PARLIAMENTARY CANDIDATES IN CORNWALL

Here’s a list of prospective parliamentary candidates I am aware of so far for the six new Cornwall seats.
Changes to list December 2009: see Green candidates in Camborne and Redruth; St Ives

CAMBORNE AND REDRUTH
Conservative George Eustice, Green Euan McPhee, 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, Green Tim Andrewes, 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.

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Original post 11 May 2008.

Related post

Unitary and EU elections in Cornwall

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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.
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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
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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.

CORNWALL ELECTION RESULTS 2009

I have merged the posts on the EU and unitary election results for Cornwall

EU PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS IN CORNWALL 4 June 2009

The EU electorate in Cornwall was about 409 000 and the turnout in these elections was about 41 percent. There were six seats to be filled from the southwest.

These are the number of EU seats won in the southwest region, the number of candidates in the southwest region, the proportion of the total votes cast in Cornwall (including rejected votes), and votes cast in Cornwall (not votes in the southwest region as a whole):

Conservatives 3 southwest UK seats, 27.6 percent of the Cornwall EU vote, 6 candidates in the southwest, 46 589 votes in Cornwall

UKIP 2 southwest UK seats, 23.6 percent, 6 candidates, 39 954 votes in Cornwall

Liberal Democrats 1 southwest UK seat, 17.4 percent, 6 candidates, 29 436 votes in Cornwall

Greens 7.9 percent, six candidates, 13 361 votes in Cornwall

Mebyon Kernow 6.8 percent, 6 candidates, 11 534 votes in Cornwall

Labour 5.0 percent, 6 candidates, 8483 votes in Cornwall

BNP 3.0 percent, 6 candidates, 5118 votes in Cornwall in Cornwall

English Democrats 1.1 percent, 6 candidates, 1781 votes

Others (eight groups plus one independent) 6.5 percent, 11 071 votes in Cornwall

In the thirty three seats MK contested in the unitary elections it got a mean average of 16 percent of the votes cast in the ward; on the Isles of Scilly MK got 39 votes, 4 percent of the total EU vote.

The EU candidates who stood are listed in this post of 21 May 2009 which also links to a list of the unitary candidates.

CORNWALL UNITARY COUNCIL ELECTION RESULTS 4 June 2009

For the 4 June 2009 unitary council election the full results for each seat are here.

The Cornwall unitary electorate is about 412 000 and the turnout was 41 percent. There are 123 seats on the new council which replaces the county council and six district councils. The unitary Cornwall Council results are:

Conservatives 50 seats won on the unitary council, 34 percent of the total unitary vote, 123 candidates stood, 57 115 votes in total

Liberal Democrats 38 seats, 29 percent, 119 candidates, 48 187 votes

Independents* 32 seats, 24 percent, 112 candidates, 39 807 votes

Mebyon Kernow (MK) 3 seats, 4 percent, 33 candidates, 7290 votes

These parties did not win any seats:

UKIP 4 percent, 28 candidates, 6350 votes

Labour 3 percent, 60 candidates, 5698 votes

Greens 2 percent, 16 candidates, 3139 votes

Liberals 0.6 percent, 9 candidates, 945 votes

BNP 0.2 percent, 4 candidates, 363 votes

English Democrats 0.05 percent, 1 candidate, 81 votes

* I have included in the Independents both candidates who described themselves as Independent on the ballot paper and the candidates who did not put any political description on the ballot paper.

The number of seats a party contests influences it share of the total vote and thus if a party contests only a few seats its share of the total vote of all seats is perhaps misleading. However, I think parties by and large contest seats which they think are most favourable to them and for which they have candidates; this is an indication of the strength and health of the party in Cornwall. The proportion of votes a smaller party wins in the seats it chooses to contest cannot be extrapolated to uncontested seats; such an extrapolation is arithmetically invalid and politically not sensible, and in any case would be an average of proportions that much vary among those seats.

