Alastair Campbell and the Lib-Dem Deserters

Owing to the death of the UKIP Candidate, the General Election in the Constituency of Thirst and Malton was pushed back to Thursday 27th May.  As unfortunate as it is, it still provides a very interesting method of gauging public sentiment towards the new Coalition Government after a few weeks of their being in office.



Since the formalisation of the coalition between the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats, Labour spin-doctor Alastair Campbell has been extremely outspoken in his declarations of "thousands" of Liberal Democrat supporters flocking to join Labour out of disenchantment with their party.  You may also have heard that the Labour Party website supposedly crashed on the evening of May 11th under the weight of people trying to join the party; a story that was subsequently disproved as spin by the subsequent traffic figures.

Labour's supposed site-crash placeholder, later revealed to be an outright lie.

If Mr. Campbell was indeed accurate (or just even telling the truth!) about the number of Liberal Democrat supporters defecting to Labour, then we could have expected an interesting result in Thirsk and Malton on Thursday night.

Instead, Labour lost a massive 9.8% of their vote from the previous election, pushing them back in to third place behind the Liberal Democrats.  In total, the coalition parties polled just over 75% of the vote.

Although it's still early days for the new Government, this certainly has to be taken as a sign that an awful lot of people are willing to give them a chance to live up to their promises rather than writing them off (as a certain spin-doctor would have us believe).