Election Results in Reading

Well, after weeks of hard work from all parties the local elections are finally over and the results are in.

In Kentwood, where I am a councillor, my colleague Tom Steele retired after serving the community terrifically for 4 years. A huge thank you to Tom for all the hard work he has done on the Council and also thanks to both him and his wife Patricia for their work in the campaign. I’m very pleased that we have such a good successor to Tom in Cllr James Anderson (right). James has lived in the area all his life and already has a strong record of working for the local community.

Local stalwart Cllr Sandra Vickers (left) was successful in Tilehurst where she has been the candidate on a number of occasions in the past and is well known for her hard work over many years. It was disappointing that the last minute leaflet from defending councillor Chris Harris (Lib Dem) sought to portray Sandra as an opportunist, describing her as an ‘unknown Tory’ when in fact he and his colleagues are aware that Sandra has been working hard in Tilehurst for a long time. However, setting aside this error of judgement, which I think was out of character, I have always found Chris to be a real gentleman and on a personal basis I wish him well in the future.

Although I am delighted to welcome two such excellent new councillors, I am of course disappointed at the result in Park and Church wards. Park, of course, was always going to be difficult as Wazir Hussain had won in 2007 with only 7 votes and the ward had subsequently gone first Labour and then Green. This has been a closely contested 3-way ward and it was no surprise, although still disappointing, that Wazir Hussain was unable to retain his seat. Having worked with Wazir on the Council for the past 3 years I can say he is a genuinely nice man and was a hard working councillor and I think he will be missed by the people of Park ward. There is no doubt that the Green Party have campaigned hard in Park over the last few years and to that extent their victory is deserved, although from what we have seen from Cllr White over the last year they seem to be very much Labour Party stooges with little to offer of genuine substance. I fully expect them to do a deal with Labour in the next few days.

I won’t pretend that the result in Church ward wasn’t a real disappointment. I know that Cllrs Azam Janjua, Tim Harris and Mike Townend have worked hard in that ward since 2007 and our candidate Geoff Poland (replacing Mike Townend who had stepped down) fought an excellent (and clean) campaign. Given the strength of feeling in the ward about the Shinfield Road lights and the efforts made by Cllr Richard Willis, as lead councillor for Transport, to try to remedy the worst of the problems it is surprising that the electorate decided to vote for the party (Labour) that caused the mess in the first place. Nevertheless, I offer my congratulations to Cllr Paul Woodward.

No comment on the results in Reading would be complete without talking about the devastating defeats for the Liberal Democrats. I have already mentioned Tilehurst, but they lost both their central Reading wards of Redlands and Katesgrove by over 500 votes – in both cases the margin of defeat was remarkable. I had expected them to lose Katesgrove, as the sitting councillor Gareth Epps, presumably with his eye on pursuing his parliamentary ambitions, had decided not to stand again. However, I was genuinely shocked to learn that their excellent leader, Kirsten Bayes, had been so soundly defeated in Redlands by a candidate who seems to have run a rather vitriolic and negative campaign. I have utmost respect for Kirsten Bayes, both as a councillor and as a person and her contributions to full Council and in scrutiny or, latterly, Cabinet, were always insightful and thought-provoking. She brought a sound analytical approach which I think will be missed – from what I’ve seen from twitter and on the blogs I doubt that her replacement will do the same but I hope that she proves me wrong.

On a national level it is clear that the Liberal Democrats have suffered a horrible defeat and some talking heads today are suggesting that this is the end for the coalition, that the Liberal Democrats should withdraw from it or that David Cameron should call a General Election in the hope of getting an overall majority. In my view, both courses of action would be foolish, and I don’t think either will happen. The Liberal Democrats have suffered (unfairly in my view) for joining the coalition and working to put this country back on its feet again. I find it perverse that voters would vote for a party and then lose faith in it immediately it enters government. Surely Liberal Democrat voters realised last year that their party was not ever going to do sufficiently well to govern by itself and therefore the only route to government was through coalition with one of the other two parties? If the Liberal Democrats split from the coalition now they would firstly look like very bad losers and I can only see that losing them even more support (if that is possible). They would also look like a party that is really just for a protest vote and is not up for the challenges of making hard choices in government. They would risk prompting a General Election at which they could expect to be virtually wiped out, whereas if they stick with the coalition they can surely expect that their electoral fortunes will have recovered from their current doldrums by the time of the next election, when they will also be able to claim some credit for having helped Britain through the economic crisis. Similarly I don’t think David Cameron should, or will, force a General Election now. The public, including Labour supporters, are clearly not yet sold on Ed Milliband and Labour failed to make the inroads they might have expected, but it is far from certain that the Conservatives could get the overall majority we failed to achieve last year, especially with the system (constituency sizes) still weighted against us. Also it would say little for Cameron’s sticking power or integrity.

Nationally, these elections were far better for the Conservatives than we had expected. Going into the polls, it was commonly accepted that the Conservatives could expect to lose in the region of 1,000 councillors across the country. Instead, we have in fact made net gains both in councillors and in councils.

Finally, we also had the AV vote alongside the local elections. Reading, like almost everywhere else in the country, voted “No”. The result was 61.03% No and 38.97% Yes. It is a measure of how comprehensively the ‘Yes’ campaign was defeated that I have seen some commentators on twitter suggesting that the Reading result was quite good on the basis that they did better than the national average. When the campaigns started I don’t think anyone could have expected that the result would be this catastrophic for the Yes campaign, but I am pleased that the outcome has been so decisive and I think it just goes to show that as the campaign wore on the more voters came to know about AV, the less they liked it.

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