Lewisham Council Election Results 2014 - the detail

Detail on the mayoral election can be found on the council's website and Alternative SE4 has a nice view of how the council chamber will look.

Below is a bar chart of the number and share of the vote in the mayoral election:


This post is about the detail of the elections for the 54 council seats. The council as yet have only published the detail of these as one huge pdf file, which is pretty hard to visualise, but thankfully Lewisham Green Party have taken the time to painstakingly transcribe the results and put them on google drive, which they were kind enough to share with me.

I've been through these and made some simple bar charts of the counts in each ward. I've done nothing more sophisticated than that, but I think they tell a story by themselves. Throughout the post the parties are denoted by their usual colours with People Before Profit denoted by a light purple and UKIP by a dark purple. The Socialist/TUSC party are denoted by pink.

Obviously Labour had the largest share of the vote and won the most seats in every ward, with only the Greens managing to hold onto a single seat in Brockley. The graphs below show what has happened to share of the vote and number of councillors between 2002 and 2014, over 4 elections.



Labour's dominance shows through clearly, but look at the Lib Dem collapse in voting share in 2014. The Tories actually increased their share of the vote between 2010 and 2014, as did the Greens, but the total collapse of the Lib Dem vote, with most of those votes going to Labour, had the knock on effect of ensuring that the Tories lost their single seat and the Greens didn't manage to make their increased voter share count. The Greens got 16% of the vote in both 2006 and 2014, but in 2006 they had 6 councillors.

But what of the individual wards? I've divided these into types depending on who was the second (and/or third) party to see what patterns start to emerge.

First up, wards where the Greens were clearly the main challengers to Labour:











Clearly the Greens have done well in the areas they previously had councillors - Brockley and Ladywell - and they are obviously now the second party in neighbouring Crofton Park. The picture is less clear cut in Lewisham Central and Perry Vale, but I think they will have been pleased to do so well here.

How about areas where the Lib Dems were the second party? Yes, they do exist...







The Lib Dems hung onto second place in their former strongholds of Forest Hill, Lee Green and Downham, where Duwayne Brooks was only 64 votes away from retaining his seat. The Downham result shows an unwelcome phenomenon - the rise of UKIP. Mercifully, through most of Lewisham UKIP either didn't stand or polled poorly, but in some wards in Lewisham they did well and in Whitefoot they were the second party.



This repeats a pattern, that UKIP have done well in areas to the south and east of the borough, as you approach suburbia. This warrants further analysis and comparison with wards in neighbouring boroughs, which I hope to tackle in a future piece of work.

Back to the slightly less nasty party, the Tories came second in Grove Park and Sydenham, on the borders with leafy Bromley and not unexpected. They're also back on the rise in wealthy Blackheath, with the dramatic drop in the LibDem vote there. That said, Labour won the seats comfortably, in contrast to neighbouring Blackheath Westcombe ward in Greenwich, where the third spot was taken by the Tories.







And last, but my no means least, the phenomenon that is Lewisham People Before Profit (PB4P). PB4P stood at least one candidate in every ward, some faring better than others, but in Evelyn (Deptford) and New Cross in the north of the borough, they stood three candidates and managed to come second, with Ray Woolford, political chameleon, scoring particularly well in New Cross.





Telegraph Hill ward was a mixed bag, in the past seats here have been taken by the socialist party (currently TUSC) and this was a keenly fought contest, with the TUSC and PB4P's mayoral candidates, Chris Flood and John Hamilton, also standing here.



Hamilton was the victor in that particular battle, but the large number of candidates on the left of the political spectrum can only have helped Labour. The poor old LibDems did about as badly here as they could possibly manage.

It only remains for me to talk about my own stamping ground of Catford, covered by three wards in the borough - Catford South, Bellingham and Rushey Green.







People Before Profit came second in all three of these wards, with a mixture of Conservatives and Greens bringing up third place. I wonder what Catford's current housing boom will do for the political make up of the area in 2018 - will the Greens fancy their chances or can we expect a resurgence of Tories? In the meantime, despite the Conservative Club being wiped out in the 1990s and currently being occupied by the Catford Constitutional Club, the Tories polled a lot better here than I might have expected. I was glad to see no UKIP candidates bothered to stand in Catford. Hopefully, they'd have been given short shrift.

I guess despite all of that detail of the second and third places, which is where arguably some of the interesting stories of Lewisham 2014 lie, if you're a Labour supporter you have to be pretty happy at the sight of all those red bars. How good it will be for the future of the borough remains to be seen.