Oh Well

I'm not very good at keeping people in suspenders and so I will say that in yesterday's by-election Wollaton West gained a Labour Councillor. This is very sad but we did give a good fight with a large number of Conservatives out knocking on doors.

'Knocking-Up' on by-election day.

We had many people come to help James. There was of course a large number of Nottingham Conservatives but also those from Broxtowe, Gedling, Sherwood and Rushcliffe. NUCA also sent out a lot of members from Joe Sheedy to Shoaib Shah. It seems the President of NUCA, Jenny, has also been converted to campaigning too. CF Chairman Oliver Cooper was also there to help us as well as people from CCHQ.

Colonel Cooper helping in the by-election.

We all did lots of knocking up on that day. We split off into 3s or 2s to cover all 'walks'. I was with Andy, Shoaib, Colonel Cooper and many others throughout the day. Victoria was manning the Merlin system and for once it was working.

Victoria working hard on Merlin.

So let's look at the results to see what happened.

Party	Number of Votes	% of Votes
Labour	2211	46.9
Conservative	1594	33.8
UKIP	565	12
Liberal Democrat	216	4.6
Green	103	2.2
Militant Elvis	28	0.6
Total Votes	4717

Well the Labour Party increased the amount of votes it got from 2011 by 200, so no massive gain. They were able to bring out all their votes. But this I think was boosted by Liberal Democrats who defected to Labour, their vote had collapsed.

The Conservatives lost around 1000 voters. Some of these went to UKIP, but the likelihood is that most just stayed at home. This seems to be more the midterm blues problem with every government rather than a genuine C change in voters for the area.

Conservative voters are probably unhappy with many things. Today's polls show that Dave is more unpopular than his party for the first time and Gay Marriage and Immigration came up too. But to my mind these things are just side shows, people are only not concentrating on them because the economy is not doing as well as projected. The good news is that the economy is slowly getting there now, partially because of some government reforms. There is a new air of optimism, this week the public are more optimistic about the economy than pessimistic for the first time since 2010. 

The economy is starting to grow.