Paul Clein sometime ago.

Speaking to the Daily Post Paul Clein said..

“I think he should resign. I feel sorry for Warren because I know that he has worked really, really hard, ceaselessly you might say, in this election.

“But he has presided over the party losing seats, going from 60 to 37.”

He said he had no plans to stand for the leadership.

Cllr Clein is seen as one of the “heavyweights” of the Local Lib Dem party, and stood unsuccessfully against Warren Bradley in 2008.

The Lib Dems are planning to meet on the 17th of May, when they will probably sort this all out. after 12 years running the council, I’m guessing it’s going to take some time for them to adjust to being in opposition.

1. Numbers can mean anything

The Lib Dems are close but not that close

All sides do this to varying degrees, you can prove anything with statistics and 65% of people don’t believe in surveys.

The Local election in Liverpool wasn’t exempt from number bending, The LibDems got out their protractors and slide rules to give us a not quite accurate graph of the previous result in riverside.

The greens gave us the Lib Dems only got 17% of the vote for 51% of the seats, in reality that’s not quite true. it was 17% of the possible vote if everyone turned out, which is far from true in local elections. Based on actual people who bothered to vote the Lib Dems had much closer to the 51%.

2. Everyone has flaws you can expose

Liverpool is a dirty place, especially during an election, their is muck flying all over the place, no one is really immune to this

the greens pledged to run a clean campaign, but that was after they had sent leaflets out questioning attendance records and expense claims of existing councillors. the second of which they had to issue an apology for.

In Greenbank the Lib Dems attacked the Greens as tree hugging plane hating hippies, and on this very blog Greenbank Councillor Jan Clein said:

“At Election time you need to tell people why you think they should vote for you & also why you think they should not vote for other parties – hard to do without a little negativity).”

Labour ? well in Greenbank I didn’t see any personal attacks but in other places they where particularity  bad (see 5).

3. The Lib-Dems don’t always agree – with themselves.

If this blog gave me one thing during the election, it was a small insight in to how the Local Lib Dem party runs.

Again in comments on this blog Jan Clein outlined the selection process.

“…in the Liberal Democrats any party member can apply for selection after vetting – neither Paul Clein nor I are on any vetting committee. Linda-Jane Buckle was selected by postal vote”

…

“Neither Paul Clein nor I knew Linda-Jane Buckle before she applied for selection (though we did know she had stood previously in another Ward) for Greenbank Ward & only met her AFTER she was selected.

Her biggest advocate in Riverside was one Cllr John Coyne, who was then a Lib Dem Councillor (on the Riverside Executive) & is now “Leader” of the Green Party in Liverpool.”

It’s a little disconcerting to hear this, obviously it wasn’t all rosy in the Lib Dem Garden.

4. The Greens have over inflatied views of thier chances?

The Greens kept telling us how they had a real chance in Greenbank, and how at the Euro elections they won Greenbank, and maybe the Lib Dems focused attacks on the Greens made us belive that it was a real chance?

The lack of (very) local polling, and no Local Election in two years, did genuinely make it hard to predict how close the greens may have been, but the result doesn’t, they came a distant third. for the next election they will need to employ the skills of the Lib Dem Graph maker.

Maybe if this PR we are all currently talking about makes it to a local level the greens might do better ? or even worse!

5. Labour get dirty if they feel threatened

Not in Greenbank, or really in riverside, but the Labour Campaign over in Wavertree got real nasty quite quickly when it looked like Labour might loose. they brought most of it upon them selves with the selection and then in fighting about Luciana Berger.

The Scanned Daily Mail article was the low point, and I hope they look back at that and see how desperate they got. Liverpool already had a reputation for dirty politics and this just helped to re-enforce that.

6. The Council can’t count or has naff printers.

Really I’ve already posted about this, but running out of ballot papers is a bit naff, imagine what we would say if this happened in another country. UN Election observers please.

According to the BBC the polling station on Dunbabin Road ran out of ballot papers. there were also reports of this happening in other polling stations including the one on Dovedale Road,

Liverpool’s returning officer Colin Hilton told the echo “an unprecedented and unexpected high turnout” meant a small number of polling stations ran out of ballot papers in the early evening.”

Except the turn out in Liverpool wasn’t that high.

• Dovedale Road is in the Church Ward next to Greenbank and according to the council website the turn out was 65.22%
• Dunbabin Road in in the Childwall Ward and the turnout was 67.31%

Now unless almost all of that turn out was in in that little bit of each ward (and in childwall this happened to more than one polling station) you would expect them to have enough ballot papers to handle at least 65% of people turning up? Really they should have enough papers should everyone turn up. or at least have a reliable way of getting them to the polling stations when they know they are running low.

I know this probably wasn’t a lot of people, but it doesn’t take a lot of people in Local Elections to make a difference, in Childwall Ward, the difference between winning and loosing was 262 votes.

