Friday, October 01, 2021

Skin of their teeth

There was a time when the Labour vote in Sunderland was weighed rather than counted. Those days are now gone. In recent local elections Labour's losing streak has seen a whole strong of seats lost to a variety of opponents. Labour's decades of one party rule is being replaced by multiple parties. Quite how long Labour's majority there will last is an interesting debating point.

One seat that Labour have managed to retain in recent elections is Hetton. They also held on in a by-election yesterday though with only a slender majority of 27, down from 704 in May. The Lib Dems went from 6th place on with 63 votes to 2nd place. With such a slender skin-of-their-teeth majority, Labour will now find that another ward is vulnerable after decades of taking it for granted.

So well done Sunderland Lib Dems and good luck in the battle for Hetton in May next year.

One final thought - Labour are spinning that their conference this week was a success. That didn't help them in Hetton.

1 comment:

nigel hunter said...

as far as the party nationally is concerned we also need to make inroads in tory and snp areas