Lib Dems go bump in Bilston North

Posted on July 30, 2010 by bobpiper

As was widely anticipated Labour gained a Tory seat in Bilston North, Wolverhampton last night, with a swing of 13.1% from the Tories to Labour. It leaves the Tory-Lib Dem coalition in the city dependent upon the casting vote of the Mayor to cling on to power by their fingernails. Following on from Labour’s remarkable victory over the Tories a couple of weeks ago in Bloxwich, it certainly looks as if the tide is turning against the coalition in this part of the world.
The staggering thing about both results is the total collapse of the Lib Dem vote. In Bloxwich they attracted just 81 votes to finish behind UKIP. In Bilston North it got worse… much worse. The Liberal Democrats got 660 votes… yesterday they got… 52, to finish 5th behind the BNP and UKIP.
You need 10 signatures to get on the ballot paper in the first place, and assuming family and friends of the candidate and nominators contributed some votes… this is a pathetic result for the Lib Dems. And they can hardly claim their voters switched to the Tories to try to defeat Labour because the Tory vote itself collapsed.
And all this before the cuts start to bite and the CSR announcements. I think Lib Dem MPs need to go back to their constituencies and prepare for annihilation.

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13 Responses to Lib Dems go bump in Bilston North

  1. mrs K says:
    July 30, 2010 at 11:17 am

    Why am I not surprised at the collapse. The ordinary Liberal voters I have know have been and have been friends all my life, are absolutely bewildered that their leaders would join with the Tories. They expected a coalition with Labour. They are either not going to vote or vote anything but Tory in the future.
    But the biggest surprise is they are now not sure they even want proportional voting of any kind.
    Interesting times.

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  2. mike says:
    July 30, 2010 at 11:40 am

    “The staggering thing about both results is the total collapse of the Lib Dem vote”
    Who needs ‘em ? Certainly not Dave, in five years time we’ll be asked to vote for another Tory Government, and that’s as it should be. Labour will be the new Lib Dem Party, never again to hold the reigns of power, and that’s also as it should be.

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  3. Bob says:
    July 30, 2010 at 12:32 pm

    Mike, you say that as if every time the Liberal vote has collapsed the Tories have done well. But it simply isn’t true. There are loads of examples of the Liberals getting a handful of seats and Labour doing well.
    Whilst the Liberal vote collapsed in Walsall and Wolverhamton, the Tory vote only nosedived.

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  4. Nicky says:
    July 30, 2010 at 1:35 pm

    Labour will be the new Lib Dem Party, never again to hold the reigns of power …
    In your dreams, Mike. The imminent demise of the Labour party has been confidently predicted from at least 1930. And each time, they ended up bouncing back, better than before.
    Roy Jenkins thought Labour was toast when he formed the SDP in ’81. They themselves went into the dustbin of history. Now their descendants have become the Quislings of the present ConDem govt, and they’re the ones facing annihilation.
    The fate of the Tories in Scotland is interesting as well – back in 1979, they were still getting a fairly respectable share of the vote in rural areas. Now the Tory vote in Scotland is virtually non-existent. This could well be replicated in rural northern England as people wise up to Tory incompetence.

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  5. AndyN says:
    July 30, 2010 at 3:02 pm

    Roy Jenkins thought Labour was toast when he formed the SDP in ’81
    Given that it took another 16 years, a complete change of personnel and the adoption of Tory policies before Labour formed another government, he was absolutely right.

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  6. mike says:
    July 30, 2010 at 5:03 pm

    Just dropped in to admire my contribution and spotted the “reigns” of power, I meant the “reins” of power, I think, but I’m still sure that whatever it is, Labour are in for a long wait before they seize them again.

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  7. Bob says:
    July 30, 2010 at 5:12 pm

    Andy, Mike… You remind of the way people whistle in the dark when they’re scared. What spared Thatcher from humiliation in ’83 was sod all to do with the SDP, and much more to do with British troops dying to liberate a pile of penguin shit in the South Atlantic.

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  8. Nicky says:
    July 30, 2010 at 7:20 pm

    Bob, you’re right about the Falklands saving Thatcher’s bacon. Before that, her standing was at rock-bottom. Ironically, the reason the Falklands were invaded was because of a decision made by Tory grandees – Lord Carrington and others felt they weren’t worth the expenditure of protecting any longer. There had been threats to the Falklands during Labour’s administration which had been thwarted by sending ships out as a warning, before any shots were fired.
    So a Tory balls-up, which unnecessarily caused great loss of life, was the reason Thatcher went from zero to hero. The SDP also helped by splitting the anti-Tory vote.
    Jenkins couldn’t countenance Labour’s then anti-Europe stance, which was why he wanted to destroy it and replace it with the SDP. He had been friends with fellow Europhile Ted Heath since the 1930s when they’d met at university. Both expected to reach the top politically – but both found themselves eventually marginalised.
    The SDP and its off-shoot remained a problem for Labour throughout the Tories’ reign of misrule.

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  9. ianrobo says:
    July 31, 2010 at 1:14 am

    lets face it the SDP hurt us but I get the feeling quite a few of them lot are coming back, they never signed up for Tory policies.
    they may not have liked labour but they had no love for the Tories (well most of them) whatsoever

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  10. mike says:
    July 31, 2010 at 9:46 am

    Labour failed the poor. Thirteen years in power and they failed the poor. The laugh is for most of those thirteen years they helped the comfortably off folk, and it was the comfortably off folk who dumped them. The folk who they didn’t help actually still voted for them, amazing. I voted Labour, always have, well my dad did.

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  11. Bob says:
    July 31, 2010 at 12:04 pm

    I don’t accept that Labour failed the poor. They certainly didn’t do enough, but if you think all of the new schools, reduced class sizes, greater access to further and higher education, over 100 new hospitals, 130,000 extra doctors and nurses, the national minimum wage, child tax credits, surestart, reductions in crime levels, modernisation of a million council houses, free bus travel for over 60′s, a 25% increase in child benefit, free nursery places for all 3 and 4 year olds… oh, and the national minimum wage… were all just sops to the well off, then you’re delusional.

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  12. mike says:
    July 31, 2010 at 4:53 pm

    They tinkered, they didn’t grasp the nettle. Cameron with no mandate is going to try and do what Gordon had a mandate to do and didn’t, that’s the shame.
    BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-10730095 “Between 1999 to 2007, for every 100 deaths before the age of 65 in the richest 10th of areas, there were 212 in the poorest 10th.
    This compared with 191 deaths in the poorest areas from 1921 to 1930 and 185 deaths from 1931 to 1939.”

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  13. Bob says:
    July 31, 2010 at 9:12 pm

    Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
    If you seriously believe that Cameron is going to act in the interests of anything other than his class, you are, as I said, delusional. And if you believe that and voted Labour, you are deluded and an idiot.

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