Month: Jul 2007

Having only had 3 hours sleep I am still somewhat grumpy this morning. My gloom was raised somewhat by looking at the vote share last night compared with the general election in 2005.

With a lower turnout Labour are the big losers losing 7 points. The LibDems are the big gainers picking up 3 points as did Others. The Tories are small gainers, having picked up 1 point.

The Tory vote share went up! It was only marginal and it doesn’t feel great but the numbers look better than they might have this morning. For all the reported mistakes made by the Tory campaign over the last three weeks we managed to stop the LibDems creating momentum.

Hidden in the Others figure above is a very poor result for the Greens. Vote share down from 4.6% to 3.1%.

As an Ealing councillor I am pleased this morning that we held on to our Cleveland seat yesterday and increased our majority from 88 to 231. Well done to Greg Stafford and welcome to the Conservative group on Ealing council which is now 42 strong.

The Ealing Southall by-election was not such a pretty picture. Virendra Sharma was elected with 15,188 votes. The LibDems were second with 10,118 and Tony Lit came in 3rd on 8,230. This was a poor result for Labour with their majority cut drastically. In the long run the weakness of their candidate will become a huge issue for them. The guy is Piara Khabra II. Although in theory we had less votes than the general election the turn out was lower so we probably have not lost vote share. I am sure someone else will have done the maths by the morning. Now is not the time. It is clear the the LibDems did gain vote share and they have every reason to be pleased with themselves. Optimistic Tories will observe that by saving Ming Campbell’s bacon Nigel Bakhai has screwed the LibDems, who might be quite dangerous without him.

This by-election has given me two new topics to blog about. One will be how rubbish our new MP is. If you google Sharma you come up with nothing except he is a councillor, with a pretty atrocious attendance record, and a candidate and now MP. He is a man without distinction or opinion. Tonight at the count he had to be told to stand up for the cameras. He duly did as he was told. No doubt he will carry on doing what he is told in the tradition of Khabra. The second topic will be outlining what awful liars the LibDems have been during this campaign. I will be going though their leaflets and exposing the porkie pies.

The Ealing Today forum is a lively and often thoughtful local discussion forum that is often contributed to by local councillors in Ealing.

Leon Markham kicked off a thread yesterday morning entitled “Who to vote for in this by-election”. I tend to stick to local issues on this blog and a few detailed issues that interest me. Here is my answer to a big question for a change:

By-elections do bring out the worst in political parties and I think that all three main parties have made mistakes over the last few weeks. The Labour party had the right to call the by-elections as it was their MPs who were incumbents so they have chosen the shortest possible timetable and thus helped to ensure a frenetic campaign. I suspect that we will all be glad when the avalanche of paper stops coming through the door on Thursday. I have had roughly 50 leaflets.

You have got three capable councillors in Northfield but being an MP is quite a different game and you have to hand it to Tony Lit that he has had the chutzpah to put himself forward for such a high profile campaign. If I had any ambitions to be an MP, I would not want to go through what he has gone through over the last three weeks. I don’t think that Tony Lit will bring great intellectual rigour to the Conservative party or strong policy ideas but he is someone with a good business brain who will ask awkward questions. The team needs a range of skills. Tony’s will be a useful addition to the mix.

For me the voting decision is simple. You have to go with the three main parties in spite of their failings. I am happy that the Greens are influential in our politics but they do not have a programme for government and are not a serious party in my view.

As an ex-(very)Young Liberal I have always had some sympathy with the SDP and the Liberal Democrats. Unfortunately, they often take positions that are unrealistic. Too often they think the state can fix things if only it is given enough cash. Wrong. We will never have a LibDem government. So for me it comes down to the choice we have had in British politics for the last 100 years. Labour or Conservative.

The modern Labour party is unrecognisable from that pre-1992 when John Major got the largest popular vote of any Prime Minister in history. A tribute to the Blair-Brown duopoly that has dominated British politics for 10 years. That project has had its day and the alternative is being created by David Cameron and a Tory party that is intent on change and intent on re-gaining power. Iain Duncan Smith’s Commission on Social Justice has shown that the new Conservative party will be as different from its predecessor as the new Labour party.

At some point in the next few years most British people will agree with this analysis and we will have a Conservative government. Ealing Southall is just a side show. A very entertaining one all the same. All we can do is send a signal. Do we believe in the Blair-Brown project or is it time for change?

Not only is it a duty to vote. It is a duty to choose too. Life is full of hard choices. Voting is one of them.

I spent the weekend in sunny Worthing visiting my parents so haven’t had the chance to comment on the toast dropping revelation that Tony Lit is a Labour donor. I read about it in my Dad’s Sunday Telegraph . Further examination though reveals that his company paid for a table at a Labour event that was aimed at Asian business people. He had been to a similar Conservative event a week before that. We knew Lit was a businessman – that is what we liked about him. Often business people think it is in the interests of their company to keep in with politicians and political parties. Fact of life.

The scanned image of the cheque made out to the Labour party gives us a clue as to what is behind this non-story. The Labour party are clearly windy about the Ealing Southall by-election so have leapt on this story. Whilst it might make a few Telegraph readers huff and puff over their cornflakes it is unlikely to ruffle many feathers in the constituency.

I suspect that this will backfire on Labour’s drive to restore its shaky finances. Whilst political donations should be public who would be a Labour donor? Whilst someone has obscured the sorting numbers on the bottom of the cheque most donors would be horrified to see an organisation they had supported revealing their banker and account name to the public along with the signature of one of their authorised signatories.

Much was made in the press of Brown’s cowardice whenever things got difficult for Blair. Some took to calling him Macavity Brown after TS Eliot’s Macavity, the cat who wasn’t there. During the Ealing Southall by-election Ming Campbell has visited the constituency four times. He has no choice. Without a good result here he is finished. David Cameron visited for the third time yesterday. He is able to relax and enjoy sticking it to both Labour and the LibDems. Coming from third place in a seat which was hitherto not a natural Tory area means that the only way is up. Like Campbell Brown has much to lose too. A bad result in Ealing Southall will mark an early end to his honeymoon if his gaffe prone foreign policy team haven’t already achieved that. Is he in Ealing Southall flying the flag? No. Too busy. Too scared.

Great coverage today for the Tories in the Telegraph, Independent and Guardian (who managed to get the result in the Hounslow by-election on Thursday wrong – it was in fact a Tory hold).

David Cameron visited Ealing Southall for the third time today in support of Tony Lit’s by-election campaign, click to enlarge cutting from the Evening Standard below:

From the red and brown sauce bottles in the background Cameron had clearly just popped in for a bacon sarnie.