MISSING

Look at this Cornwall unitary council by-election result from St Austell the other day:
Liberal Democrat 690 votes, Conservative 675 votes, Labour 66 votes. The Libdems won the seat previously held by a Conservative. Cheers — diffugere nives — and groans — occidit, occidit — no doubt.

Look again. What do you notice? No, not the winner and losers, not Labour’s parvissimum vote. Here’s a clue. Something is missing. Someone is missing. A party is missing.

Yes, that’s right, Mebyon Kernow isn’t there.

The ‘party for Cornwall’ did not put up a candidate.
______________________________________________________

Diffugere nives redeunt iam gramina campis
Arboribusque comae
The snows have gone and now grass comes back to the fields and leaves to the trees
HORACE Odes 4.7

Occidit, occidit
Spes omnis et fortuna nostri
All our hope and luck have gone, gone
HORACE Odes 4.4
________________________________________________________

PARLIAMENTARY CANDIDATES IN CORNWALL

Here’s a list of prospective parliamentary candidates I am aware of so far for the six new Cornwall seats.

CAMBORNE AND REDRUTH
Conservative George Eustice, Labour Jude Robinson, Liberal Democrat Julia Goldsworthy MP, Mebyon Kernow Loveday Jenkin, UKIP Derek Elliot

The previous Conservative candidate for Camborne and Redruth, John Woodward, resigned 15 October 2008. Read about it here .

The Times of 25 September 2009 has an article, PR consultants who are working to become your Tory MP, which includes a reference to George Eustice.

NORTH CORNWALL
Conservative Sian Flynn, Liberal Democrat Dan Rogerson MP, Mebyon Kernow Joanie Willett, UKIP Ivor Masters

ST AUSTELL AND NEWQUAY
Conservative Caroline Righton, Labour Lee Jameson, Liberal Democrat Stephen Gilbert, Mebyon Kernow Dick Cole, UKIP Clive Medway

ST IVES AND ISLES OF SCILLY
Conservative Derek Thomas, Labour Philippa Latimer, Liberal Democrat Andrew George MP, Mebyon Kernow Simon Reed, UKIP Mick Faulkner

The MK candidate was Richard Clark but he had to leave the area for work reasons. The Green candidate was Tracy Stanton but she stepped down in November 2009 because of a change in personal circumstances.

SOUTHEAST CORNWALL
Conservative Sheryll Murray, Labour Bill Stevens, Liberal Democrat Karen Gillard, Mebyon Kernow Glenn Renshaw, UKIP Stephanie McWilliam

TRURO AND FALMOUTH
Conservative Sarah Newton, Green Lindsay Southcombe, Labour Charlotte Mackenzie, Liberal Chris Tankard, Liberal Democrat Terrye Teverson, Mebyon Kernow Loic Rich, UKIP Glen Corcoran

The previous MK candidate, Conan Jenkin, resigned because of increasing work and family commitments. Read the MK announcement here. The web has several writings by Loic Rich, just google his name.

Two current Liberal Democrat MPs, Colin Breed for South East Cornwall and Matthew Taylor for Truro and St Austell, are not standing again. The five Cornwall seats have been rejigged into six. There are three newly created seats: St Austell and Newquay; Truro and Falmouth; and Camborne, Redruth, and Hayle.

The parties have websites and details of the candidates are largely available. For example, see here for Derek Thomas and here for Philippa Latimer.

__________________________________________________

Original post 11 May 2008.

Related post

Unitary and EU elections in Cornwall

_________________________________________________

MK STILL LOSING

Mebyon Kernow (MK), the Cornish nationalist party, lost in three by-elections for town councils in western Cornwall in August 2009. Camborne is an area where MK does much better than in most of Cornwall and has town councillors already. In Camborne north and south wards the party took 26 and 22 percent of the vote and lost to Liberal Democrat and Conservative party candidates; in Falmouth it took 9 percent and the Conservative party won. In August 2008 MK took 28 percent of the vote in a Camborne South by-election and lost, a larger percentage than this August.

