Thursday, September 07, 2017

It's Super Thursday for local by-elections - let's have some Lib Dem realism

There are no fewer than 14 (count 'em) local by-elections being held.

This gives me a good excuse to pay tribute to the magnificent by-election previews posted by Andrew Teale every week. They give the geography, sociology and political history of each ward being contested.

You can read today's preview on his website.

Looking at that preview, there are some good prospects for Liberal Democrat advances when the results come through later on this evening.

I hope we celebrate them - no doubt the #libdemfightback hashtag will make a reappearance if we do.

But I hope we will also pay attention to the seats where our vote amounts to only a few percentage points or we cannot even find a candidate.

We failed to do that between 2015 and 2017 - I once called it confirmation bias - with the result that we were shocked when our vote went down at this year's general election.

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