From Kevan Lim:
Unfortunately your figures are wrong. The tory vote was 17543 as you say, but the labour vote was 16764. Thats significantly more than Chris Mole’s vote. However my main point was the lib vote variation between parlamentary and borough. So I don’t think you can say my point was wrong. Allowing for the switch by some labour and tory voters to fringe like green,bnp and ukip, their were numbers of labour and lib who voted for ben gummer and then went back to their usual political choice for the borough.
Kevan Lim is right and I’ve missed out Labour’s 912 votes in Bixley. This means that Labour actually scored 16,764 votes in the Borough which was 472 votes more than Chris Mole. This was about 3% of their borough vote and between a quarter and a fifth of Ben Gummer’s margin. I still think that this shows that there was not that much split ticket voting, although Kevan disagrees, arguing that the UKIP (and perhaps BNP) votes probably went to the Tories in the borough and so masking the Labour votes that went to Ben and back to Labour in the borough.
The collapse of the Liberal parliamentary vote is very important, and on that I don’t disagree with Kevan Lim. Their disastrous choice of Mark Dyson needs to be quickly acknowledged by the Liberal Democrats in Ipswich. There have been stories that he was getting rather tetchy with volunteers, these and other stories show that he needed to have some grounding in grass roots politics before going for being a Parliamentary candidate. I think a couple of stints of running for (Wandsworth) council should stop him making rookie mistakes. He’s clearly not a stupid man and seems quite well intentioned, but politics does not suit him and parachuting in to another seat won’t suit him either. Also, some electorates take kindly to carpet baggers, but not Ipswich.
I suspect a lot of the Liberal vote split between both Ben and Chris Mole as although Ben Gummer is probably the most Liberal Democrat friendly of the two candidates and there is a history of co-operation on the town, many Liberal Democratic voters are still anti-Tory. This will probably change with the economic climate, but the realisation of how bad things are has not really hit home yet.
However the psychological point that Chris Mole scored less well than his borough colleagues is very important, and could harm him in any reselection battle.
My main point still stands however – The decision makers in Ipswich Labour Party really seem to have seen this election as a fight to win the borough through concentrating effort in the marginal seats. To an outside observer this seems mad when there was a strong expectation that they could lose the Parliamentary seat, reflected in the betting markets. This seems like their fatal mistake (and not just because by losing Alexandra, they still are in a minority). Was it because they just didn’t believe the polls and the betting figures or did they just not think that saving the seat was that important – at least in the short term?
That’s not a question for me, I’ve no interest in Labour’s future electoral success. I suspect that those Labour supporting readers of this blog (I’ll exclude Kevan Lim, who has a clear grasp of what’s happened) either are too loyal, scared or nice to see what their local leadership has done.
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