GUEST POST Reform and Labour are losing councillors fast

We’ve all enjoyed the regular resignations, defections and disgrace of Reform UK councillors, but the party actually gained councillors from by-election victories and defections, between May 2025 and May 2026. But now, as the latest post from the indefatigable Augustus Carp shows, the tide has turned for them.

The kaleidoscope of local government has continued to twist since the local elections in May, and with it a number of political allegiances have changed. Sometimes a councillor’s defection has little impact, but clustering in some authorities has led to significant weakening in control. For the first time since I started paying any attention to this phenomenon, all political parties have suffered a net loss of councillors, to the benefit of Independents and a number of new Localist groups.

Mark Pack’s website, which diligently catalogues the various defections, expulsions, resignations and arrests of Reform UK councillors, provides a lot of entertainment value, particularly for the type of person who likes watching slow-motion car crashes. But why isn’t anyone paying the same sort of attention to the Labour Party? In terms of defections, ReformUK has lost 48 councillors since the local elections in May. Labour has lost 42 – a similar number, which has received almost no publicity whatsoever. In both cases, there have been a number of councillors in the same political group who have gone at the same time, presumably for ideological rather than just personal reasons.

Seven Labour councillors have gone in Luton, four in Neath, four in Colchester and three in North Tyneside. In Luton, it’s reasonable to assume that the losses from the Labour group were significant in allowing the Lib Dems to form a new minority administration. (But to be fair, the situation there is complex, and the resignation of a senior Lib Dem complicates matters further.)

Four Independents have joined forces with the Conservatives in Braintree, but one has gone the other way. Four of the councillors in Sevenoaks who left the fold in May 2025 to form the West Kent Independent Group have now drifted back. Three others have left the party in Fife

The big losses for Reform UK have been in Durham (8, or maybe 9 councillors, including a suspension) and Plymouth (6) but four have joined in North East Derbyshire and three in Flintshire 

For councillors flying off in all sorts of different directions, have a look at Worcestershire. The Conservatives are unchanged, with two coming and two going, taking at face value their assertion that the national suspension of one of their number doesn’t apply locally. Likewise the Lib Dems are unchanged – one in and one out – but ReformUK are down three. The situation is similarly unclear in some of the District Councils covered by the County.

Across the nation, in the 18 weeks since the local elections in May, the net changes for the number of councillors defecting or getting themselves suspended is:

Conservatives       -6

Labour                 -44

Lib Dem               -15

Greens                  -4

Nationalists           -1  

ReformUK           -48

Independents   +118 

Let’s see if conference season causes any more movement.

Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.

GUEST POST Councillor defection scores on the eve of polling day

Augustus Carp offers something to whet your appetite – a curtain-raiser, a short not-too-dramatic offering before the Grand-Guignol horror show that awaits us as the results start to trickle in from late on Thursday night until the following evening.

In the first four months of 2026, the procession of councillors resigning from the political parties that helped them to get elected has continued apace. So far, 299 "events" have occurred; not just defections, but also a few expulsions and suspensions. "Double-hatted" councillors who change their affiliation have been counted twice, as have councillors who resigned and then re-joined (48 hours later, in one celebrated case in North Northamptonshire.)

That’s an average of nearly 18 a week, or 2.5 every day. I doubt if most political pundits realise that the figure is quite so high, which might explain why the subject does not get the attention given to the half-a-dozen local council by elections held every week. An exception is Mark Pack’s regular update of Reform UK defections, but those resignations are indeed worthy of serious inspection because of the novelty value, fuss and general hoop-la associated with the new insurgent populist party.

From an objective perspective, defecting councillors are a significant indicator of a change in local party morale. When they go, they take valuable resources with them, such as knowledge of their wards, help with campaigning and general goodwill towards their former party. Worse still, they might be taking their families and friends with them – perhaps into a rival organisation. They may only constitute a handful of votes, but they could represent hundreds of hours of solid campaigning at a future election, against the former party’s new candidate.

Big parties, big losers

Reasons for defections can be many and various, and can range from the principled to the ridiculous, but the damage can still be significant, regardless of the circumstances which cause it. 

The main losers so far this year have been the Labour party (down 59 councillors) and the Conservatives (down 52). The Labour figure seems to have been exacerbated by the impending London Borough elections, where reselection processes have put some noses and egos out of joint. As one might expect, excluding councillors who have opted for Independent status, most Labour councillors have gone to the Greens, with Conservatives tending towards Reform UK.

The Greens have acquired an additional 21 councillors via defections, with the Reform UK tally rising by 32. On balance, the Lib Dems have lost 13 and the Nationalists are down 2. The balancing figure in the equation is 73, representing various "Independents" (loosely described).

