National Guardian Article

I see that yesterday's national Guardian has an article referring to Sutton as a top Tory target.

No great surprise when you look at the demographics. More importantly the Lib Dem vote has essentially risen (from 94 to present) and fallen (77-79) with the national Labour vote. The periods where that wasn't so was the 72-74 period which was due to the Sutton and Cheam by-election and the 82 to 86 period which coincided with the rather unique Liberal-SDP years.

As the Lib Dem MP's have spent so much time concentrating on the Labour vote (just look at the bar charts they regularly deliver to Tory voters), they have in effect reduced their "vote reach" mainly to the Labour vote plus about 10-15% of the Tory vote, which may not be enough for a long-term maintenance of their hegemony.

In addition the Lib Dems are now suffering from a cap on their vote due to:
a) The rise of small 4th parties which take part of the protest vote they used to solely get;
b) Their membership base being small (70,000 in total, with half in their top 100 seats), which means they can only target a certain number of more promising wards. You only have track the movements of Chris Maines from Bromley to Lewisham to see they are in effect creating a maximum level of seats for themselves.

If they are targetted by the Tories in Sutton there will be targets elsewhere they hope to gain. In other words the Lib Dems have in effect organisationally expanded the space for a viable third party under a first past the post system from their minimum 13% if they had contested all seats in the 1950's up to 20-23% now. That is an achievement they and particularly the ALDC should be proud of, but it is definitely not a realignment.

I will return to the impact of these scenarios in much greater detail in the future.

http://http://www.guardian.co.uk/