Liberal Wins Llay By Election
-
Posts
-
Last night’s result.
LDEM – 52.2% (+52.2)
LAB – 26.3% (-24.8)What a turn around for the Liberal Party to take a Llay seat on the Council, by reducing the Labour vote by around 25%. Llay returned two Labour Councillors in 2012 ( Llay is a two seat ward). The sharp reduction in support for Labour and the disarray of the party nationally might result in an interesting Welsh Assembly Election!
The info posted up has been updated this morning after a request for clarification, as apparently saying it was a swing from Labour to Lib Dem was not correct in some peoples view as the incumbent changed from Labour to Independent.
It would make a nonsense of the swing figures as it would mean Labour gained 26.3% of the vote from zero, despite Labour standing last time.
It does raise a question to what a seat should be seen a, is it what the incumbent aligns themselves with, or what the voters voted for?
Or, perhaps most radically should such a change trigger a by election itself!?
Simple in my view , the electors of Llay voted for two Welsh Labour candidates in 2012 and yesterday the Welsh Labour Party was trounced by the Liberal. It could be the electorate of Llay are reflecting the view that they don’t like Labour candidates who get elected and then declare themselves Independent.
I think it was more of voting for the man not the party. Rob Walsh is a great worker and really works for Llay and the residents. The same can be said of Terry Boland (Labour) who works very hard indeed in the village and together they will make a great team.
There is some other interesting info to this result — Rob has come top but only had 15% of the total potential population in Llay. Similar to Westminster the actual level of votes required to win is relatively small –85% have not voted for the winner.
All political parties have got to re-engage with the population as this level of democracy surely is not sustainable. With proportionate voting at Regional level for the Welsh Government minority groups could conceivably gain a number of seatsI have to agree with both wrexview and Captain C on this.
In my view residents voted for the party of their choice in 2012, as I did. Then in September 2014 ten councillors resigned from the Labour Party (one from Llay) and failed to give up their seat. If this councillor would have let the village decide whether they wanted an independent councillor in a poll, I believe he would have lost.
This has now woken the village up to the fact that you vote for a person not a party!
This is what happened in Llay yesterday, the electorate voted for the best person to stand up for our village, regardless of what party they associate themselves with.
We now have two excellent Councillors, Terry Boland & Rob Walsh from two different parties. Congratulations Councillor Walsh, I am certain you will do us proud.
It will be interesting to see where the independents rank at the next local elections!
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