Straight swaps

Three Reform UK councillors have moved to the Conservatives – but 33 have gone the other way. One Tory has joined the Lib Dems, whilst one Lib Dem has travelled in the opposite direction. Four Lib Dems have joined the Greens, with one going against the tide. Eight Labour councillors left for the Greens, two for the Lib Dems, and one (in Hartlepool) for Reform UK.

Although not (yet) counted as a separate party in my system, it is worth noting that Restore Britain has attracted 21 councillors, from the independents and Reform UK. This includes a bulk membership event on Kent County Council in February. Similarly, there has been a handful of moves to Advance UK, mainly from Independents but also one from the Workers Party. (No, I don’t understand it either.)

If the local elections on Thursday pan out according to the pundits, with a large number of Reform UK and Green Party successes, then I confidently forecast that there will be many more resignations and defections over the summer, once the new councillors realise that theirs is a thankless task, with lots of work but little chance of changing anything to do with small boats or Gaza.

Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.

The Joy of Six 1511

"Opinion polls consistently suggest that after the elections on 7 May, England will be flanked by countries run by restless centre-left nationalist parties – Plaid Cymru in Cardiff, the Scottish National party in Edinburgh and, in Belfast, Sinn Féin, which shares power with the Democratic Unionists." Severin Carrell and Bethan McKernan say next week's elections could reshape UK.

"Real names becomes a tool for bullies online – and will force victims either to accept the bullying or avoid using the internet. This, of course, is not just true for bullies, but for overbearing parents, sadistic teachers and much worse. It is really important not to just think about good parents and protective teachers. For the vulnerable children, parents and teachers can be exactly the people they need to avoid." Paul Bernal argues that children need anonymity and encryption online. 

Catherine Heseltine asks if we can build crisis care outside the mental health system: "Being violently locked away and forcibly drugged made my mental health crisis many times worse – an experience shared by far too many people who have been subjected to standard NHS crisis 'care'.  Yet the mental health system seems to resist change like a train with no brakes."

Emma Peplow, with the help of the History of Parliament blog's oral history archive reminds us that Hannah Spencer is not the first new MP to remark on Westminster's drinking culture disapprovingly.

"Football Focus lasted almost two decades after its mothership Grandstand finally came off the air in 2007. The falling number of top flight 3pm kick offs certainly didn’t help though, and that trend might in time make it harder for even Final Score to endure, too." Richard Jones discusses what the BBC's axeing of Football Focus tells us about trends in sports broadcasting.

Londonist takes us to North Korea's London embassy, which stands just off the North Circular in Ealing

GUEST POST Old Carp's Almanack: Councillor defections in 2024

Augustus Carp, our man with the Local Government Chronicle and a slide rule, looks back on a year packed with defecting councillors.

As a start to the New Year, here’s a handy cut-out-'n-keep souvenir edition of all the defections by local government councillors we are aware of in 2024. The net changes are 

• Conservatives -186
• Labour -192
• Lib Dems -69 
• Greens +8
• Nationalists -20
• Reform UK +58 

The balancing figure consists of 401 Independents, broadly defined, as not all changes are directly from one party to another. 

I freely confess that when I started this exercise a couple of years ago I had no idea of the numbers involved, but for 445 elected representatives to change their party allegiance in just one year strikes me as rather high.

Nevertheless, for sensible analysis of local politics we need to rely on the experts – people like Andrew Teale, Mark Pack, Britain Elects and the others, who examine the by elections, calculate the swings and thence extrapolate into the future.

They provide us with solid sustenance, whereas the defections summarised above are perhaps more like herbs and spices – they might add something to the dish, but can be somewhat repulsive if relied on too much, so please use them with caution.  

“But what”, I hear you cry, “about the mass Labour defections in Broxtowe? And that unusual Conservative resignation in Oldham?”  

Well, the thing is, they all happened in 2025, so you will have to wait a while before they are tallied and collated – perhaps until late April, when I will look at the situation again, just before the (cancelled?) local elections in May.

Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.

The Joy of Six 1290

Linsey McGoey listened to Trump voters and suggests the Democrats will have to do the same if they are to win power again.

"The language of social justice - 'wokeness' if you will - is not about social justice at all but acts rather as an ideological glue binding together a section of the elite that want to keep climbing the ladder of privilege but don’t want to see themselves as part of the elite." Kenan Malik reads We Have Never Been Woke by Musa al-Gharbi.

Pam Jarvis fears many multi-academy trusts are putting copious amounts of public money into the pockets of non-teaching managers while giving the nation’s children less quality for more funding.

Alfie Steer asks if Caroline Lucas was really Britain's first Green MP: "One other former MP could plausibly claim this historic title: Cynog Dafis, Plaid Cymru MP for Ceredigion and North Pembrokeshire from 1992 to 2000. The reasons why reveal a unique, and largely forgotten moment in Welsh and British, political history."

