Neil Reddin, a Councillor in the London Borough of Bromley, looks at the upcoming LibDem Vs Tory by-election to succeed Boris Johnson.
It is difficult to say this, but one has to give the Lib Dems credit... some of them really are eternal optimists. I guess you’d have to be as a member of that party, forever trying to believe that you really are the third force in British politics, even if that force’s greatest achievement in the last thirty years has been to help keep Mrs Thatcher in power for a decade by splitting the left-wing vote (which proves the LibDems, in their various incarnations over the years, are useful for something).
That optimism has been seen recently on Lib Dem sites such as LibDem Voice, despite their uninspiring result in Crewe and Nantwich, as they look ahead to the Henley by-election. The motto for the activists seems to be “remember Bromley”. Against all the signs that the Conservative by-election machine has now been properly tuned up, and that the political landscape for the Lib Dems has changed, they seem to think that it’ll come right for them. So, are there any grounds for their optimism, or are they more like the outdated generals, comforted by the false hope that the horses of the cavalry will somehow win the battle against the modern tanks and machine guns, just like they used to against muskets and swords.
Firstly, let’s look at the similarities between Bromley & Chislehurst (where my own ward partly lies, currently) and Henley.
Both are pretty solidly Conservative now. Bromley & Chislehurst (henceforth “Bromley” for short, with apologies to my Chislehurst colleagues), despite once suffering up to three LibDem and one Labour wards, is now completely blue. Henley is also predominantly Conservative. There, I see we hold 15 of the 21 wards, with 51% of the vote in the last district elections.
In both constituencies, the LibDems provide the main opposition, at least on the council, though Bromley usually saw the Lib Dems lagging slightly behind Labour in regular parliamentary elections. The general election party shares of the vote do bear some resemblance. Bromley was a 51/22/20 split (Con/Lab/LD), Henley scores 54/15/26 – a Conservative majority of 29% and 28% respectively, with the Lib Dems in the 20-26% range.
Clearly, neither area is a traditional working class Labour constituency. Any anti-Labour vote would normally be expected to go to the Conservatives – if there was any anti-Labour vote left.
If that is the case, then why did the Bromley by-election end up bringing the Lib Dems so close to victory? Well, firstly let’s explode a few myths and burst the Lib Dem bubble.
The Lib Dems may have experienced an apparently good swing from the
Conservatives, but there was actually very little transfer of votes to
them from the Conservatives – in fact, it is more likely that the
paltry 1,600 vote increase in the Lib Dem showing was drawn largely
from the collapsed Labour vote (down over 8,000). So why the close
result? The Conservative vote dropped significantly, by some 12,000.
With the overall turnout dropping by 17,000, it is clear that the real
story of the Bromley by-election was that the Conservative and Labour
voters stayed away. Now, the Labour abstentions are easy to explain,
with factors including Iraq and general discontent with the dying
months of the Blair administration.
The Conservative vote though? A number of factors were at play:
Election fatigue. The by-election started in earnest only a couple of weeks after the council elections, and the constituency included some previously marginal wards which had seen some hard campaigning already. To have more dead trees pushed through the letterboxes would have been too much for some, especially given the quantities of paper normally associated with by-elections. The length of the campaign itself didn’t help either: the constituency saw some six or seven weeks of campaigning by at least the two main parties, with an electorate growing increasingly fed up, and a common view is that had it taken one more week then the result could have been worse for the Conservatives.
Organisational issues. Bromley already had a well established and pretty useful party infrastructure, which in terms of outside assistance, only needed bodies to fill in the gaps and, when appropriate, to take the pressure off the local branches. Instead, there were too many stories of roads being delivered twice (something I experienced myself more than once), and confusion over what was being handled by branches as opposed to the campaign teams shipped in by CCHQ. All had the best of intentions, but the coordination was lacking. Thankfully, reports from Crewe and Nantwich indicate that Eric Pickles’ team meshed far better with the local party than had happened here in 2006.
The Candidate. Now this is absolutely not a criticism of Bob Neill, who has proved himself as good an MP as he was a London Assembly Member. More to the point, the Lib Dems proved, as before and since, that they wrote all the recent editions of the book when it comes to being the nasty party – a book that Labour clearly took a leaf from recently. Bob took a lot of personal attacks that would have had the LibDems crying foul and pretending to run to their lawyers had the tables been turned. That Bob was able to shrug these attacks off, as Edward Timpson also did in Crewe & Nantwich, is a credit to them both. Nevertheless, though by all accounts we have selected an excellent candidate in John Howell, we should be ready to counter and mitigate whatever the LibDems will throw at him.
What didn’t happen in Bromley, as mentioned already, was a massive shift in support from Conservative to LibDems. It was purely. Were the abstentions by Conservatives, as the Heffer/Hitchens tendency delighted in declaring afterwards, the result of disillusionment with David Cameron? Maybe at the fringes, but this is the constituency which, in its various incarnations, had voted in figures from Harold Macmillan to, of course, Eric Forth – hardly a fickle constituency when it comes to which part of the Conservative spectrum their MPs are drawn from. In any case, the feeling from the doorsteps was not one of resentment of David Cameron’s efforts.
So could such a close result happen in Henley? One should never say never, but there are clear omens that bode well for us, and should give LibDems pause for thought.
Election fatigue is unlikely to be an issue: the last local elections in South Oxfordshire were in May 2007. As far as any discontent with David Cameron might have played a (highly marginal) part in Bromley, if ConservativeHome’s surveys are any indication, the disapproval rating for DC has dropped from 24% around the time of Bromley to 13% as of March 2008 (and is almost certainly even lower now).
The national picture has changed significantly, and not just in the genuine growth in support for the Conservatives. Iraq - the LibDems’ strongest policy area in recent years - is gradually fading as an issue, particularly as the economy takes priority in voters’ minds. Though taxation in general has moved up the agenda, capping threats have dulled Council Tax as a specific hot issue, for now, leaving the Libs’ shaky Local Income Tax policy castrated.
What could throw a screwdriver in the server would be if similar problems to those in Bromley were repeated. There are also factors that would be difficult to avoid and must be managed. In Bromley, polling day, being at the start of July, saw an increasing number of residents (particularly the retired) away on holiday. Ensuring that as much of the Conservative vote as possible is covered by postal votes will help to mitigate the effects of campaign length and distractions on the day. And of course, all parties will be working on their expectations management – it is quite possible that the LibDems will see a bounce, but anything short of a Bromley-style result should be painted as Clegg’s team at best standing still: a shadow of the by-election winning juggernaut of times past.
Finally, though, there will be no substitute for good campaign management and boots on the ground - then Henley really could prove another nail in the Lib Dem coffin. Eric Pickles, Stephen Gilbert and the team have shown how it can be done – all Conservatives must now make sure they have the troops to finish the job.
