A good night for the Conservatives in Southampton!

not a happy bunny...

Labour were incredibly upbeat prior to the local elections in Southampton. They have the advantage of having run the city for many years, having two-Labour MPs in the city and generous money and campaigning support from unions like Unison (who took out a full page ad in local paper on Wednesday urging people to vote Labour). even so, I still don't really understand why thought they could buck the national trend to such a significant extent. On his quasi-official Labour blog, Matt Stevens wrote,

"The election appears to be going well. Met Cllr Dick at one of the school promotion evenings, who is convinced he is going to win Sholing, poor bloke….don’t think so. The parties’ polling is strong in this ward on the east side of the city."

Gavin got 1787 votes giving him a majority over Labour of 353! some of them thought they would beat me in Shirley ( my majority was just over 500) and that they would win at least one seat in Millbrook (their party came third behind the Conservatives who won the seats and the Lib-Dems!) and yet they still don't get it. I overheard a group of Labour activists talking about the Sholing result last night. One of them (I think it was June Bridle) said she couldn't believe that the Conservative Gavin Dick had kept his seat after a three week election campaign. Don't they realise that it was Gavin's work as a councillor, the fact he is a personable guy who knocked on thousands of doors and delivered tens of thousands of leaflets, disillusionment with Blair, a little perhaps political stardust with David Cameron and all the rest that won it?

Swaythling was a similar story. Jane Odgers got involved in politics because she didn't want a gypsy camp on her doorstep. The Lib-Dems just refused to listen and the result was they lost the seat. The public were disillusioned with the Lib-Dems in Millbrook for different reasons- they had elected a number of councillors who had defected or retired and the public saw through their absurd claims that a highly successful post office was to close and that the Tories were going to cut the number of fire engines (actually they were redeploying a tender and buying a new extra vehicle!) Millbook really was just coming home to the Conservatives, albeit after a lengthy tenure of Lib-Dem tenure.

So the composition of the council is now 18 Conservative, 18 Labour, 12 Lib-Dem. We gained 2 Conservative councillors (+3 if you consider our 1 in Milbrook was a Lib Dem defection) and
the Lib-Dems lost 4. We won in 9 out of 17 seats contested last night and came second in 6 while Labour won in 6 out of 16 seats. In contrast the Lib Dems won in 2 out of 16 seats.
In terms of the popular vote, the Tory Party polled 3366 votes more than Labour and 7143 more than Lib Dem.

It will be interesting to see what happens next.