Oxford Respect on a high

Dave Radford, Oxford Respect agent

 

I'm on a high, everyone seems really pleased with our result. Good for a first attempt. Oxford is obviously a busy field, being one of the Greens strongest areas and with the IWCA building in the ring road estates. We chose Cowley as a starting point because of its historical associations with the car plant and because it had two Labour Councillors. Also it was not a seat that the Greens were going to target, the result last time was Labour 616, Lid Dem 369 Greens 323 and Conservatives 262.

The result we got was down to weeks of solid canvassing, talking to perhaps 1200 of the 2200 households. There was no single key local campaigning issue and although we had a great candidate in Pippa who is a young teacher in the area, we had no established personality to build the campaign around. The impression I got from the first day canvassing was that people were generally disillusioned with Labour and open to an argument. Most hadn’t seen a councillor for years.

Cowley is a predominately white ward with, according to the council web site, a population which is 5% of Afro Caribbean and 8% of Pakistani and Bangladeshi background. Whilst we undoubtedly won some support from this section of the electorate there seemed to be a strong Labour loyalty amongst older afro-Caribbean voters and much of the Pakistani/Bangladeshi vote was successfully courted by the Labour and Lib Dem candidates who were both from the Asian community.

I've learnt a lot about the process of electoral politics, the basic campaign went ok but our finishing was poor and on election day the other parties (Lab & Lib Dems) had far more people out and had a far higher profile. I had thought that they would be stretched elsewhere in the city, in fact they fought the ward hard. There is loads more to say but I probably should go to bed.

 

Oxford
Cowley ward
Shah Jahan Khan	Liberal Democrats	627	37.6%	ELECTED
Mumtaz Fareed	Labour	534	32.0%
Martin Nicholas Juckes	Green	294	17.6%
Philippa Martha Whittaker	Respect	213	12.8%

 

 

May 2006

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