"Despite there being no evidence to support their existence, ghosts have haunted humanity wherever they have settled across the planet. Every age and every culture has its own type of ghost and ghost stories, each shaped by its own peculiar context. And despite the rise of scientific thinking in the 20th and 21st centuries, the belief in unquiet spirits is still very much alive." Russell Moul on why we believe in ghosts.

"At St Mary de Castro ... the volunteer on duty is keen to assert that it is in a completely different league from the cathedral. Boasting elements of all eras of English architecture, from Norman to Gothic Revival, its highlight is the triple-arched Norman sedilia. It is really two churches in one, a collegiate and a parish church and thus has two naves." Iain Sharpe goes back to Leicester.

GUEST POST No sign of an end to defections in local government

Thanks to Augustus Carp for his latest bulletin on local councillors changing parties, though I'll have him know that I lived in Hemel Hempstead between the ages of 3 and 13.

Well, it's been three months now since the General Election, and in Parliament we have seen several expulsions from the Labour Party together with a rather sudden resignation. In my innocence I had assumed that people would have left their political parties before the election, rather than in the immediate aftermath, but the evidence shows that resignations have continued apace amongst our local councillors.

Since July, there have been 17 defections from the Conservative Party, 13 from Labour, 17 from the Lib Dems and 6 from the Nationalists. The net beneficiaries have been the Greens (up 3) and Reform UK (up 12). The balancing figure is described, perhaps not accurately enough, as 'Independents', who have picked up the remaining 37.  

If I had more time and patience I would no doubt try to do a bit of analysis of the various independents. I am using the category to cover ratepayers, residents associations, localists, single-issue hobbyhorse jockeys and people who are incapable of working within any sort of group structure, and many more besides.  

Some councils have one or more competing groups who fall into the Independent category. Note that councillors sometimes become Independent as a sort of casualty clearing station, where they reside after resigning from A before seeing the light and joining Party B.  

Of the 103 defections, only five councillors have made a direct swap between parties - 2 from Labour to Green, 1 from Tory to Green, 1 from Lib Dem to Labour and 1 from Labour to Lib Dem.  

One trend that seems prevalent at the moment is a disproportionately high number of defections in Wales. Since July, 14 councillors have changed their colours – 5 from Labour, 4 from the Conservatives, 3 Independents (who have transmogrified into a Reform group in Torfaen) and a Liberal Democrat.  The situation is similar in Scotland – 4 each from the Tories and the Nationalists, 3 from Labour and 1 Independent. 

The dramatic move for the Lib Dems was the mass defection of eight female councillors in Dacorum, over allegations of sexism and bullying. 

It's a matter of conjecture whether personal grievances or political ideologies are the main reason for councillor defections – there might be a doctoral thesis in it for someone with a high pain threshold.  

Incidentally, the reason the local authority is called Dacorum is to prevent the residents of Berkhamsted from having to say that they live in Hemel Hempstead.

Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.

My Liberator article on the prospects for a Progressive Alliance

This article on the prospects for a Progressive Alliance of the non-Conservative parties at the next general election appears in the new issue  of Liberator. You can download it (issue 414) from the magazine's website.

It was meant to be a review of Duncan Brack's pamphlet 1997 Then and Now: The Progressive Alliance That Was and the One That Could Be, but turned into the sort of review you get in the TLS or London Review of Books.

By that I mean that it's one where the reviewer is less interested in the book in front of them than setting out their own ideas. Still, a lot of what I say is in line with the views in the pamphlet,

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Four into one won't go

With its thick concrete walls, the Progressive Alliance control bunker lies deep beneath the soil of… We’d better keep its location a secret, but I can tell you what you will find there. The room is dominated by a table whose top carries a constituency map of Britain and across which WAAFs with victory roll hairdos slide little figures representing voters.

“Less than six hundred votes needed for Labour to gain High Peak,” barks a voice from the gantry that overlooks the room. “Withdraw the Liberal Democrat candidate.” A WAAF pushes some orange voters into the red group.” “Labour gain High Peak, sir.”

And that, if you believe what you read on social media, is all opposition parties need do to win the next general election. Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, together perhaps with Plaid Cymru and some smaller parties, should reach agreement to field only one ‘Progressive’ candidate between them in every constituency in England and Wales. 

Some early models of this Progressive Alliance (PA) also included the SNP, but such is its dominance of the Scottish scene, holding 48 of the 59 Westminster seats there, that it’s hard to see what it has to gain from joining such an arrangement. Besides, Scottish elections now see Unionist voters operating an alliance of their own, happy to fall in behind whichever party has the best chance of defeating the Nationalists in each constituency, and the SNP may well calculate that keeping a Conservative government in office at Westminster improves its chances of winning majority support for Scottish independence.