For MK this is not progress. It is not making headway even though the Labour vote has collapsed in Cornwall and MK is a leftist party — and all the main parties are in disfavour with very many electors. Additionally, these were very local town elections, not the more serious election of a government.

In these circumstances MK should be winning in the streets. MK had good candidates who would have made good councillors; however, people in Cornwall generally still do not vote for the MK party in any numbers; the large majority reject MK political nationalism.

HOW HAS MK DONE IN THE 2009 ELECTIONS?

This is a summary of MK’s record in recent local and EU elections:

2005 COUNTY: 9421 votes, no seats, 3 percent of the vote
2007 DISTRICT: 8919 votes, 7 seats, 4 percent of the vote
2009 UNITARY: 7290 votes, 3 seats, 4 percent of the vote

2009 EU 11 534 votes, no seats, 7 percent of the vote

The % number is the percentage of the total vote; for the EU election this is the total vote in Cornwall.

Unitary election
In local elections MK has made no progress. Its 2009 unitary council vote is less though it put up more candidates than in the earlier years. In terms of votes per MK candidate the figures are county 523, district 372, unitary 221 which suggest that it overstretched itself this year. MK had seven elected councillors out of 331 county and district ones before the 4 June election and after the election it has three elected out of 123 unitary councillors; pro rata it has stood still. MK is primarily a party which seeks a devolved Cornwall, which focuses on the local rather than the transnational. Cornwall and its government is MK’s speciality and here it has not advanced. Even in its most propitious seats, the seats it contested, voters in Cornwall largely rejected MK as their choice for governing the county and MK got an absolute majority of the votes in only two of the 123 seats. It is reasonable to assume that in rejecting MK the people of Cornwall are rejecting its version of concern for Cornwall, its nationalism, and choosing other versions of concern. MK does not speak for Cornwall.

EU election
The turnout in Cornwall was similar in both the unitary and the EU elections. What we are looking at is a shift, a reassignment, from Conservative, Liberal Democrat, and Independent unitary voters to different parties in the EU election. In the EU elections MK received more votes than in the unitary election; so did the BNP, English Democrat, Green, Labour, and UKIP parties. UKIP polled six times as many EU votes in Cornwall as it did unitary votes, presumably because its focus is on the EU rather than local government. Arithmetically, MK received fewer ‘extra’ EU votes than either UKIP, or the Greens, or the BNP.

MK also received EU votes outside Cornwall — 63 in Tewkesbury and four hundred in Wiltshire, for example. I think most of these were general protest votes rather than outposts of Cornish nationalism.

Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.

I think we can be clear about the unitary vote: people chose the candidate or the party they preferred to see running Cornwall and that was overwhelmingly not MK.

The EU vote is more problematic. The increased UKIP and decreased Libdem EU votes seem clear as those two parties are seen to have distinctive views on the European Union. The rise in the EU votes of the other parties cannot be easily separated from the fact that votes were available for reassignment as it were and perhaps the extra EU votes are best seen as representing secondary not core support.

In short, Cornwall rejected MK very clearly and MK did not advance on its previous position. It will be interesting to see how MK does in next year’s parliamentary election when they contest all six seats in Cornwall. Historically, it does very poorly in these elections.

________________________________________________________

Now here, you see…Lewis CARROLL Through the looking glass, chapter 2 (the Red Queen to Alice)

See also the post Cornwall election results 2009

ELECTION SNIPPETS

Original post 31 May 2009
Some candidates have been accidentally missed off the 4 June ballots sent out to postal voters for the unitary council. A handful of candidates missed off apparently — the exact number seems unclear but is probably in single figures — and it is those with names that put them at the bottom alphabetically that have been lost. No one seems to know for sure how many postal ballot papers are affected though it looks like only a few and it isn’t every postal ballot paper in the affected wards. New ballot papers have been sent out to those known to be affected but I don’t know what happens if some people have already used the defective ones. In future every candidate should change his name to Aaron Aardvark.

A more positive story is that the West Briton and the Cornishman, weekly papers for central and west Cornwall, have published summaries of the manifestos from the main parties for the unitary council election; and I expect their sister paper in east Cornwall has too. Yes, Mebyon Kernow’s there and has rightly been on local radio and television so no more whingeing about lack of media publicity.

