Livingston Upon Reflection

I've taken a few days off posting as a well earned rest. I'm sure nobody will begrudge me that. After all when I returned to the office after the count by right ankle had swollen up and not moving in any intelligent direction, but I still got up the following morning to start removing the posters.

How did we do?

We held our share of the vote up from the may election, without the backgraound data and party machines that both Labour and the SNP have in place across West Lothian.

We were not squeezed. Traditionally in Scottish seats when we have faced these two party's they have gained all the media attention (something they largely did this time), they have the press talking about them as potential winners and us as nowhere (this happened again), and our vote share goes down often to close or actually losing our deposit. That did not happen here so we acheived our promary objective.

The SNP got roughly the same vote they acheived in May. As I said above they have the data to know exactly who their vote is, they appear done a good job in getting that vote out. The fact that I saw them from late morning chapping (knocking for the non-Scots) their vote up shows that even to do that they were stretching themselves.

We didn't close the gap on the SNP here as a result. That was disappointing as people were telling us on doorsteps that after voting for Robin Cook they were not sure about Jim Devine and were thought or intended to vote for us. It appears that a number of those traditional Cok voters just did not bother to vote at all and are waiting to see how the new MP does before returning to the polls.

The canmpaign was busy, lively and fun to work on. It could have been busier if more people had come to help out. If we'd had more people and or had what we had earlier the literature would have gone out faster allowing more time for meeting people on their doorsteps to get down to the nitty gritty of telling them why we were the best alternative for them.

In the areas we did put a lot of work our vote increased considerably from our samples. This is a very encouraging thing especially as we are going to be fighting the 2007 council elections under Single Transferable Vote.

So I think we did what we could but with more support we could have done better. But hats off to a big thank you to everyone who did help we couldn't have done as well as we did without you.