Would a PA defeat a reviving Conservative Party? Could it even win if the Conservatives were ahead in the polls? Supporters of the idea point out that the Tories never win 50 per cent of the popular vote, so that in many constituencies they win despite polling less than the combined votes of the parties in the proposed alliance. All we have to do is put those votes together behind a single candidate, the reasoning goes, and the Conservatives may never form a government again.

Problems problems

There would be many practical problems in establishing such an alliance. The first is that Labour’s constitution has always been taken to rule out any electoral pacts with other parties, though some way round this must have been found at Tatton in the 1997 general election, where both Labour and the Liberal Democrats stood down in favour of the Independent Martin Bell.

A second problem is that if Labour agreed to join an alliance, there would have to be agreement between it and all the other parties over who would fight which seats. Liberal Democrats of my generation have memories – perhaps “flashbacks” is a better word – of the endless hours consumed in meetings between the Liberal Party and the SDP to decide which party would represent the Alliance where – hours that would have been more profitably spent on campaigning, watching Dallas or almost anything else. Even if agreement could be reached in time for the next election, it would be at a similar opportunity cost.

Then there is the problem of what policy platform the PA would stand on – there would surely have to be some sort of agreement on policy to give voters an idea of what they are voting for, particularly if we are asking them to vote for a party they don’t usually support. One idea that you read on social media can be ruled out: a one-line manifesto pledging to introduce proportional representation for general elections. If we fought on that while the Conservatives talked about the economy, defence and education – no matter how stupid we thought what they had to say on those issues was – the Conservatives would win and deserve to win. We would certainly want to secure some movement from Labour on proportional representation and constitutional reform in general, but if we are exhausted after the seat negotiations it would be easier to agree some form of statement promising to undo the worst of the damage the Conservatives have cause on poverty, the environment and the economy.

We should also have to overcome the fact that a PA would threaten to hang around our necks the gaffes and objectionable views of every Labour and Green candidate around our necks. At the very least, Lib Dem candidates fighting the Tories in our target seats would have to cope with being called “the Labour/Lib Dem candidate” on all their leaflets, and even if the other PA candidates conducted themselves blamelessly, we should still have to cope with all the worst policies of their national parties. The Greens, for instance, want to leave NATO, but not while the war in Ukraine is going on. It’s hard to see that rallying disappointed Conservatives to the PA flag.

Would it work?

When all that had been accomplished, one question would remain to be answered: would a Progressive Alliance be worth all this trouble? Parties cannot deliver their voters en bloc to another party because those votes do not belong to them: they belong to the individual voters. Some specially commissioned opinion polls give encouragement to the idea, but the trouble with them is that they do not seek information like conventional polls (“How would you vote if there was a general election tomorrow”) but rather ask people to forecast what they would in a hypothetical situation at some unspecified point in the future (“If there were an electoral pact between X, Y and Z parties at the next election and this resulted in you having only a Y candidate to vote for, how would you vote?” 

And the trouble with that, as psychologists will tell you, is that we are not very good at forecasting our own actions. We are actually better at forecasting other people’s, because we take into account a wider range of factors when we look at them. We wonder how our neighbours will be influenced by the election campaign, but are, wrongly, confident that we are far too secure in our own beliefs for it to affect us.

And even a PA could be agreed, it would contain subtle dangers for the Liberal Democrats. As Simon Titley asked in Liberator 346:

‘Progressive’. What does it mean? The only discernible meaning is ‘not conservative’ or ‘not reactionary’, but those are negative definitions. … The ‘p’ word is a lazy word, so give it up. It will force you to say what you really mean, and that’s a good thing.

It may be that being against the Tories will be enough at the next general election, but in the long run the ideology-light Liberal Democrats need something more to found a party on.

1997 and all that

But maybe we can learn something from 1997, when a limited sort of PA operated between Labour and the Liberal Democrats and helped bring about the rout of the Conservatives. We Lib Dems saw our vote decline by one per cent, yet made a net gain of 28 seats.

Duncan Brack has written a pamphlet for Compass, 1997 Then and Now: The Progressive Alliance That Was and the One That Could Be, looking at the lessons to be drawn from that experience. It reminds us that that the cooperation between the two parties in 1997 was the result of much work, both public and private.

The public work took place in the talks between Labour’s future foreign secretary Robin Cook and the former SDP leader Robert Maclennan talks. Between them they agreed a package of constitutional reforms, which included incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law, freedom of information legislation, devolution to Scotland and Wales (and elections by proportional representation to their parliaments), an elected authority for London, the removal of hereditary peers from the House of Lords, proportional representation for the European elections and a referendum on voting reform for Westminster elections that gave a choice between the existing first-past-the-post system and a proportional alternative.