When I voted – they had just started a new book of ballot papers, and there where lots in a book, I don’t think they could have gotten threw a book in less than 20 minutes even with a queue. so when they started on their last book, they should have been panicking and phoning for more? maybe they did, and the bus was just late. really this is very poor.

I successfully voted for third place, and you could argue (and it would be valid) that I contributed to the Lib Dems winning by not voting for Labour, but that is a good case in point for some form of alternative voting system.

I don’t think I should be forced to vote for only one of two parties just because they are the only ones who may win. otherwise they will ponce about telling everyone that people agree with all their policies when that’s not true, people just think you are the lesser of two evils.

So Greenbank still has three Lib Dem Councillors, but city wide Labour have now taken control of the Council.

It’s so identical as to be hardly worth staying up for. before last night Louise Ellman had 59.2% of the vote, and now she has 59.3%, The Lib Dems had 23.3% and now they have 22.7% the BBC swing-o-meter, puts this result as a 0.3% swing to Labour.

In Liverpool it looks like it was a good night for labour, and a bad one for the Lib Dems. The Labour party have not only won all the seats in Liverpool but in the other Liverpool seats they have seen around a 1.5% – 5.7% swing to Labour from he Lib Dems, including Wavertree which was the one everyone thought might be close.

I think they are counting the Local Elections now, but if the same thing has happened to the Lib Dems there, then Labour could well be looking at getting control of the council by the end of the day. I think I am off to get some sleep now.

The Local Election was a lot less clear for me. I’ve been swinging all day; between Labour and the Greens. Labour because I actually liked a lot of what they said locally, the Candidate seems well qualified and they genuinely do seem to want to make a difference. Green again because the Candidate makes a lot of sense and because I believe that we do need to make more of a change than we currently are, and that the Local Council isn’t really doing all it can to be green.

The views in my head also span around who actually has a chance of winning. Greenbank is and has been for a long time a Lib Dem ward with Labour in second place, but the Greens showing an increasing improvement as the years progressed. Because there was no Local Election last year, it’s hard to actually know for certain how close this is going to be, no one polls on Wards (well not that I can see) so it’s all about who you think might win.

So I was torn but sooner or later I had to choose. and with my yellow slip in my hand I voted… Green.

In the end I decided to vote for the party I agree with the Most, and after doing a lot of reading, and on-line political Cosmo quizzes I just have to except my fate as a tree hugging hippy and give the greens at least one of my votes.

On balance I think that Liverpool City Council needs to be held more to account over it’s green credentials and while I’m not 100% convinced a green council would be the best option, a few green councillors to keep them in check isn’t that bad a thing.

It was a genuinely hard decision, and if I have come away from this election process with only one thing, It’s that we need a better voting system, in both the General and Local Elections.

For me the General Election vote is the easy one, I have thought about that and I am voting Lib Dem. I have some ideological issues with the Labour Government mainly over civil liberties, and I don’t want them to have a majority stake in British politics until they get a little bit less big brothery.

I know Liverpool Riverside is an Incredibly safe seat and My vote has little impact, but I am playing the long game. I figure if i vote LibDem now then next time (if the voting system hasn’t changed) it won’t be as safe and all parties will be forced to actually contest the seat.

I will say now, I am not 100% happy with Richard Marbrow the Lib Dem canidate, he has been the invisible man in this election, it’s not just me who has noticed, it was the first question he got asked in the Radio Merseyside Debate. His answer was you could always email him, this is also lame, because I know people who have emailed him and he has given no response. He didn’t turn up to the Hustings in Granby, which is also very lame.

My aim then in voting for the invisible man, is to make Riverside a contest next time, somewhere where the candidates actually turn up to stuff,  and also to add to the pressure on the voting system, so that we don’t end up with this no contest seats in the future.

The Locals ? well I won’t be voting for another 10 ish hours, so I have some time to actually make up my mind.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p007l0n1/Roger_Phillips_05_05_2010/

We got a LibDem leaflet acknowledging the existence of Richard Marbrow!

I understand totally why the LibDems haven’t been pushing it in Liverpool Riverside, they need a 16.4% swing to get the seat, and they don’t have very much money in comparison to the other two parties, but I was beginning to worry about the existence of Richard, and that I would get to the polling booth and end up having to choose between labour, the greens and some wacky toffee crisp party. [I will be voting Lib Dem in the General Election, I have made up my mind for that, I am undecided locally]

It did however include the random graph

The LibDem version of the result

The Actual Result in Riverside

I know it is only a two horse race, but lets all be honest here – one of those horses is way out in-front.

The Greens have decided to all but admit defeat in the race for riverside, and are instead pushing for a ‘split’ voting message, basically telling people they can vote for two different parties in each election -

I like this approach, people do need to be told that they can actually vote for two different parties in the elections, it’s a suprising how many people don’t appear to make a distinction.

They also make a good case for an alternative voting system in local elections. in Liverpool the Lib Dems have 17% of the vote and 51% of the seats. if this is right (and a night of number crunching awaits me) then it does offer a good reason for some form of alternative voting at a local level.