First addition
What will be another memorable incident of the elections is a leaflet which describes a candidate offensively as a “greasy haired twat.” The leaflet apparently came from the Liberal Democrats whose candidate says she never saw or approved it and whose agent has said the leaflet was not authorised by him and has apologised to the other candidate and the recipient voters and is investigating the circumstances of the leaflet’s birth. We shall perhaps know eventually exactly who wrote it and printed it and the attendant circumstances. The BBC has the story here. It will be interesting to see if there is any discernible effect upon the votes of the two candidates.

So will these be the lost candidates election or the swearing election?

Second addition
Oh dear, more chaos, hiccups, cock-ups. Since I began this post a few days ago electoral life here has worsened. The BBC reports that some voters in Cornwall haven’t yet received their postal ballots — it’s now Tuesday 2 June and the election is on the 4th. Apparently the council will send ballot papers to people by courier if necessary. A couple holidaying in Norfolk will get theirs by courier because they didn’t receive them in Cornwall time.

So now it’s the lost candidates or swearing or lost ballot papers election.

UNITARY AND EU ELECTION CANDIDATES IN CORNWALL

Cornwall unitary council elections

The list of candidates for the unitary council elections in Cornwall on 4 June 2009 is on the Cornwall council website here. Scroll to the file Statement of persons nominated.

There are 123 unitary seats and there are maps of them here .

There was one withdrawal marked on the original list on the Cornwall Council website and there have been three withdrawals of candidates from the original published nominations by 12 May, the last date for withdrawal. The figures in the next paragraph take account of these four withdrawals.

The candidates standing are: British National Party (BNP) 4, Conservative 123, English Democrat 1, Green 16, Independent 106, Labour 60, Liberal Democrat 119, Liberal Party 9, Mebyon Kernow (MK) 33, and UK Independence Party (UKIP) 28.

EU elections

These are the candidates for the parties for the southwest for the European parliament elections 4 June 2009 as listed by the UK Office of the European Parliament. There are seventy two UK members of the EU parliament, six to be elected for the southwest (in the last election in 2004 there were seven). I have listed the candidates in the order in which their party has put them (which decides who gets elected on that party’s share of the vote). There are eighty nine candidates in the south west representing seventeen parties/groups/labels.

British National Party (BNP): Jeremy Wotherspoon, Barry Bennett, Adrian Romilly, Sean Twitchin, Lawrence West, Peryn Parsons

Christian Party, Proclaiming Christ’s Lordship: William Capstick, Katherine Mills, Diana Ofori, Larna Martin, Peter Vickers, Adenike Williams

Conservative: Giles Chichester, Julie Girling, Ashley Fox, Michael Dolley, Donald Collier, Syeda Zehra Zaidi

English Democrats: Michael Turner, Sara Box, Keith Riley, Stephen Wright, Raymond Carr, Lee Pickering

Fair Pay, Fair Trade Party: David Michael, Judy Foster

Greens: Ricky Knight, Roger Creagh-Osborne, David Taylor, Sarah Scott-Cato,
Chloe Somers, Richard Lawson

Labour: Glyn Ford, Isabel Owen, Keir Dhillon, Dorothea Hodge, Dafydd Williams, Libby Lisgo

Liberal Democrats: Graham Watson, Kay Barnard, Justine McGuinness, Humphrey Temperley, Paul Massey, Jonathan Stagnetto

Independent: Katie Hopkins

Jury Team: Sally Smith, Martin Paley, Michael Clayton, Brian Underwood, Roger Whitfield, William Barnett

Mebyon Kernow (MK): Dick Cole, Conan Jenkin, Loveday Jenkin, Simon Reed, Glenn Renshaw, Joanie Willett

No2EU, Yes To Democracy : Alexander Gordon, Roger Davey, Rachael Lynch, Nicholas Quirk, John Chambers, Paul Dyer

Pensioners Party: Jonathan Cockburn, Barry Hodgson, Derek Wharton, Roger Edwards, Stuart Baker, Barry Egerton

