Intelligent Voting
In 2001 I created a page giving some background on the elections and how people voted last time and I thought it was worth doing again this time. So here are some facts and figures you might like to consider. As some of what follows is also opinion I’ll remind you that this web site and this page are nothing to do with Milton Parish Council.
General Election
In the general election to elect our MP our constituency is Cambridgeshire South East and our MP is James Paice (Con). The results in the last three general elections for the three main parties were as follows:
| Con | Lab | LDem | |
| 1992 | 36693 | 12688 | 12883 |
| 1997 | 24397 | 15048 | 14246 |
| 2001 | 22927 | 13714 | 13937 |
(A UKIP candidate stood in 2001, but only polled 1308.)
As you can see this is a very safe Conservative seat, and the Labour and Lib Dem vote, even when added together would only have defeated James Paice by about 5,000 votes in the Labour landslide of 1997. The time before in 1992 he had an absolute majority of around 11,000!
He didn’t return to those heady heights in 2001 but he still had a very clear majority and Labour and Lib Dem remain very evenly split so have little hope of defeating him. So if you’ve wondered why none of the main parties seem particularly active here at election time, especially compared to the city for example, now you know.
The following people are known to be standing this time:
- Jonathan Chatfield, Lib Dem
- 34 years old. Sits on South Cambridgeshire District Council for Histon and Impington. He is a senior manager in the rail industry. His wife Doris works as a Research nurse at Addenbrooke’s.
There is a biography of him on the Lib Dem’s web site. - James Paice, Conservative
- He is the party’s Shadow Secretary of State for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. He has a web site where you can discover more about the man, his position on a wide variety of issues and the constituency, including maps.
- Fiona Ross, Labour
- Fiona Ross was born in 1966. She works for a local NHS Trust and her children attend local schools. Fiona is Vice-Chair of Soham Town Council, Secretary of Soham and District Labour Party and affiliated Political Officer of UNISON. She has a web site where you can read more about her.
You can hear all three candidates on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire on Friday, 29th April from 11am to noon.
County Council
Make Up of the Council
The County Council is responsible for things like education and transport. There’s a complete list on the County Council web site. The last election was in May 2001.
Previous results were as follows (NB: there were 77 Councillors prior to 1997 as the county also included Peterborough, now a Unitary Authority):
| Con | Lab | Ldem | Lib | Ind | |
| 1989 | 46 | 20 | 9 | 1 | 1 |
| 1993 | 33 | 21 | 20 | 1 | 2 |
| 1997 | 33 | 10 | 16 | ||
| 2001 | 34 | 9 | 16 |
Since the last there have been some by-elections so the current state of the council is slightly different with Conservatives still on 34 but Labour having 8 and the Lib Dems 17.
So the Conservatives are currently in control of the council and have tended to be for quite a while. The only exception was four years from 1993-1997 when it was run by a Lib Dem/Labour coalition – an era still blamed by some local Tories for the some of the council’s current woes.
This situation is unlikely to change, especially since Peterborough (which tended to return Labour members) was split off as a unitary authority. The county council has pages to let you look at the representation in details included a clickable map.
Our Division
Our division is Waterbeach, which covers the villages of Waterbeach, Landbeach, Milton and Chittering and we have one councillor. The voting figures for the last three elections were as follows:
| Con | Lab | LDem | Green | |
| 1993 | 593 | 248 | 1437 | |
| 1997 | 1350 | *345 | 3143 | |
| 2001 | 1071 | 611 | 2545 | 112 |
* the candidate didn’t put a party on the ballot paper, but is
believed to have been standing for Labour.
There are only two candidates this time:
- Gerda Covell, Conservative
- This is Gerda’s second outing for the Tories: she stood for district council in Milton last year. She lives in Milton.
- Michael Williamson, Lib Dem
- Jane Coston, our current county councillor, is retiring so Michael is standing in her place for the Lib Dems. He lives in Waterbeach and is a parish councillor there and is currently vice-chairman of the council and chairman of the Highways Committee, having previously been chairman of the council.
Related Web Sites
Local Government Manifestos
I hope to post links to the party’s local government manifestos here if I can find them on their web sites. If you can then please let me know.
Party sites
Campaigns for fairer voting systems
Other Interesting Pages
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Caveats
The figures on this page were pulled from a variety of sources and were, as ever, very hard to track down. If you spot any errors then please let me know and I will correct them.
