Thanks to Danivon for pointing out the Worthing Liberal Democrats website. I shouldn’t really be praising the opposition, but I quite like the Worthing Lib Dems – quite a few of them I have met only joined when Thatcher was in power and thought the Lib Dems were the most likely party to beat the Tories down there. Had they lived in Crawley they would almost certainly have joined Labour.

Anyway, they are building up a very decent database of West Sussex election results, which more than makes up for the deficiencies in the Crawley council website and those of other local councils, and which Danivon used in his analysis of the Crawley results. And then I had a look at the main site which hosts the Worthing Lib Dems and found that it is run by our old mate James Doyle.

James was the Mayor of Worthing during the time I was Deputy Mayor of Crawley, so me & Jayne bumped into him and his wife many times at various civic functions across the county. Party differences aside, we found him to be a thoroughly nice bloke, and an amateur thesp – something I sometimes find myself regretting having given up on.

What I couldn’t find on the website was anything about what is going on with the Worthing hospital campaign. I keep hearing vague rumours about the Tories upsetting everyone by apparently hijacking it, but can’t get any hard facts.

Reading between the lines, it looks like there was/is an ‘all-party’ campaign to save the local hospital . At the recent local elections all the Tory candidates were described as “Conservatives: stop the hospital cuts” which other parties interpreted as an attempt to imply that they, despite also being part of the same campaign, are in favour of cuts.

Sounds messy, but have I got it right? I looked up the Conservative and Unionist Party on the Electoral Commission’s website (thanks for that link Gordon!) and they do indeed have that registered as an official description to be used on ballot papers, along with “Conservatives: vote blue get green”, and “David Cameron’s Conservatives”. (Not hearing so much criticism of Tony Blair’s so-called presidential style from that direction any more are we? I wonder why…)

Does that count as a dirty trick? I have to say that I don’t like the idea of having slogans on the ballot paper anyway, but if everyone else is doing it should Labour join in?

Another description the Tories have registered is “Local Conservatives”. I don’t know where it was used but presume it was somewhere they perceived hostility to Cameron/the national party and wanted to distance themselves from it. As many Crawley Labour members are convinced we lost solely because of national issues, should we think of doing the same for next year’s elections?