Assessing the local election in Medway: Twydall

The Twydall Labour Councillors (the last in Gillingham and Rainham) have released their post-election thank you leaflet.

Spanning two pages, they provide a brief assessment of their achievments and also explain what they are going to do in the next four years – including knocking on all 6,500 doors in Twydall (they obviously see this as some kind of achievment, try knocking all 5,000+ doors in Rainham Central twice in four months).

However, reading through the single page of text (with just one diagram, but I will come to that later), it became clear to me how even Labour Councillors are spin perfectionists – and how they are hinting at more to come.

They start by declaring that they secured “more than 50% of the votes, with the Labour vote increasing by 750″. I don’t know about you, but to me that sounded impressive. That was until I got onto Microsoft Excel and the Medway Council website and did some number crunching myself.

In 2003, the total number of votes cast was 7691, in 2007, that number was 9562. In total the number of votes cast rose by 1871, or 24.3%. In order for a Party to be truly successful, they need to match or better that figure.

So how did Labour do? Their increase from 4203 to 4953 is an increase of 750 as they stated, but it is only an increase of 17.8%, marginally better than the Liberal Democrat’s 17.5%, meaning that their support has actually dropped when you take into account turnout. This is further evident when you see that their share of the vote in 2003 was 54.6%, compared to 51.7% this year.

How about the others, then? Well, the BNP cannot be counted, as they did not field a candidate in 2003. UKIP are up 62 votes (from 219 to 281), doing best with an increase of 28.3%, but the Conservatives, the second party in Twydall, increased by 634 votes (from 2327 to 2961). Although that was less than Labour’s increase in terms of votes, when you see the percentage increase of 27.2%, nearly ten points ahead of Labour’s increase and above the 24.3% threshold, things look more promising.

They conceded that they were unsuccessful in overturning the Conservative majority in Medway, but said that they would fight for issues that Twydall residents voted for. These included half price bus fares for young people. The same half price bus fares for young people the Conservatives introduced in this year’s budget that the Labour Councillors (the three Twydall ones included) voted against. So why include them? They are planning for the future.

In the following paragraph, they stated that they “have already had a success in forcing the Tories to promise not to introduce fortnightly bin collections”. When you look over the past few months, the Conservatives spoke out against the fortnightly bin collections, and the promise the Labour Councillors speak of was not a promise, but a reiteration of opposition to the scheme that the Labour Government is trying to impose on Councils. It’s a vicious circle.

So it comes back to half price bus fares. When they are introduced in September, the Labour Councillors, having included in their pre- and post-election literature a promise to campaign for half price bus fares, can then send out another leaflet claiming that their campaign to see half price bus fares introduced was a success. Oh to be in politics!

In my opinion, though, the icing on the cake came when I had a look at their graph the 51% for Labour was represented by the colour blue. So it seems that it is not just Rainham that has turned blue!