There was one principal local council by-election that took place on Thursday 27th January 2011.  The Lib Dems held the seat. There were no parish or town council results reported to ALDC.

Oliver’s Battery and Badgers Farm is perhaps the best named ward of any I know in the UK. It's in Winchester and it's still held by the Lib Dems.  This was an excellent campaign led by an excellent team. We were defending on three levels: inevitably the coalition, the Lib Dem led council and the exemplary district and County councillors for the area.

Our councillors' failing health gave us the early warning that a by-election might be necessary. Wisely we did some succession planning and identified a possible replacement should the need occur. When the by-election was eventually called  we could truthfully say that Brian Laming was David Spender’s chosen successor -  and we did.

The weather played a part in this election as it has in many others this winter and we did not canvass as much as we would like but we built on the good work put in October and November surveying and leafleting. As a held ward with a reasonable shuttleworth base, on top of a good literature campaign it was crucial that we got out the vote (GOTV). Part of this was our postal vote campaign. The other half was a full “knobs on”  GOTV operation.

The Tuesday before polling day saw Blue letters. The Wednesday, a stop press leaflet. The Tories, unusually put a last minute leaflet out condemning our group for being in disarray as we have suffered two defections from the group in recent months. Thursday saw mail-merged, targeted A3 “Goodmornings”, followed by two knock ups and a phone knock up. We covered all the polling stations and knocked up until ten.
In May even in erstwhile safe wards we need to run intensive GOTV operations and this is resource intensive. It may be time to look at either expanding your capacity or tightening your targeting strategy. In either case its time to pull in some favours and ask any relatives to keep May 5th free now! If you don’t live in a local authority with elections this May, think about where you can help the local elections in 2011 and start helping now!

The first week of January was another very quiet week for council by-elections, with only one principal election in the Windsor & Maidenhead unitary authority.

Park Ward is in Windsor itself, with the park after which it is named being Windsor Great Park. The ward’s other notable landmark being Legoland. This was a disappointing result in a largely suburban residential ward that we held until four years ago. This ward had been consistently Lib Dem for many years before but our vote is down nearly 40% in the eight years since we last won there.

Since the coalition was formed we have been performing consistently well in by-elections where we are fighting the Conservatives, even though the last few weeks haven’t been as promising. However if there is one common theme running through the good results it has been the willingness by the local Lib Dems to take on the Conservatives and keep squeezing Labour. Just because we’re in coalition with the Conservatives nationally, it doesn’t mean we are locally and so don’t pull any punches. Make sure you highlight in your leaflets what we would do differently locally and that the only option in who runs the council is the Lib Dems or the Conservatives.

November 11th is, of course, the day on which we all reflect on both the fragility and the price of the freedoms we are lucky enough to enjoy.  It also adds an extra resonance to the act of voting in an election that can often be lost on the other 51 Thursdays of a year.  There were five principal council by-elections that took place on the 11th and ALDC received reports of one election contested out in the towns.  The current political cold snap continues, with very little to cherry pick for Liberal Democrats; of the five elections, we were defending none, we stood candidates in two, and neither of those changed hands.

It was a good day for Independents.  An Independent held the one seat they were defending in the Hunsdon ward of East Hertfordshire District, and another took the Forres seat on Moray Council in Scotland from the Tories, who collapsed into third behind the SNP and the eventual Independent winner on first preferences.  The remaining three seats were all holds for the Conservative Party; a marginal decline in vote-share in the Rushall-Shelfield ward in Walsall wasn’t enough for Labour, who remained 28 votes behind.  The last time the Walsall seat was contested, the local Lib Dem team took a respectable 17.8%, but the absence of a candidate somewhat hampered efforts to build on that this time around.  On the Isle of Wight, Labour’s first attempt to win the Chale, Niton, and Whitwell ward yielded a haul of 76 and our candidate Malcolm Groves kept the Lib Dem vote steady.  Finally, in a three-way thriller in Bury St Edmunds Tower division of Suffolk County Council, the Tories held the second-place Independent off by 55 votes, and the Liberal Democrats placed fifth with a fraction less of the popular vote than in 2009.  There’s a little bit of silver glinting around the November clouds, none of our candidates registered a dramatic decrease in their vote-share and we did pick up a seat in the Pill ward of Saltash Town Council.

As the nights draw in and the air gets brisker, ALDC have rustled up some very fetching Christmas card and calendar templates for those character-building Winter rounds!  They can be accessed at the members-only section of the ALDC site here.  It’s onwards and upwards next week with a further six principal council by-elections, there’s a double election in Croxteth in Liverpool and one of those seats is the week’s only Lib Dem defence.  The very best of luck to all our candidates and campaigners across the country.

Craig Whittall
craig.whittall@aldc.org

There were nine principal council elections held on the 14th October and they continued to be encouraging. The Tories held one seat, the Independents  one seat, the Lib Dems two and Labour four. The only seat to change hands was a Labour gain from Plaid.  In the two Parish council elections reported to ALDC the Independents held one seat and there was a gain by the Lib Dems from Independent.

With all the controversy swirling around and within the Liberal Democrats last Thursdays results continued to confound the pundits. We were defending two seats.

In the Watford Central Ward we had a very strong local candidate with a high profile going in to the campaign. This was particularly useful given that our sitting councillor was moving to the USA. Labour and the Tories made much of that running on “"Fred not Florida".

Labour used of heavy knocking copy on the coalition cuts. One last minute leaflet implied we were closing a community centre on the large council estate in the ward! We remained positive, running on a hard working local candidate who had helped set up a community action group and our year long record of action. Labour threw five leaflets at us, a full colour Florida post card- personally addressed to voters, A5 blue ink letters(unaddressed) ,a personal letter to supporters and a good morning.

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