More Sunniside letters

It was a relatively early start with letter delivery this morning. 200 letters to deliver in to my constituents in Sunniside. It took me about an hour and a half. The letters were the same as those I delivered elsewhere in Sunniside yesterday. I would have liked to get more delivered today but I had Gateshead Council's budget setting meeting to attend instead.

At current rate of progress, delivery of the letters in Sunniside and the nearby villages should be largely completed tomorrow. Then comes delivery in Whickham...

Letters to Sunniside

 

Gateshead Lib Dems have been working on a major project to produce 25,000 letters - and then deliver them to residents. Today I delivered a few 100 in Sunniside. I'm pleased to report that they were positively received, at least by the handful of people who stopped to talk to me in the village. I will deliver more tomorrow morning and also take bundles of letters to people who deliver them on their home patch.

Alas, I can't deliver tomorrow afternoon. The Council is setting the budget and council tax for the year ahead.

Birtley delivery

 

Gateshead Lib Dems recently had an action day in Birtley but I was unable to attend. Instead, I agreed to take a couple of patches which I would deliver in my own time. The problem with that was that it took 2 weeks for me to take delivery of the Focuses. At the moment we have huge quantities of literature to produce and deliver so the handover of the Birtley patches to me kept getting delayed. On Saturday I received 2 bundles and maps. I delivered the first on Sunday and the second on Tuesday.

Birtley is currently the most marginal ward in Gateshead. In the last election, May 2024, we took the seat from Labour with a majority of 5. In May 2023, we won our first seat there from Labour. The majority was substantially higher than 5! I tend to be cautious nowadays when speculating on potential election results in wards in Gateshead but I will go as far as saying in Birtley that Labour appear to have given up. Labour needs to find 3 candidates to contest the ward. We are not aware of what the remaining Labour councillor in Birtley is planning to do. Will he retire at the election or contest it but with the ward now heavily weighted against Labour. Even if he does stand again, Labour need to find another two candidates but at the moment, it appears they have no one. No names are cropping up. No Labour activity has been detected. It is as if Labour have packed their bags and left.

I've never known Labour not to field a candidate in Gateshead for each vacancy. They've run the council for 52 years and have been the dominant party here since the 1930s. Could this be coming to an end?

Lobley Hill and Bensham action day

 

We had a good turnout on Saturday for our Lobley Hill and Bensham action day. 15 members turned out to help deliver the latest Focus. I was given 2 patches to do in Lobley Hill. I was raised there so for me it was a journey through my memories of the area.

Last week's byelections

There were three council byelections last week (I don't include town and parish councils). Things to note about these contests:

• Labour were defending all 3 seats. They lost all of them.
• The seats fell to Plaid Cymru, Greens and Lib Dems.
• Reform won nothing. I think this is the first time since the May 2025 elections in which Reform came away empty handed.
• In Caerphilly, PC's share of the vote was down a couple of percent but Labour's meltdown continues. PC's gain was due to collapsing Labour.
• In Leicester, the Greens were the victors though the majority was only 3%. Still, a win is a win. The Green's share of the vote at 30% is closer to the typical share of byelection winners generally - these days there are large numbers of political parties. The vote is fractured on both left and right.
• Meanwhile, the Lib Dems took half the votes cast in Redcar and Cleveland, a rise of 15%. 
• Reform had to chuck in the towel in Redcar and Cleveland after their candidate's vile social media attacks on the Jewish and Muslim communities were discovered. When they came to light, it was too late to withdraw the candidate.

For Labour the most worrying trend is the continued loss of vote share. Typically, they are losing half their share, often more. Though Labour's vote share fell in Leicester by a more modest 12%, in Caerphilly Labour fell from 55% to 27%. In Redcar and Cleveland, Labour dropped from 46% to 22%.

If this continues into the local elections in May, Labour's performance will be dismal. At the moment I cannot see any knights riding to Labour's rescue. However a lot can change in a few weeks in politics. Let's see what the Denton and Gorton Parliamentary by-election bring.

Tackling flooding in Sunniside

 

On Friday last week, I carried out a tour of Sunniside in my council ward to look at flood risk areas and solutions. I was accompanied by my ward colleague Marilynn Ord, and engineers from both Gateshead Council and Northumbrian Water. They are working on plans to tackle flooding. We are hoping that the plans will be completed and go out to public consultation in the coming months. I had originally expected the tour to take about half an hour. It took 2 hours but it was time well spent.

Group considers budget

Gateshead Council's budget will go before full council next week. On Monday the Lib Dem group had a meeting with the Chief Exec and Director of Finance to go through the proposals on which we will be voting a week tomorrow. After the officers left, the group had a discussion about our budget. The end result was an amendment which Cllr Ron Beadle, as Leader of the Opposition, will move. At this moment in time I am not at liberty to say what is in the amendment and what our view of the budget is. You will have to wait until next week for that.

Cancellation cancelled

I was chopping firewood yesterday when my phone pinged. I checked the message and initially came to the conclusion that someone had sent me a spoof. Apparently, the government have now carried out U-turn no 15: the cancelled elections were no longer cancelled. And Reform were £100K better off, paid for by the taxpayer. I thought someone had sent me by mistake a copy of a very bad script for a very bad political soap opera. But on checking out the story on Sky News, it turns out that the story was real.

