My analysis of local by-elections from 18/02/16

Readers, the results from yesterday's local by-elections that featured Green Party candidates were as follows:

Argyll & Bute UA, Oban North & Lorn: (1st preference votes): SNP 1113 (42.3%, +9.9%), Conservative 609 (23.2%, +13.5%), Independent 608 (23.1%), Green 300 (11.4%). SNP elected at stage 4; SNP gain from Argyll First.

Broxtowe DC, Toton & Chilwell Meadows: Conservative 910 (51.9%, +7.0%), Labour 368 (21.0%, -0.2%), Liberal Democrats 363 (20.7%), Green 111 (6.3%, -3.7%).

Lichfield DC, Chadsmead: Lib Dem 300 (40.0%, +14.9%), Lab 195 (26.0%, +1.6%), Con 159 (21.2%, -12.2%), UKIP 73 (9.7%, -7.4%), Green 23 (3.1%).

Manchester MBC, Higher Blackley: Lab 1062 (65.2%, +7.7%), UKIP 308 (18.9%, -6.9%), Con 130 (8.0%, -1.8%), Lib Dem 78 (4.8%, +2.1%), Green 40 (2.5%, -1.7%), Pirate 9 (0.6%).

None of these wards were Green targets and nor have they ever elected Green councillors, but the Green result in Oban North & Lorn is rather promising especially with the next Scottish Parliament elections coming soon. We are now only two-and-a-half months from the next set of elections in the UK (Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly, Northern Irish Assembly, London Assembly, and local elections in England), and in spite of our two recent local by-election gains, UKIP's decline, and the Liberal Democrats' local recovery to an extent, May 2016 will be a crucial test for the future of British politics.

Alan.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The English local elections of 2023-Conservatives pay the penalty for failing to put a stop to sleaze and sewage in our rivers

The English local elections of 2023 (Northern Ireland's elections will finish next week and a separate blog post will be devoted to these) not only resulted in more than 1000 Conservative losses just as Rallings & Thrasher and Sir John Curtice predicted, they also resulted in sweeping Green and Liberal Democrat gains across the nation-sending a hard message to the Conservatives about the need to protect our environment and Labour for barely acting like an opposition at all. The Conservatives in total made a net loss of 1,061 seats, with the vast majority being in the shire districts where they once dominated-even councils such as Bracknell Forest and Surrey Heath, which they held in 1995 and 2019, fell, to Labour and the Liberal Democrats respectively in those two cases. Who they lost to varied widely by the nature of the authority-their losses to Labour came mainly in (ex) industrial "Red Wall" areas where they had made against-the-trend gains in 2019 or fared better
Read more

My analysis of the Swedish general election of 2022

The Swedish general election of 2022 generated some surprising results, despite also averting pollsters' predictions significantly. The last three years in particular proved to be a rough ride for the Social Democrat led governments of Stefan Lofven and Magdalena Andersson respectively. Although Sweden's laxer approach to the COVID-19 pandemic (compared to most countries in Europe, which imposed lockdowns during much of 2020 and 2021, an approach that arguably caused more problems than it solved) proved effective, Mr Lofven's desire to lift the austerity tax (which only affected a wealthy minority, similar in nature to the wealth tax initiative of former French President Francois Hollande) and to join NATO proved contentious, with two of the Social Democrats' former coalition partners (the Swedish Greens and Swedish Left Party, who had both pulled out of confidence and supply) unsurprisingly voting against Swedish accession to NATO membership (all other parties in the R
Read more

On the 2020 Serbian election: Why a boycott will only worsen things there

First of all, I apologise for the recent hiatus; however elections are still postponed or on hold in many countries, including the UK. Serbia, however, was able to proceed with its 2020 general election amidst this crisis. Its overall result proved reminiscent of Hungarian elections under Viktor Orban's tenure (2010-present), since the leading national-conservative coalition, the SNS (Progressive Party of Serbia) coalition led by Serbian President Aleksander Vucic (Ana Brnabic is the Serbian Prime Minister, and the first woman and openly homosexual person to hold that position), polled 61.6% of the vote, giving them as many as 191 seats out of 250 and a majority of as high as 132, almost unheard of in any country with proportional representation. Press freedom has endured significant curbs since President Vucic first came into power as Serbian PM in 2012 (he became President of Serbia in 2017), as have civil liberties of Serbs in general. Nepotism and corruption in the Serbian
Read more