Rhiw by-election pain for BNP

Conwy County Borough Council is, by any measure, the sort of political arena commentators like to call "interesting".

Sitting on the North Wales coastal belt, Conwy CBC was formed in 1996 with the merger of Aberconwy and Colwyn district councils. It serves a diverse population of indigenous Welsh and English incomers, and some of the most spectacular scenery in the British Isles falls within its borders (35% of its area comes within Snowdonia National Park).

Over 80% of the population live in the coastal strip, with nearly half of those classified as "British" being born outside Wales (mostly English). There are also a substantial number of East European (mostly Polish) migrant workers. About a third of the total population claim to be Welsh speakers, an incidence well above the national average of 20%.

Since its inception Conwy CBC has never fallen under the control of a single political party. There are 59 councillors elected from 38 wards, the majority of these wards squeezed into the narrow coastal strip from Bryn in the west to Kinmel Bay in the east. The full council is elected every four years, the next election being in May 2008.

The May 2000 local elections returned a council composed as follows:

Labour 19
Independents 15
LibDem 13
Plaid Cymru 7
Conservative 5

The current council (ignoring by-elections) is composed as follows:

Independents 17
Conservative 14
Labour 12
Plaid Cymru 11
LibDems 4
Vacancy 1 (Conservative).

Bearing in mind that the last full council election took place in 2004, the decline of Labour and the descent into near-irrelevance of the Liberal Democrats as a result of growth by the Tories and Plaid is striking. There have been seven by-elections for Conwy CBC since 2004, three being won by the Conservatives, two by Plaid, and one by Labour, which regained its own seat in Mochdre in September.

The Mochdre by-election saw the first attempt by the BNP to make an impact with Conwy CBC voters. It was a dismal failure. The racist party scraped together 35 votes, or less than 5.3%, in a low-turnout four-cornered (Lab/Con/PC/BNP) contest.

Next door to Mochdre is Rhiw ward, a well-to-do part of Colwyn Bay where the most pressing recent issues affecting the community were drug dealing on The Heights, followed closely by complaints of football-playing youths damaging plants in a local park and speeding traffic.

Rhiw ward also owns the distinction of having had two Conservative councillors removed from their seats for non-attendance in the last six years. In early October Councillor Steven Woolfe was forced to resign by fellow Tories, having failed to attend council business since March while continuing to claim thousands of pounds in allowances.

Woolfe's enforced resignation has caused a by-election which has attracted the attentions of the BNP.

In May 2004 Rhiw voted as follows (percentages in brackets):

Con 1003 (22.61) Elected
Con 751 (16.93) Elected
Con 739 (16.66)
Ind 502 (11.32)
Ind 337 (7.60)
PC 760 (17.13) Elected
Lab 344 (7.75)

Total 4436

Untangling those results is something of a nightmare we don't propose to enter into, but clearly Rhiw is comfortably Conservative.

And, like Conwy CBC elections generally, interesting.

In March 2006 a by-election attracted only two candidates. Perversely, Plaid Cymru, which had won a Rhiw seat in 2004 did not stand, while the Liberal Democrats, absent in 2004, did. The result was:

Con 716 (59.92)
LibDem 479 (40.08)

Total 1195

The winning Conservative was the disgraced Councillor Woolfe.

The line-up for yesterday's by-election saw the return of an Independent candidate and the intervention of the Greens and the BNP - but again Plaid Cymru and Labour failed to contest.

(To digress, the stay-at-home blinkered BNP blogger, full-time idiot, fame-seeker and Griffin sycophant we know and ridicule as Green Arrow has suggested that Conspiracy Central - the Tri-Axis Parties of Evil to him - arranged matters so that Labour did not stand as a ploy to keep the BNP out. So that solves that little conundrum. No doubt Plaid were in on it too...)

The BNP's candidate is John Oddy. As we've been noticing in our by-election reports, Oddy's campaign is a direct appeal to middle-Wales, calling for increased policing, a halt to the closure of sub-post offices and other harmless gestures that carefully avoid mentioning the BNP's more notorious policies.

Whatever the BNP's expectations are, no hint of them has slipped out, but we believe they will call anything better than Mochdre's 5.3% a "success", and may come in above the Greens.

The eclectic electoral history of Rhiw ward, the disarray of the local Conservatives - and the fact that the behaviour of a disgraced Tory brought about the by-election - should see a more open contest, especially as the Liberal Democrats, desperate to arrest their decline, have been fighting a determined campaign with former Rhiw councillor Trevor Stott as their candidate.

Conwy CBC Rhiw ward by-election result:

LibDem 548 (44.26)
Con 513 (41.44)
Ind 80 (6.46)
BNP 61 (4.93)
Green 36 (2.91)

Total 1238

An unsurprising - if narrow - victory for the Liberal Democrats, then. The only (very) cold crumb of comfort the BNP can take from their abysmal performance is that they came in ahead of the Greens. Perhaps this is what Nick Griffin and his acolytes mean when they chant their mantra about the BNP's "unstoppable" electoral progress.

To anybody else it looks like a complete standstill.

Postscript

For reasons best known to himself, the man who keeps Nick Griffin alive through the power of prayer, Green Arrow, jumped the gun by a considerable distance in his eagerness to be the first to publish and comment on the BNP's Rhiw performance, making a complete fool of himself in the process.

It seems that some little devil fed the hapless Green Arrow a fake set of results, which he promptly posted on Stormfront and his own blog, with the following comments:

So more new BNP members have been blooded and gained experience in fighting a by-election and I for one think they done rather well. Better than well. Bloody excellent in fact.

Rhiw, has always been a firm Conservative stronghold but the Liberal Democrats had come second last time out and have spend vast sums of both time and money in fighting this campaign and bussed in activists from all over the Country. So determined were they this time to put up more than a good show and there hard work paid off. But boy, did our lads give them a run for their money. Next time. Next time.

Full Results were as follows:-


Lib Democrats 635
Conservative 620
BNP 599
Ind 104
Green 47

Good work was done on the ground by the BNP activists led by their Candidate John Oddy and much information was gained at street level of those who currently support the BNP and those who might consider voting BNP and notes made of those who would never vote for a True British patriotic party like the British National Party.

A special mention to young Joe Llwelyn Griffiths who stood for the Green Party and his vegan friends who swamped this site with posts earlier today on why eating meat was wrong. Get some bacon butties into you boys. You need energy in this game, not just dreams.

Well done also to all the voters who put their trust in John. You at least have awoken to the dangers facing Our Country. Now please wake up just a few more of your friends. With your continued support the BNP will prevail.

Not being electorally savvy, the Green Arrow failed to smell a rat, the rat being that it was vanishingly unlikely that the BNP would score 5.3% in Mochdre ward in September, yet suddenly leap to nearly 30% on a first outing in next-door Rhiw just two months later.

An embarrassed Green Arrow was forced to admit on Stormfront, "Looks like I was well stiched up."

According to him: "Around about 01:00 I posted on here [Stormfront] that I was only staying up waiting for the RHIW results. At around 01:30 I received a comment on GA, from a person using an identity that I believed to be a true comrade giving me the results."

Which just goes to show, Green Arrow, that you really shouldn't believe everything you read on a blog.

Especially your own.