As Duncan Brack says, much of this was already Liberal Democrat policy – some of it was watered down to be accepted as part of the package – but the agreement did break new ground for Labour. And most of it was implemented by the Blair government. The exceptions were the referendum on a proportional voting system for Westminster elections and the total removal from hereditary peers from the Lords, where a deal brokered by the former Commons speaker Lord Weatherill saw 92 of them allowed to remain.

When Paddy met Tony

Meanwhile, the private work took place in talks between Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown. These looked at electoral cooperation and the possibility of a wider policy agreement than that reached by Cook and Maclennan.

Tony Blair, says Duncan Brack, was keen on the idea of the two parties backing a single candidate in a limited number of seats, and accepted that in some the candidate would be a Liberal Democrat. Remembering the hours lost in negotiations with the SDP, Ashdown vetoed this idea saying it would appear “a grubby plan designed to gain power and votes for ourselves, instead of one based round principles and what was best for the country”.

This line was forced on Ashdown, who had earlier floated the idea of closer cooperation between the parties, by the Liberal Democrats’ polling. This showed clearly that the soft Conservative voters the party was targeting would be happy for it to enter government with Labour in the event of a hung parliament but were hostile to the idea that it should campaign with Labour for that outcome.

So the parties turned to covert cooperation, concentrating on the same issues and using the same language. They avoided attacks on each other, shared information on which seats they were targeting and jointly gave the Daily Mirror a list of 22 seats where Labour voters should back the Liberal Democrats.

In the event, Liberal Democrat supporters proved to be more prepared to vote tactically than Labour supporters. The Labour vote went up in some Liberal Democrat targets, but such was the fall in Conservative support that we still won some of them. I don’t know if they were official targets, but Labour also came from third place to win two seats we had rather fancied winning ourselves: St Albans and Hastings & Rye.

Building trust and relationships

Duncan Brack concludes from this history that parties should not try to negotiate a national pact. Instead, he says: 

Any level of cooperation between non-Conservative parties will need to be more fluid and organic than it was in 1997, built from the bottom up as well as the top down – hence the Compass focus on local groups and building trust and relationships over the long term. 

This could feature a wide range of approaches – including, possibly, local electoral agreements but, more importantly, cooperation in local campaigns and policy discussions, building a common understanding and appreciation of parties’ positions and potential solutions to the challenges the UK faces in the mid-2020s.

And I am happy to support his conclusion, which takes us a long way from that Progressive Alliance Control Bunker:

Whatever the form a progressive alliance takes, whether it’s an electoral pact or encouragement for tactical voting, the parties that form it need to give an indication to the electorate of what will be the result if they vote for it: a positive agenda of reform, not merely the negative case for getting rid of the Tories.

The new issue of Liberator is out - and why you should subscribe

The new Liberator has arrived, which is pretty impressive seeing as I was still writing for it this time last week.

Soon I will inflict Lord Bonkers' latest writings on you, and maybe my review of the new Social Liberal Forum publication The Wolves in the Forest.

But this evening let's do what every reader does and turn first to Radical Bulletin, the feature that tells you what is really going on in the Liberal Democrats.

There you will find the answer to these questions:

• Which Lib Dem leadership contended sacked their campaign chief halfway through the recent contest?
• Which seat says it has been told by party HQ to stand down its candidate in favour of Plaid Cymru?
• Which seat where we polled 3.3 per cent last time round is being treated as a target?

Once again the moral is clear: subscribe to Liberator.

Nick Cohen announces "Unite to Remain" alliance in the Spectator

You wouldn't expect the announcement to be made by a socialist journalist in the Spectator, but Nick Cohen appears to have important news:

On 15 August, the attempt to build an effective remain force will begin when the Liberal Democrats, Greens and Plaid Cymru agree a non-aggression pact in 30 constituencies.

They will back one candidate in each seat who will stand as X Liberal Democrat (Unite to Remain) or Y Green (Unite to Remain) and so on. 

The “Unite to Remain” title has already been agreed with the Electoral Commission so the problems found in running unity candidates in the European elections shouldn’t trouble us next time. 

My understanding is that the easy decisions are close to being taken. There’s agreement that sitting MPs should be given a free run, and on the names of candidates for obvious target seats. 

The Greens were far ahead of the Liberal Democrats in the Isle of Wight in the 2017 election, for example, and will provide the sole remain candidate in the constituency next time. 

A second tranche of 30 or so constituencies will be settled on 22 August. As the parties move down the list of target seats, the task becomes harder. In each constituency they are asking activists to step aside for a rival, a hard concession for many to make.

There's a lot to digest here.

For now - and remembering the Liberal/SDP years -  I can say with some authority that it is not enough to form an alliance: you need something exciting to say too.

Six thoughts on Brecon and Radnorshire

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Well done the Liberal Democrats

Brecon and Radnorshire may have looked like an inevitable Liberal Democrat gain – we have held the seat for 20 of the past 34 years – but an enormous amount of work went into winning.