Labour sinks

For Labour the Cornwall unitary elections were a catastrophe. It won less than a fifth of the votes it got in the last county elections and its mean average vote per seat was ninety five compared with 693 in the last county elections. It contested sixty unitary seats and in seven-tenths of those it polled fewer than a hundred votes. These figures suggest it spread itself far too thinly for its present intrinsic strength and it would have fared better if it had focussed hard on its few possibly winnable seats. Labour will not recover easily in Cornwall from this disastrous result.

Mebyon Kernow stands still

In the Cornwall unitary elections Mebyon Kernow (MK) has not advanced on the immediate past though the number of MK candidates has increased absolutely and proportionately.

MK had no county councillors and seven elected district councillors out of a grand total of 331 before these elections: it now has a pro rata three on the unitary council. It won 7290 votes in these unitary elections; in the last county council elections it won 9421 votes and in the last district council elections 8919 votes (not all district seats were up for election in Cornwall as in one of the districts, Penwith, only a third were so the MK district votes can be reasonably likened to the county votes). The mean average votes in each seat MK contested are: county 523, district 372, unitary 221: these figures suggest that MK has, like Labour, overstretched itself this year.

The MK leader, Dick Cole, polled 927 votes, 78 percent of the total vote, in his unitary ward, a very impressive result.

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Also see the post How has MK done in the 2009 elections?

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

MEBYON KERNOW LOSES

There was a by-election for a seat on Camborne parish council (town council) on 28 August 2008.

There was a 19 percent turnout which suggests little interest among the people of Camborne South. The Conservatives won with 30 percent of the votes cast, followed by Mebyon Kernow (MK) 28, Liberal Democrat 26, and Labour 16.

This is a disappointing result for MK which already holds two of the ward seats on the parish council and one of the seats for the Camborne South district council ward. Camborne is an area where MK does much better than in most of Cornwall and here seven tenths of the voters rejected them. MK is going nowhere, not even at lowly parish level, not even as a protest party.

BEWILDERED IN THE MAZE OF SCHOOLS

As we glide effortlessly into the unitary set up, let me recall the present political disposition of Cornwall.

In 2005 there were elections for the eighty two county council seats and a general election for the five seats; in 2007 there were elections for the six district councils, elections for the whole council in five of the districts and for a third in Penwith. The results of these give us the present party make-up of Cornwall.

Overall nearly 800 000 votes were cast in the three sets of elections. Here they are in percentages:

General election 2005
Liberal Democrats 44.4, Conservatives 31.8, Labour 15.9, UKIP 5, MK 1.4, Greens 0.7, all others 0.9

County council elections 2005
Liberal Democrats 39.2, Conservatives 24.1, Independents 19.5, Labour 10.5, MK 3.2, Greens 1.3, UKIP 1.1, all others 1.1

District elections 2007
Liberal Democrats 36.1, Conservatives 30.7, Independents 20.0, MK 3.9, Labour 3.5, UKIP 2.5, Greens 0.7, all others 2.6.

There are caveats.

These figures do not compare the same seats over time but different seats. The aim is to give a general county snapshot using the latest figures available in the three sets.

In the county and district elections some seats had more than one councillor elected and so people had more than one vote. The percentages are based on totals of votes not ballot papers. The “others” include unlabelled candidates, Liberals (a separate party from Liberal Democrats), two BNP candidates, and Veritas. Uncontested seats are excluded.

The votes cast for a party depend in part on how many candidates stand for that party though how many candidates a party puts up reflects its organisational and membership health and its estimate of its chances.

The parties perform differently in the seats and these overall figures, which represent general averages of real votes, do not reveal those differences. A couple of very popular candidates do wonders for a small party’s total vote and percentage and make it difficult to assess that party’s general standing with the electorate. These considerations suggest that in local elections at any rate some people do not vote only for a party.

The general election throws up very different results so here are the two local government sets in percentages of votes cast, county 2005 and districts 2007, more than half a million votes:

Liberal Democrats 37.9, Conservatives 26.9, Independents 19.7, Labour 7.5, MK 3.5, UKIP 1.7, Greens 1.1, Others 1.7.

Finally, these figures are about people’s choices. Seats won are a different matter, about power.

The next elections are in spring 2009 for the unitary council.

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Bewildered in the maze of schools: Alexander Pope (1688-1744) An essay on criticism