Lib Dems crash to fourth in Southfields

It must be disheartening being a Liberal Democrat in Wandsworth. Last week's European election results were hardly good news for Labour; in fact the only party that can genuinely claim to have done well in our borough were the Greens who knocked the Lib Dems into fourth place.

Wandsworth Liberal Democrats, because they are so weak, tend to try to target one part of the borough for a few years - and when they get no joy there they move on somewhere else. In the 1980s it was Earlsfield, which is the only part of the borough they have ever managed to get a councillor elected, and that was back in the early 1980s. They then tried their hand in Graveney in Tooting; but after repeated and ever-more desperate attempts failed there too.

More recently, they've liked to pretend they have a chance of winning in Southfields; if you're a Southfields resident you might have had one of their leaflets claiming they're the challengers to the Tories.

Well, in last year's Mayoral elections the Lib Dems came a distant third in Southfields; and this year they went one worse: coming fourth behind the Green Party here*, just as they did across the whole borough.

Don't get me wrong: we in Labour didn't do spectacularly well here, but in election after election the Lib Dems are claiming they're the alternative to the Tories and the voters keep saying otherwise.

In the European elections 71% voted against the Conservatives. They "won" because the opposition was splintered against them. The same is true here in Wandsworth in council elections. If you want to beat the Tories, in Southfields or in any of the other parts of Putney, the only vote that stops them is a Labour vote.

* The Southfields result was calculated through a detailed sampling of over 20% of all the votes cast in the Putney constituency on Thursday 4 June 2009 and is accurate to within 1%.