As the New Year rolls in, and we enter what could be one of the longest election campaigns in my lifetime, you can expect to be bombarded with figures.
David Cameron will behave as though he is the Prime Minister elect, though he will be careful to always add that the electorate must have its say. David Mowat will try to convince you, similarly, that he is the next MP for Warrington South.
If Warrington South was such a safe bet for the Tories in the coming election Fiona Bruce wouldn’t have opted for the safer seat of Congleton rather than fighting the constituency she fought before and where her business is based. The truth is that she performed very poorly in Warrington in the last election and the Tories have been flat lining here since 1997. The real battle has been between the Liberal Democrats and Labour, with the Liberal Democrats consistently taking Labour wards and benefiting from the Labour decline.
This is why I keep saying that Warrington South is a three way marginal. The Conservatives don’t want you to know this, they and Labour prefer you to think it is a two horse race between the two old discredited parties. A message that would be more convincing if the Conservatives had managed to achieve as little as a third of the vote in any of the last three elections in Warrington South.
In fact since 1997 it is the Liberal Democrats who have been taking votes and Council seats from Labour in Warrington. This graph shows the results of the last three General Election campaigns in Warrington South and projects the probable position in 2010:
It is clear that the votes of the three major parties are converging. If you extend the trend lines to 2010 you will see that the result here is likely to be too close to call. So with both the Conservatives and the Labour previous candidates having run away, to another constituency or from Parliament altogether, neither of those parties is at all confident that they can take the seat.
By contrast the Liberal Democrats have been working hard in Warrington for a very long time and have the confidence of many voters. The voters keep confirming that confidence, most recently in Whittle Hall. We are now only one seat away from overall control of the Council and we know that Jo Crotty has as good a chance of representing Warrington South at Westminster as any of the other candidates, she will do an excellent job there and she deserves your support.