Even to force the by-election after the sitting Conservative MP was committed of fraudulent expense claims required us to collect the signatures of more than 10 per cent of the constituency’s electors. In the event we achieved 19 per cent.

Then we flooded Brecon and Radnorshire with workers for the six weeks of the by-election campaign and overturned a Tory majority of over 8000 votes.

Well done the Liberal Democrats. Well done us.

The Remain Alliance helped…

The Green and Plaid Cymru stood down in favour of the Lib Dems so there was only one Remain candidate.

It was a helpful decision and one the Lib Dems should reciprocate in the few seats where it might have an effect. But it may not have been a decisive one.

At the last general election there was no Green candidate in Brecon and Radnorshire and the Plaid candidate’s vote was (just) lower than the majority Jane Dodds achieved last night.

…but the unofficial alliance with Labour voters was decisive

From what I saw on Twitter last night it was when the boxes from Ystradgynlais were sampled and found to be strongly in favour of the Lib Dems that it became clear we were going to win.

This willingness of Labour voters to abandon their party if another has a better chance of defeating the Conservatives is an important development and an encouraging one for the Lib Dems.

An anti-Brexit vote or an anti-Tory vote?

Brecon and Radnorshire came out for Leave in the EU referendum, but that does not mean that the issue is of overwhelming importance to the constituency’s voters.

Back in June, a YouGov survey found that Leave voters feel less strongly about Brexit than us Remainers do.

Which makes me think that our victory yesterday was more of an anti-Tory vote than an anti-Brexit vote. Brexit was far from the only issue we campaigned on.

The local Tories are to blame

That is what the national Conservative machine was saying. The local party had assured them that Chris Davies was still popular and would win the by-election. They were wrong.

My impression that local Tory officials are increasingly out of touch with the wider electorate has only been strengthened by this contest.

And the national Tories are no better

I have seen tweets from the Conservative Party today telling off people for voting for the Brexit Party.

The idea that you own your supporters’ votes - and that the way to win them back if they stray from the path of righteousness is to attack them – comes straight from the Hard Left.

It will do the Tories no more good than it has done Labour.

On becoming exasperated with Heidi Allen

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So the Tiggers have changed their name again - they are now The Independents - and will be less of a party in future.

But there was another, less amusing, development involving Heidi Allen yesterday. She also announced the launch of Unite to Remain.

According to The New European:

The independent MP for South Cambridgeshire, who will lead the initiative, said the group will follow the blueprint of what is happening in the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election, where both Plaid Cymru and the Greens have agreed to stand aside in order to support the Liberal Democrat candidate, who is seen as having the best chance of defeating the Conservatives and bringing a seat to the Remain cause.

But the parties listed here are getting on very well with no help from Heidi Allen.

And when the Tiggers did involve themselves involved in a by-election - in Peterborough - it all turned shambolic.

Who can forget Gavin Shuker's explanation of why there was not a single Remain candidate?

He said:

"We all agreed to stand down any candidates we might field in favour of a genuinely independent, pro-'people's vote' and pro-remain candidate who had expressed an interest and intention to stand. 

"However, senior Labour figures, including senior figures campaigning for a people’s vote, made it clear they would strenuously disrupt the campaign and obstruct an independent candidate, driven by fears that it would harm their party in Peterborough."

If there is a vacancy for a group like Unite to Remain it is for one that can bring in the SNP and parts of the Labour Party. And for that task you do not want a recent Conservative MP.

Even then there are problems. The Scottish Liberal Democrats have clearly concluded that there way back to significance is to unite the Unionist vote in the seats we held until 2015. Working with the SNP will not be easy for them.

I agree with Nick Tyrone: the Tiggers should accept the way the tide is running and join the Lib Dems.

Heidi Allen should be aware that if she continues down her present path, she may well find South Cambridgeshire Lib Dems putting up against her at the next general election out of sheer exasperation.

Six of the Best 874

Andrew Page gives his reaction to Plaid and the Greens' decision not to field candidates in the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election.

"Dismissing an issue or challenge or complaint as being “politically correct” has become catchall for those who want to avoid discussing racism, sexism, and discrimination and who are willing to rebrand offensiveness as frankness." Edwin L. Battistella on the evolution of a concept.

William D. Cohan reviews a life of John F. Kennedy Jr.

Nicole Rudick on the way women science fiction writers are left out of the history of the genre.

"Four decades on, what started as a labour of love, before being duly assigned to the scrapheap by an indifferent movie industry, continues to be, even in the technological age, a touchstone of British pop culture, and a much-quoted icon of maverick filmmaking." A year on from Robin Hardy’s death, James Gent looks at his masterpiece The Wicker Man and its legacy.

