Hardly a ringing endorsement of North Norfolk Conservatives

In his fortnightly column in the Eastern Daily Press, Iain Dale, perhaps with some justification, gets very excited about the local election results, but with one notable exception. His old stomping ground of North Norfolk gets mentioned, but it is hardly a ringing endorsement of the Conservatives there or indeed an expectation of them having any chance of victory in the near future. Iain writes ;

"North Norfolk Tories now need to grasp a nettle they know in their heads they should have grasped several years ago. They lost the parliamentary seat to the Lib Dems in 2001, they lost the Council to the Lib Dems, they haven’t won a single council by election in a decade and they (and I ) were trounced in the 2005 General Election. They now need to ask themselves why that is. They’ve got to learn the campaigning techniques which South Norfolk Tories - and indeed, North Norfolk Lib Dems - seem to take for granted. They have got to embrace the sort of community politics which the Lib Dems thrive on but also learn the art of opposition."

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Actually, Iain is wrong about their by-elections. According to our records we have no evidence of a Conservative District Council by-election victory since local government re-organisation in 1974, but I am happy to be corrected on this, but at the very least, the Tories have won no council by-elections since Norman Lamb first became involved in North Norfolk back in 1990.

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As for community politics, it will be difficult for the Tories to do this because in great swathes of North Norfolk they never see a Conservative until three weeks before an election and the Tories failure to find candidates who lived anywhere near the wards they were standing in on May 3rd spoke volumes about the state of their local party organisation.

Iain Dale went on to add ;

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"Tory councillors sometimes tend to act as if they are in some sort of power sharing arrangement with the Lib Dems. The LibD ems exploit this weakness and reap the benefits. "

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Again, the problem with this is that the Tories lack judgement. They opposed the wheelie bin system, which has proved to be both popular and successful. However, this was after they had already supported it. This duplicity shows a distinct lack of judgement.

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On issues like coastal erosion, Tory Councillors were asking the council to deliver leaflets explaining what the councils position was because local people were worried about things that had been said in leaflets. It turns out the leaflets were Tory leaflets that had been scaremongering, but then the Tories want council tax payers to explain the truth to rectify the damage done by their own leaflets !

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Then we have council tax where the Tories put out leaflets in by-election campaigns claiming they would proposed a 0% budget, only for the budget to come round and they have no such budget and they back the Lib Dem budget.

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Finally, the most recent issue where the Tories show their duplicity is the issue of travellers sites. The Lib Dems went to a second round of consultations in order to ensure the public had as much chance as possible to contribute to the debate. The Tories actually opposed going to a second round of consultation, then argued in leaflets during the local elections that the Lib Dems had failed to consult. In my own former ward of Fakenham, the Tories failed to lodge a single complaint or letter of opposition to the proposed traveller site on the very edge of town. They even had one Tory councillor propose that two sites should be put in Fakenham instead of one, then they had the nerve to claim during the election campaign that only the Tories were fighting against the travellers site.

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The problem is for the Tories is that you need to be a bit smarter to be an effective opposition, but you also have to rely on having a ruling council group that loses touch with what people want. The Lib Dem's in North Norfolk have their ears too close to the ground to lose touch with people's concerns whilst the Tories obsession with opposing what is popular makes them look like fools.

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Iain's analysis is quite fair, but like nature, politics abhors a vacuum. In South Norfolk the Tories were able to fill the vacuum the Lib Dems had left. In North Norfolk I cannot see this happening, and if you take the example of other areas of the country where they have strong Lib Dem council groups and Lib Dem MP's (Eastleigh springs to mind), there is no reason to suggest that it is certain that the Lib Dems will implode as they have in South Norfolk.

Iain finshes by saying;

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"North Norfolk Tories have an excellent new parliamentary candidate who deserves top class support. North Norfolk Conservatives know now what they need to do to give it to him."

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It sounds to me as if Iain is of the opinion that none of the things the Tories need to do in North Norfolk are being done at all. Perhaps with his knowledge of North Norfolk Conservative's, as their candidate in 2005 , he feels that they have not moved on or learnt any lessons at all from their 10,606 vote defeat.

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Overall, and perhaps I am reading between the lines, Iain Dale's commentary on North Norfolk Conservatives prospects and organisation is far from a ringing endorsement.