Quite how a government led by an experienced lawyer can get a government legal case so badly wrong is beyond me. But somehow Labour under Starmer have achieved the near impossible: reversed a major policy at the last moment, heaped an almighty mess on local councils who now have to organise a major set of local elections with only 2 months to go before nominations open and, to add insult to injury, the taxpayers are paying Reform's legal bills. The one bright spark in all of this is that electoral offices are used to having short notice for organising elections. General elections often come as a surprise yet still they manage to run everything needed to elect the local MP.

Those I feel most sorry for are the campaigners of all political parties on the ground who had been under the impression that they were not going to the polls this May.  Elections are like icebergs. You can see the tip of them but most are out of view below the waterline. Candidates need to be identified, interviewed and selected, agents need to be trained and appointed, literature needs to be written to include material about the elections, data need to be up-to-date, manifestos need to be written and approved, key messages need to be agreed. Here in Gateshead we have been working towards the May local elections for two years and fortunately our council was not one of those due to have elections cancelled. I know that Lib Dem HQ have been pressing for months all the areas facing cancelled elections to continue as if the elections were going to take place anyway. Hopefully, local Lib Dem parties have heeded this advice but it would be so easy for some of the preparations to slip.

The decision to go ahead with the elections benefits Reform. Judging by how they fought elections last year, they are likely to have a centralised campaign with lots of nationally produced target literature mailed out via the postal service. Whatever they deliver locally is also likely to be national literature. They have little or no input from their candidates on the ground. The biggest losers are likely to be Labour, followed by the Conservatives. Some areas are vulnerable to the Lib Dems who are likely to pick up more seats. This however does not excuse the mess left by Labour. 15 u-turns and counting.

Bridges action day

 

Gateshead Lib Dems had yet another action day on Sunday. The aim was to deliver the latest Focus newsletters across a fair chunk of Bridges ward. This was achieved. I had only 2 conversations with residents while I was out delivering. The first was with someone who had voted Labour at the last general election, is not interested in Reform and was thinking of voting Lib Dem. Our task is to enthuse people like this to turn out for us. The 2nd person thought I was delivering takeaway leaflets and didn't want to take one. When I showed him I was delivering Focus leaflets, he still didn't want to take it because he never votes!

Meanwhile, we had an interesting discussion over lunch in Tesco cafe. Both Lib Dems and Labour will see some members retire in the local elections in May. However, the numbers of those retiring on the Labour side are significant. I have counted 15 so far - ie nearly a third of Labour councillors are retiring. This figure is just of those we are sure about. We think there are more in the pipeline. And as lunch breaks are good times to speculate further, we discussed what some Labour councillors may do in terms of moving from a ward under threat from the Lib Dems to one which could be a safer bet. Throw Reform into the situation and finding a safe Labour ward is quite a challenge!

Envelope stuffing

Gateshead Lib Dems recently held what could be called an envelope stuffing event. We had 25,000 letters to stuff into envelopes and then label them. We never expected to complete the task on the day so we arranged for our Gateshead West branch meeting last week in Winlaton to stuff another ward's envelopes. So Ryton had 3500 envelopes stuffed and labelled at the meeting. The task was not finished by 10pm so everything left to do was shipped down to another location where Team Ryton finished the job on Thursday. Delivery of the letters to people's homes in Ryton started on Saturday when we had an action day in the ward. There is still a fair quantity to get through doors but the good news is that we are a week ahead of schedule.

A village green for Sunniside

In our latest Focus newsletter we put forward a suggestion that we apply for village green status for the grassed area next to Sun Hill on Sunniside Front Street. The areas was home to the Sunniside Christmas tree in November and December. Go back further in time to the 1970s and there were plans for a library on the site. It never happened as austerity (under the Labour government) put an end to it. Plans for large scale house building also never happened as there would be insufficient residents to maintain a Library. The same problem ended plans for a school in the village as well. So the grassed area remained.

My hope is that if there is a successful bid for village green status, we can apply for funding to which we are currently blocked as the site is the responsibility of the Council. On Tuesday last week, I spoke at the Planting Up Sunniside meeting about the village green idea. This resulted in lots of questions about how it would be maintained and who would be responsible for it. At this point we don't have all the answers but we want to explore the options to see what benefits, if any, there are for residents of Sunniside.

And another Reform defection

Yesterday I wrote about two Reform defections in the North East. In Sunderland, the entire Reform group (consisting of one person) parted company from Reform. And Durham County Council saw a Reform Councillor go independent. Well, another day and another Reform defection. Councillor Nick Brown has cut his ties with Reform Ltd. and has gone independent.

Cllr Brown helpfully sent his views to the Reform Council Leader Andrew Husband in a letter which contained a few home truths about the operation of Reform in Durham. Apparently, the Reform Council leadership treat their councillors with "very serious disdain" and they "refuse to engage in any meaningful dialogue, instead choosing to insult and belittle them."

This two day saga of Reform defections is not the first time the Farage Ltd party has lost members. The tally for losses and resignations now stands at six in the nine months since Reform won control of the council last year. So approximately a tenth of the Reform Group has now been lost. Ferrets in a sack is a description that springs to mind.