Pro Democracy, Libertas: Robin Matthews, Peter Morgan-Barnes, Chloe Gwynne,
Christopher Charnock, Nicholas Sherman, Nicholas Coke

Socialist Labour Party: Robert James Hawkins, Brian Corbett, Alison Entwistle,
David Marchesi, Robert Oliver Hawkins, James Bannister

United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP): Trevor Colman, William Dartmouth, Gawain Towler, Julia Reid, Alan Wood, Stephanie McWilliam

WAI D: Nicola Guagliardo, Joy Skey

(I have put the forenames by which candidates appear on election leflets that I have recieved; the others are as listed by the EU site below.)

The EU parliament website for the elections in the UK is here.

That website is the definitive list for the candidates for all UK seats and gives the previous election results. MEPS are elected by a regional list system of proportional voting with seats allocated according to the share of the total votes cast for a party. In the southwest the 2004 results for the parties, to nearest whole percentage of the votes cast, were: Conservative 32, UKIP 23, Liberal Democrats 18, Labour 14, Greens 7, BNP 3, Countryside 2, Respect 1. Only the first four parties had any MEPs elected in the southwest in 2004.

Related posts

Cornwall parliamentary candidates

________________________________________________

MEBYON KERNOW’S ELECTORAL RECORD

We’re coming up to local unitary and European elections in a few weeks on 4 June and it is timely to set out the recent electoral record of the nationalist party in Cornwall, Mebyon Kernow (MK). I’ve explored in previous posts my beliefs that MK represents only a small minority among Cornwall voters and that political nationalism misreads the affection for Cornwall felt by people here; therefore I’ll largely focus this post on the electoral facts.

MK has not contested every available seat in the past and this has reduced its total vote but this partialness probably reflects its political health and estimation of its chances. It has candidates selected for every Cornwall seat for the next general election, probably in 2010.

The local elections are for a new-start unitary council of 123 seats, replacing the county council which had 82 seats and six district councils which had a total of 249 seats. The European elections are for six seats in the vast southwest constituency stretching from Land’s End to Gloucestershire and Wiltshire.

European elections
MK fought in the 1979, 1989, and 1994 European elections but those results are too distant in time to be relevant to 2009; the voting system and constituency have also changed. MK has never had an MEP.

Cornwall county council
The last elections were in 2005. MK won no seats. It did not contest every county council seat and in the the seats it contested, approximately a quarter of the total, MK got 9 percent of the votes cast (not ballots issued as in some seats voters had more than one vote). Overall MK got 9421 votes, that is 3.2 percent, of the total votes cast (not ballots issued ) in all the county council seats in which there were elections.

There are online maps of the unitary electoral divisions here.

Cornwall district councils
There were 249 district/borough councillors in the six district councils at abolition in March 2009 and MK had 9 district councillors. In the 2007 district council elections in Cornwall there were 225 seats out of the 249 for election; MK put up twenty four candidates and they polled a total of 8919 votes. Seven were elected and since then two other councillors have joined MK, making a total of nine district councillors.

Cornwall parish and town councils
There are 208 parish/town councils in Cornwall. MK has 19 councillors out of several hundred (March 2009).

Parliamentary general elections
MK has fought eight of the ten general elections between 1970 and 2005. In the 2005 general election in Cornwall MK won about one in sixty of the votes cast in the four seats it contested. MK has no MPs.

4 June
In its forty years as a political party Mebyon Kernow has so far made no discernibly consistent progress in the numbers and proportion of voters it attracts, though by and large it does better at local rather than national elections. It is a decidedly minority party. In the unitary elections for the whole county MK starts from a base of about three percent of the total (county council) votes cast, about 9 percent in the county seats it contested, and 9 (district) councillors. The new council has far fewer seats than the old county and district councils combined so MK’s likely haul is difficult to forecast but to stand still it must expect to win some. There is little chance that MK, a one-county party, will win any of the six seats in the Euro constituency which stretches surreally way, way beyond Cornwall.

