Cllr Graham Burgess is Leader of the Conservative Group on Gosport Borough Council.
Unlike many Associations, Gosport Conservatives were quietly celebrating our results in the Council Elections.
The story here was one of bucking the national trend. Entering the polls with only 10 Council seats and a mountain to climb to fight the strong incumbent Liberal Democrats, we nevertheless emerged having gained a seat, and come within a whisker of a couple more gains, having made progress in most others and with no losses.
We still learned plenty of lessons over this campaign, but for us, context is important. All-out elections in 2022 ended our 12-year tenure as the local administration, and it was brutal, with many good Councillors lost. In that sense 2022 was our lowest ebb.
Maybe that’s why, in Gosport, we have found ourselves slightly askew from the national situation. And what is clear here is that, having experienced a council run (or mis-run) by another party, in this case the Lib Dems, people have seen our local area become tangibly worse.
What has that looked like in Gosport? The Lib Dem decision to remove monitored CCTV cameras and spend the money on ‘free’ skips, has resulted in the bus station windows being smashed in, with nobody held to account. Car parking charges rose 83 per cent across the borough. Nearly three-quarters of a million pounds was spent buying a dilapidated local Bingo hall for an entertainment venue, with no business case, meanwhile some residents found their homes and businesses flooded because a “priority” flood defence project was shelved due to lack of funds. Fly-tipping incidents rose 20 per cent. Council tax was hiked – whilst Councillors’ allowances rose by 11.35 per cent.
And it wasn’t just the big things. Local residents have seen civic pride in our town slowly ebb away. The streets are scruffier and less safe with dirtier shop windows and fewer stalls on market day. Two years has felt like a long time under this Lib Dem mismanagement – the repercussions are visible and tangible. And local people have begun to see the grass simply isn’t greener without the Tories at the helm …. It’s longer, it’s more unkempt and you feel a little bit less safe walking home on it at night.
We knew however that our biggest strength is not the opposition’s weakness, it’s that we are a unified team. We often talk about Gosport Conservatives as a great big, (sometimes dysfunctional) but ultimately close-knit family. So we came together, running the Election as a united front and in partnership with our popular local MP. In practice, this meant supporting one another on Action Days, door-knocking extensively and in big numbers, and working all year round, making the Conservative case our community’s case.
The success of this policy cannot be disputed. Exactly a week before polls opened a big team of Conservatives, including the Party Chairman Richard Holden and our MP Caroline Dinenage, descended on Peel Common ward to knock on doors in support of our candidate, Supriya Namdeo. She was returned at the count the following week, unseating a Liberal Democrat in the process.
Supriya was a superb candidate. She is smart, resilient, caring, young, and full of life. She runs a successful local business along with her young husband – one of the best-performing Premier shops in England – and makes time for the people in our community alongside her work. Throughout the campaign she knew that people would vote for her if they met her, so she went and knocked on doors, asking people for their views on local issues. Voters saw Supriya as someone who would not only promise action, but deliver it too. That’s why they voted for her.
As with many of our candidates this year, Supriya offered something different. She is young and businesslike – a real breath of fresh air to people throughout the campaign. Similar to Dan Hayes, at 26 our youngest candidate, who was elected for the first time in Lee West. People were happy to see candidates who were part of an overall slate that is more representative of our communities – and politics works best when it better reflects the people we serve.
Of course, the campaign was not always plain sailing. We were often told on the doorsteps that splits and division in Government meant that they didn’t want to vote Tory. Local government is separate from Westminster, but we found ourselves losing votes because of the national picture – despite pulling together ourselves. All we could do was stand back, listen, and patiently deliver our coherent message, made easier by the lacklustre local Lib Dem record and the fact that we sensed very little real enthusiasm for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
Our results showed that turning the tide is possible. Those doorstep conversations, sometimes difficult, demonstrated to us that there is no love for the opposition, and that voters are standing by to vote Conservative if we just give them a good reason to. Even where, in Gosport, a Conservative candidate was not returned, ballots were extremely close, so much so that, a mere four hundred and eleven votes across the Borough would have won us five more seats and control of the Council.
We may not have wrestled back control of Gosport Borough Council, but we showed that with a clear message, a united front, and a dedicated set of candidates, we could reverse the direction of travel. It’s now up to the Party in Westminster to do the same!
