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Infamy, infamy…

April 9th, 2007 · Posted by Skuds in Politics · No Comments · Politics

…they've all got it in for me.

I had been looking forward to some nice, straightforward elections this year, at least as far as my own campaign and Jayne's are concerned, but it has all got very complicated.

First of all we had a resignation in Furnace Green leading to a second seat being up for election there.  This was only announced about a day before nominations opened so there was a lot of frantic shuffling to find an extra candidate.  The end result was that I stopped being the candidate for Maidenbower before the election was even called and will now stand in Furnace Green.

Maidenbower was going to be a simple and entirely predictable election where the Tories romp home and Labour and  the Lib Dems slug it out for (distant) second place.  Furnace Green is a complicated one with seven candidates from 5 parties fighting over two seats. Based on last year's results we should expect to lose this in a straight race, but with all those split votes and Lib Dem, BNP and Green voters having a spare vote to use somewhere else its all a lot less certain.

The picture across the whole of Crawley is that Labour and the Tories are contesting every seat.  The Lib Dems are in every ward but only have one candidate in Furnace Green.  Maybe they got could not arrange an extra candidate, and understandably so – they only had 6 days notice of the vacancy while the Tories must have had 6 months warning.

The Greens are standing in 5 wards, the BNP in 4 wards, the English Democrats in 2 wards, and Crawley's very own Justice party (AKA Arshad Khan) is standing in Bewbush.  Ifield has a couple of Independents.

Normally I am not big on conspiracy theories, but the distribution of all these fringe parties does not seem to be doing us in Labour any favours.  The traditional safe-as-houses seats have been left alone and are straight three-way elections (I am not counting the Justice party in Bewbush) and the smaller parties are only standing in those wards which are currently Labour but are at risk, or which are Tory/Lib Dem but where we might fancy our chances in a better year than this.

If the BNP, Greens and English Democrats got together and decided to co-ordinate their efforts to try and split the votes and spoil Labours chances they could have hardly done better than this – only Gossops Green escapes their attentions.

One danger is that we have some notoriously low turnouts in Crawley.  When the majority stay at home and there are little more than a thousand votes cast in some wards having 6 candidates, as there are in Ifield, could mean that the BNP sneak in somewhere, despite being the first choice of very few voters.

Even in the safest of seats here, the non-voters outnumber the votes for the winner, and the challenge for everyone is not persuading people to vote for a particular party or candidate but just to vote at all.

Anyway, the full line-up is:

  • Bewbush:  Lab, Con, LD, Justice
  • Gossops Green:  Lab, Con, LD
  • Maidenbower:  Lab, Con, LD
  • Tilgate:  Lab, Con, LD, BNP, Green
  • Pound Hill Sth:  Lab, Con, LD
  • Pound Hill Nth:  Lab, Con, LD
  • Southgate:  Lab, Con, LD, BNP, Green
  • Furnace Green:  Lab, Lab, Con, Con, LD, BNP, Green
  • Ifield:  Lab, Con, LD, BNP, Ind, Ind
  • Three Bridges:  Lab, Con, LD, Green, ED
  • Northgate:  Lab, Con, LD, Green, ED 

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