Oxfordshire
NORWICH NORTH AND CAMBRIDGESHIRE RESULTS
Saturday, 25th July 2009
While not a win for UKIP, the result of the Norwich North by-election was pretty good - the 11.8% of the vote gained by Glenn Tingle, the candidate, was the highest-ever result in a Westminster by-election or General Election. Only Hartlepool in 2004 and Boston in 2005 came anywhere near, with around 10% in each case.
Here's the Norwich North result in full :
Conservative Party: 13,591
Labour: 6,243
Liberal Democrats: 4,803
UKIP: 4,068
Green: 3,350
Craig Murray (Ind): 953
BNP: 941
Independent: 166
Monster Raving Loony Party: 144
None of the Above Party : 59
Libertarian Party: 36
Independent: 23
Six Oxfordshire UKIP activists travelled to the constituency and did their bit for Glenn. You can see a montage of still pictures from the campaign on Youtube here .
At the same time, Peter Reeve of UKIP's eastern region won a seat on Cambridgeshire County Council and Huntingdonshire District Council. The County Council figures were :
UKIP: 865
Conservatives : 682
Liberal Democrats: 308
Labour: 53
Apart from anything else, it is so very gratifying to see another last place showing for Labour.
Some activists of UKIP Oxfordshire know Peter from the Henley by-election a few years ago when we met him there.
In the Norwich North by-election it looks like the BBC either made a very bad judgement (being charitable) or positively wanted to play down UKIP's chances. Throughout the campaign the BBC presented the contest as a four horse race : the LibLabCon and the Greens. Their "narrative" was that the Greens were the fourth party and were set to possibly make a breakthrough.
As even Daniel Hannan has remarked, it does fit very well the image of the BBC left-"liberal" types, devoted to the climate change mantra. Not for them the "populist" UKIP, campaigning on an anti-EU, anti-immigration platform and even sceptical about the causes of global warming.
Anyway, the BBC is now receiving a flurry of letters of complaint and even the police have been requested to intervene.
One other aspect of the by-election is that it provides more proof that we now do not even have a two-and-a-half party system, as is sometimes joked. We now have a six party system ; LibLabCom, UKIP, Green and BNP. But it is a six-party system struggling around a two-party structure. If we must continue with the first-past-the-post system then the harsh reality is that, for UKIP to win, it must struggle out of the "second tier" (UKIP, Green and BNP) and take on the establishment parties.
Glenn Tingle talks about this aspect in an article he wrote for the politics.co.uk website and the theme of multi-party politics was also taken up by in the Guardian.
For those of us who have been on the campaign trail for so long - its about time.
