Pretty well a rout… but is it good for democracy?

The last few weeks have been manic for me with the local elections. My own Seat, at local District level, was sadly uncontested. You may wonder why I say ’sadly’. Well, quite simply I like democracy and I think it’s a great shame that none of the other Parties put anyone up for election in Shenstone. And also I would have liked an indication, via the ballot box, of whether local people think I’m doing a good job for them… or perhaps not!

Anyway it didn’t happen but that just meant I had an even bigger job on trying to get our district candidates in my County area elected. One of those district wards was also uncontested and one had two very experienced councillors standing. So that left two wards for me to focus on… Mease & Tame which had two excellent Conservative candidates, neither of whom had ever been involved with politics until six weeks before, and Fazeley which had one experienced current councillor, one candidate who had stood unsuccessfully at the last District election and, again, one who had never been involved until recently.

So, across the two wards there were 5 Seats available. Before this election the 2 in Mease were Liberal Democrat held and in Fazeley Conservatives had one Seat and Labour had 2, one of which was held by the Leader of the Labour Party in Lichfield.

One Seat in each of the wards was held by longstanding councillors with massive personal support so with the best will in the world it would be unlikely for us to take each of those. In reality my target should have been 3 out of 5 Seats but I couldn’t help really thinking we had a good chance of 4 and an outside chance of all 5.

Well, it wasn’t through lack of hard work… all the candidates worked their socks off and actually, even though I say it myself, we ran a very high quality campaign which on the whole went like clockwork.

But despite all that we only managed the 3 out of 5. If I’m honest I was disappointed. I really did think we had a chance of all 3 Seats in Fazeley but the Labour Leader got back in by just 33 votes. Everyone is telling me it was a great result in the two wards and I suppose going from 1 to 3 councillors was pretty good. But 33 votes… what could I have done to get that extra 34? Something I’ve been asking myself since.

As far as the overall District election is concerned it was almost a rout in favour of my Party. We gained 9 more Seats meaning the scores on the doors are now… Conservatives 44, Labour 7, Lib Dems 4 and 1 Independent. Now that’s a huge majority. Too big, if I’m really honest. That may seem a strange thing to say but very large majorities bring with them their own problems for the controlling Party. I’m sure I may write about that in the future. I can’t help thinking also that the opposition will be so weak that it won’t really be an opposition. We must be very careful of that… checks and balances are important in the democratic process.

On the whole a job well done both in the two wards I coordinated and, of course, the overall result. Mease & Tame now has a new Conservative councillor… Ellen Fleetwood. Fazeley sees Ian Lewin re-elected and Ben Adams joins him.

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