BusAndTrainUser takes the Sunday-only 279 bus from Okehampton to Gunnislake.

My fan-dabi-dozi column for the Leicester Mercury

On 9 January I had the following column published in the Leicester Mercury.

Run-of-the-mill stuff, you will say, but it appeared on the same spread as The Krankies.

Multi-party politics here for the long haul

I’ve got some bad news for people who don’t like the Coalition: it’s going to continue throughout 2014. And when I say “people who don’t like the Coalition,” I am thinking chiefly of Conservative activists and backbench MPs.

Because ever since their party failed to win the 2010 general election those backbenchers and activists have taken out their anger, not on David Cameron, but on the Liberal Democrats. If it weren’t for Nick Clegg, they tell us, we could do all sorts of wonderful things.

Which is odd, because the Coalition has chalked up some solid achievements. Tax cuts for low-paid workers; scrapping Labour’s plans for compulsory national identity cards; maintaining the overseas aid budget; providing more funding to schools to help children from poor families.

It’s even odder when you look at what those backbenchers and activists think a Conservative government would do if it weren’t reined in by the Liberal Democrats. Cuts in inheritance tax for millionaires; allowing employers to fire people at will; a database to record everyone’s emails and text messages; abolishing Natural England, the public body that conserves our natural environment.

That does not sound like a programme to enthuse anyone beyond the Conservative Party. So one effect of the Coalition may have been to make David Cameron more popular than he would have been if he were leading a one-party government.

But let’s leave the party politics aside and look at the deeper picture. Back in 1951 the Conservatives and Labour between them received 96.8 per cent of the votes cast. By the time of the last general election that figure had fallen to 65.1 per cent.

The Liberal revival, the rise of the Nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales, and the arrival of the Greens and UKIP mean that multi-party politics is here to stay. And that, despite the near lottery of our current electoral system, means that coalitions are much more likely in future.

And why assume that is a bad thing? Ask the public what they think of politics and they say they hate petty squabbling and want to see people from different parties working together. That is what coalitions give you.

Maybe they make radical change less likely, but it’s not as if the major parties are far apart these days. I would like to see this government doing more to help the poor, but I remember that Labour’s rising star Rachel Reeves has promised to be tougher on benefits than the Coalition.

So not only will the Coalition last throughout 2014: coalition governments may well be here to stay.

David Heath to promote new laws to control spying agencies

Tomorrow's Guardian says that the former Liberal Democrat minister David Heath is to demand new laws to make sure Britain's spying agencies do not intercept calls or email data without a specific warrant:

He told the Guardian there were gaps in legislation governing the intelligence services that had to be closed, and called for the UK to follow America's example in looking at how to address the issue.

The report goes on to say that Heath attempt to bring in a new bill from the backbenches will have cross-party support. The paper names Labour's Tom Watson, the Conservative former diplomat Rory Stewart, Caroline Lucas, of the Greens, Elfyn Llwyd, the Westminster leader of Plaid Cymru, and Simon Hughes.

Certainly, something needs to be done in the light of recent revelations. Parliament, or at least the dimmer Conservative backbenchers, appears to believe that all we need do is prosecute the Guardian.

But then, under Labour, Blair's deceit over Iraq was set aside in favour of a campaign against the BBC.

GUEST POST The uncertain politics of railway preservation

A week before Christmas I blogged about the BBC programme The Golden Age of Railways. Joseph Boughey, who appeared in that programme, left a comment on that post.

Now Joseph has written a guest post on the uncertain politics of railway preservation and the relation of the 'small is beautiful' theme to wider political aspirations and economic arrangements.

During the film The Golden Age of Steam: Small is Beautiful I explained some of my impressions of those who, in 1950, founded the Talyllyn Railway Preservation Society (not its present members, or members of similar societies).

Of course, much was said that did not appear in the film. The outlook of the Talyllyn founders was conservative rather than Conservative, and indeed only one founder – William Trinder – had a clear party identification, and he was a Liberal. This facilitated his dealings with the line’s owner, Sir Henry Haydn Jones, who was Liberal MP for Merioneth.

On the whole, support for small railway preservation has never been linked to direct party advantage. It could appeal to figures on the Left like Bob Cryer MP, supporter of the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway Company, who saw it as a form of common ownership under workers control; or Sir Gerald Nabarro, maverick Conservative MP, who sought to take over the Severn Valley Railway and demonstrate the virtues of private enterprise. As Raphael Samuel asserted in Theatres of Memory, 'heritage' (itself a much-contested concept) has proved unusually capable of attracting wide-ranging support quite separately from party interest.

Quite apart from party involvement, many who are involved in railway preservation would see this as quite separate from politics, and would repudiate any political connections. There are, however, distinct political dimensions to preservation, conservation and heritage, albeit ones that cannot be reduced to conventional party stances. Preserved railways correspond to a stress on the small-scale, the personal and intimate, in contrast to the large-scale impersonal bureaucracies represented by corporate capital.

