The View from Wealden

This is a guest post from Roger McCarthy - A Labour candidate for Wealden District Council (Crowborough Jarvis Brook ward).

Wealden is probably fairly typical of southern CLPs - we have a Tory MP with a rock-solid 17,000 majority, a district council with a Tory majority (currently 33 out of 55 seats), a similarly Tory (29 out 49 seats) county council in East Sussex and a number of parish and town councils where most of the seats go uncontested to Tories and Independents.

Although our CLP has rather more Labour members than you might expect (in fact there are Labour-held seats with fewer members), we are scattered across a large semi-rural seat with no real urban centre - so even getting to branch meetings requires considerably more time and effort than most of us can spare - ditto for leafleting, canvassing and pretty much any other political activity you can name.

And 13 years of New Labour in power may have been good for the country - but for us as for most other CLPs the endless compromises and disappointments of government lost us many members (particularly the younger ones) and made those that stayed less and less inclined to work actively for the party.

The consequences in electoral terms were predictably dismal:

• The constituency Labour vote hit 10,000+ in 1997 and 2001 (20%), stayed at 9,360 in 2005 but plummeted to 5,266 (9.6%) last year.
• Our county council vote fell from 9,053 in 2005 to just 1,600 in 2009 with not a single Labour councillor elected from within the constituency.
• And on the district council it would require significant research to find out if Labour has ever held a seat and we only managed to put up 3 candidates in 2007 who won just 424 votes between them.

But as of April 2011 our CLP seems to have magically come back to life - we are standing 22 candidates in 21 out of the 24 Wealden District wards in our constituency - and those candidates are leafleting and getting positive responses on the street and on the doorstep even in picturesque little villages where we haven't actively campaigned in living memory.

And looking at the District Council as a whole (which includes additional wards from Eastbourne, Lewes and Bexhill and Battle constituencies) we can see a wider political pattern emerging:

WDC summary of nominations	Current Councillors	2011 Nominations	2007 Nominations	Change in Nominations
Conservative	33	55	53	+2
Green	2	3	12	-9
Independent	7	15	13	+2
Labour	0	27	3	+24
Liberal Democrat	13	24	35	-11

• The Liberal Democrats who here long ago became the natural party of opposition at council level seem to be suffering a real activists strike - this election they can only find candidates for half of the wards and three of their sitting councillors (including the Wealden LD group leader) have disappeared without their being able to nominate any replacements.
• The Greens (who did rather well in 2007 picking up many votes in seats that Labour did not contest) have imploded even more dramatically - they have abandoned the two seats that they won last time (which the Tories will now walk into without any contest) and can only put up three candidates in total.
• In fact if were not Labour putting up candidates in most wards, no fewer than 15 seats - over a quarter of the council - would have gone to Tories with no contests at all.

But does this mean that we will overtake the Liberal Democrats as the party of opposition here in Wealden?

Unfortunately not (yet):

• Almost all of the 13 Wealden seats that the Lib Dems won last time are Con/Lib Dem marginals (or Con/Lib Dem/Ind marginals) so a collapse in their vote will see most - perhaps as many as 10 - drop into the Tories laps.
• So even if the Conservative vote stays the same and a large proportion of the former Lib Dem (and Green) voters return to Labour, the Tories stand to win considerably more seats on Wealden Council than they did in 2007.
• And absurd though it is given all has happened in the last ten months, we can expect the Lib Dems and their media cheerleaders to begin ( Polly Toynbee has already started) the refrain that it is Labour that is splitting the 'anti-Tory' vote in the south - even though it is clear that very few 'progressive' voters will be persuaded to vote tactically for the Lib Dems for as long as they remain part of the most reactionary government since the 1930s.

So we are in for a long haul.

We can win council seats even in such hostile territory to Labour as Wealden and when we do we will put up a far more principled and effective campaign against the cuts than whatever demoralised rump of Liberal Democrats is left on the council after May 5th.

But it took the Liberal Democrats 49 years (starting with the 1962 Orpington by-election) of the doorstep politics of which they used to be so proud to replace Labour as the main opposition to the Tories in the south.

Clegg and Co. may have thrown away all of that hard-won political capital in just a few short months, but the Liberal Democrat collapse will leave a vacuum which will initially be mostly occupied by the Tories.

And even if stuffing the Liberal Democrats back into the dustbin of history again takes much less time than the half a century it took them to climb out of it, that process really has only just begun.

So we need to realistically manage our expectations and to start thinking hard about how we build on whatever local successes we do gain on May 5th for the 2013 County Council and 2015 general election campaigns (assuming that the coalition doesn't crumple altogether and present us with a snap election before then).

But Wealden's experience is that the key to bringing back the party from near-dead in constituencies like ours is quite simply to stand in every contest we can:

• Nothing else will energise existing, bring back departed and recruit new members.
• Nothing else will remind Labour voters that we still exist and that even under an unfair electoral system we can win seats and offer real opposition to coalition policies locally.
• Nothing else will prevent the Liberal Democrats and Greens desertion of the battlefield from handing over many seats to the Tories without even the formality of a contest.

If you want to get involved in our campaign please contact me by or phone ().