Friday 20 July 2007

Lib Dems suffer further drop in vote in Ipswich

Whilst most of the country were looking at the election results in Sedgefield and Ealing, we had our own election here in Ipswich.

A by- election was held in the Castle Hill Ward after the former Tory Group Leader was chucked off the council as he had not been to a meeting since November 2006- well it was hard for him as he had moved to Spain!

Castle Hill is one of the safest Tory seats in Ipswich so we were not expecting victory and in May we had come third behind the Tories and the Lib Dems.

This time we had a far better result, the turnout was down and there were only 3 candidates this time (in May we also had a Green and an Independent) the Tories came in - as expected first with 1028, a drop of 53 from their May total of 1081, John Harris our Labour candidate polled 385 a drop of 40 from 425 but the big losers on the night were the Lib dems who collapsed from 502 to 284!

With no Green or Independent candidate, you would have expected them to have hopes of keeping their previous second place. What makes it worse for them is that part of the Castle Hill Ward is in a Suffolk County Council seat that has two Lib Dem councilors!

It seems that the electorate of Ipswich have realised that a Lib dem vote is just another way of voting Tory!

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