By a modest leap, the 'small is beautiful' approach to organisation can be extended to forms of politics, notably a Green emphasis on local control and the small-scale, and some aspects of 'community politics' fostered by the 1970s Liberal revival. The Green movement has also encouraged many to eschew formal party involvement for attempts to develop small-scale alternatives, experiments that might spread to counter and replace the mainstream. The Centre for Alternative Technology, founded in 1975 to foster and generalise ecological alternatives, represents one such smaller-scale institution.

In the 1970s, community politics, seen as “a system of ideas for social transformation”, seemed to offer an alternative to unfettered corporate capitalism or bureaucratic monocultural social democracy. I recall a Radical Bulletin activist asserting that “participation is an end in itself” in 1975 (Guardian, 20 September), spreading the idea of popular involvement well beyond parties into the wider economy. Somehow, given wide participation, better decisions, better policies, indeed a better world, would emerge. If this now seems a bizarre idea for the party of Nick Clegg and David Laws, this remains an ideal that seems to lie behind some initiatives and some organisations of economic or political purpose.

It is tempting to view the Talyllyn and other enthusiast-run railways in this light, as a more appropriate way to proceed than the large-scale nationalised railway or the corporate state-regulated system represented by the privatised railway. And yet, organisationally, while small-scale may be good for a local leisure attraction supported by enthusiasts, it is hardly the way to run a railroad, let alone to develop new infrastructure.

Those who founded the Talyllyn seemed to hark back to an era before the Big Four companies produced by Grouping, which, apparently, featured a more human scale. The hierarchical nature of such companies, often run by autocrats, was not stressed. Trinder had initially hoped that a former railway director, expropriated through nationalisation, could be persuaded to take over the line, and the model of small-scale local management, which would be followed later by many preserved lines, only emerged when such railway 'enthusiasts' proved uninterested.

If the Talyllyn founders regarded nationalisation as a threat to the human-scale, there was also an attempt to turn back the clock to a somewhat romanticised vision of a countryside that was yet to be marred by industrialisation, in a post-war world in which the modernisation associated with social democracy seemed to threaten landscapes and “traditional” ways of life.

L.T.C Rolt’s writings, in particular, were later claimed by parts of the Green movement, although his views were closer to the interwar organic movement (of “blood and soil”) than the politics of Caroline Lucas. He saw the Talyllyn as somehow accessing surviving remnants of a pre-industrial natural order, in which contradictions between people and environment were not manifest; he had earlier made a similar case for Britain’s smaller canals. Rolt made the leap of imagination to praise both a settled mediaeval order and the apparent esprit de corps of pre-Grouping railway companies.

This comes close to the derided 'hobbit socialism', advocating a settled order that had eschewed industrialism, something that The Shire was threatened by in Tolkien’s book, until his heroes returned and restored an agrarian society. This romanticised vision had resonances with the right-wing nationalism espoused by Saunders Lewis, the co-founder of Plaid Cymru, who wanted to deindustrialise the South Wales valleys (something with which Plaid’s current leader, who is decidedly left wing and comes from the Rhondda, might take issue!). Some movements that seek to promote the local in opposition to the global or large-scale can be distinctly ultra-reactionary – orcs rather than hobbits.

The appeal of the small scale can be seductive. I fully agree with the assertion that “The ultimate obscenity is to reduce people to the status of objects: to be led, manipulated, directed, discarded.” (ALC Campaign Booklet, The Theory and Practice of Community Politics, 1980). However, the problem is how to secure a political environment in which all people count.

What is crucial is the broader polity and economic system, in which the small-scale are embedded. Small organisations, whether self-managed enterprises, consumer co-operatives, social enterprises or co-owned organisations or property might well prove to feature in the good society. However, on their own they do not provide more than a miniature bulwark against the impersonal forces of capitalist economies and corresponding states; and without challenges to established ownership of capital, community involvement, participation and (frankly) control must remain marginal or utopian.

BBC: Kirsty Williams has not ruled out working with Labour in Wales

BBC News reports that talks are taking place to explore the possibility of a coalition government in Wales after Labour fell just short of winning a majority last week:

Welsh Liberal Democrat leader Kirsty Williams told BBC Wales she has not ruled out working with Labour.

"Welsh Liberal Democrats want there to be a stable government over the next five years and we want to concentrate on the issues we've been campaigning on, how can we strengthen the Welsh economy, how can we improve education results for our children and how can we cut waiting times.

"Whether that's part of government or opposition these will continue to be the main thrust of the work of the Welsh Liberal Democrats," she said.

Interesting, but a minority Labour administration or a deal between Labour and Plaid Cymru both look more likely.