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Winchester T: 01962 893 893 F: 01962 893 883
London T: 020 7812 6490 F: 020 7812 6677
info@remarkable-engagement.co.uk
Find out more about Localism visit localism-agenda.com
The Liberal Democrats suffered a double blow in the local elections last week, losing councillors up and down the country on Thursday before the electorate voted resoundingly in favour of keeping the first past the post electoral system for electing members of parliament.
In seeing the Alternative Vote (AV) defeated so resoundingly, Nick Clegg and his party know the chance for meaningful electoral reform has likely passed for a generation.
In the local elections, there were few positives to take for the Lib Dems, losing some 700 council seats in England and seeing their vote collapse in the elections to the Scottish Parliament, with at least 20 deposits lost. Nick Clegg also suffered the personal humiliation of seeing Sheffield Council - based in his own constituency - swing from Lib Dem to Labour, highlighting his spectacular fall from grace since being in Government. As Tim Farron, the party's president, said, it was an "unpleasant" night.
By contrast, the Conservatives, the Lib Dem's coalition partners, proved to be the unlikely winners, retaining roughly the same number of councils as they had in 2007 - which was a year of unprecedented success for the party - and gaining almost 100 extra councillors. They also received a huge boost from the AV result, with many pundits putting this down to David Cameron's personal support for the no campaign which also worked to get the Conservative vote out and bolster their showing in the elections.
It seems an obvious point but one still worth making: the junior partners in coalition government regularly receive the worst drubbing in the polls. Put bluntly, Nick Clegg has been punished for his support for the Tories.
And what of Labour? A mixed night for Ed Miliband, with the SNP snatching an outright majority in Scotland and Labour just failing to secure the same for themselves in Wales it could have been better, though there were significant gains in England (+800 councillors and +26 councils, mainly in the north). All in all, an ‘okay' result for a party still struggling to recover, though Ed Miliband looks set to face pressure over his tactics in the coming months.
The BBC is projecting that Labour had a total share of the vote of 37%, the Conservatives 35% and the Lib Dems 15% which, if repeated at a general election, would give Labour a narrow majority.
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