't share all of our culture and attitudes. I actually want people in Haverhill to vote for us.

However, in response to Tim I would point out that it's a FPTP system and the name of the game is getting the votes in the seats where we need them to form a government - West Suffolk, with a 13,000 Tory majority and Labour in third place, isn't one of them.

Sorry for the lateness in reading this, I've largely been without internet for two weeks as it appears my Lifeline alarm system upsets Sky broadband, and it took an angry email from my MP to Sky to get an engineer out to it.

I agree (I think I said somewhere) we're never going to win Suffolk West, but it concerns me somewhat that there are towns like Haverhill in more winnable constituencies where our performance might be slipping back/not recovering similarly as evidenced in this week's ICM poll.

However, I'm a natural pessimist, so I do tend to look for negatives and overlook positives.