Sources
Election results are published by a variety of sources including national and local newspapers, councils, and various websites. For individual parliamentary constituency results see the websites here and here.

RENDEZVOUS WITH CORNWALL VOTERS

The government has decided that the elections for Cornwall unitary council will be on 4 June 2009, fourteen weeks away. They will be for the new 123 seats on new boundaries.

Given the delay in sorting out the new wards and their boundaries there will need to be especially effective management to prevent a fiasco. I think that getting everything in place on time will be, as the duke of Wellington nearly said, a damned close run thing.

And no, I don’t know who will govern Cornwall between the end of the district councils on 31 March and the election on 4 June.

WHO GROUNDED CORNWALL?

The RAF has run a military airport at St Mawgan, near Newquay; and for a while now Cornwall county council has at the same place run a commercial, civilian airport, called Newquay, Cornwall airport. The RAF provided the air traffic control. The county council was right to step in a few years back and take over the commercial part of the airport; it was costly to do this but right to ensure that in the twenty-first century Cornwall had an airport to help its economy and people. For this and for the continual development of the airport the county council deserve much credit.

In 2006 the RAF announced its decision to close down the military side in 2008; this was two years advance notice for the county council who was to take over the air traffic control and fire services there and obtain a CAA licence. In March this year the RAF delayed their withdrawal from 1 August 2008 until 1 December to help the county council. In a media statement the council said the delay would ensure a “seamless overnight handover” and a “seamless transition.”

However, two years later, December, and the council isn’t ready and the RAF has said its people are committed to other work elsewhere and their deadline cannot be altered again. The upshot is that at the last minute the airport has closed to passengers for about three weeks while the county council gets up to speed. The date of reopening is only a hope at present and not guaranteed.

Let’s get this clear. The county council is run by the Liberal Democrats who hold all the portfolio (executive or cabinet) posts; county council officers work under Liberal Democrat direction and supervision. At bottom, no matter what the part of others might turn out to be, this airport foul up is down to the Liberal Democrat administration at the county council which appears to have been surprised by the lack of readiness. Ironically the council’s newspaper for this month has a two-page spread on the council’s “masterplan” for the airport. The Libdem administration should accept responsibility for the foul up because it is responsible for it.

It isn’t just the airport, is it? This is the Libdem council that fouled up about the county’s fire service . This is the Libdem council that foisted the unitary council on to an unconvinced electorate, albeit with the active support of the Labour government. This is the Libdem council that took so long to agree on unitary councillor numbers that unitary elections have been postponed until, well, no one knows but perhaps June but probably autumn next year. This is the Libdem council that will probably not have all the unitary elements in place until even later than that. This is the Libdem council of whom assessment reports do not glow. Did I mention their council newspaper, Your Cornwall, delivered free to all households in Cornwall and which this month had only five job advertisements, though such advertisements were to help to pay for it?

Three months ago I put up a quiz about the Liberal Democrats in Cornwall after the unitary seats nonsense: was their county administration a pantomime, or a farce, a circus, an opera buffa, a burlesque, or a cabaret? That was before the shambles of the airport. Eventually, at some ever-receding date we shall get the chance to vote on this Liberal Democrat record.

Additamentum 18 December 2008
The Civil Aviation Authority has now granted Newquay Cornwall airport an operating licence and the airport will reopen on 20 December 2008.

MEBYON KERNOW LOSING IN CORNWALL

There was a by-election in Truro on 25 September for a seat on the city council (a parish council). The seat was previously held by a Mebyon Kernow councillor.

The result of the by-election?

Liberal Democrat 49 percent of the votes cast, Conservative 31 percent, MK 12 percent, Labour 9 percent.

Mebyon Kernow lost the seat. Nearly nine tenths of voters rejected the party of Cornish nationalism.

MK does not hold any parliamentary or county council seats. It wins very few district and parish council seats and, as I said in this post (noting MK’s losing in a by-election in Camborne in August) MK is going nowhere, not even at lowly parish level, not even as a protest party. It is not so much the party for Cornwall as it describes itself but rather the party of very few in Cornwall. MK political Cornish nationalism is failing to persuade.