Election night: could Norwich go green?
As it stands, Labour run Norwich City Council with 16 of the 39 seats.
But the Green Party have made gains in Norwich in every election for the past ten years. With 14 seats, they’re confident of winning at least one more.
Is 2011 the year Britain sees it’s first Green council?
What’s interesting about this year’s election is that prominent names in politics in south Norwich are standing down.
In Nelson, the deputy leader of the Green Party nationally is stepping aside. Adrian Ramsay has played a key part in consolidating support for the Greens. He’s confident they’ll hold Nelson, where they’ve gained 60% of the vote in previous years, making it the strongest ward for the party in the country: ”We also stand a great chance of winning Thorpe Hamlet, where we lost by just one vote last time.”
Over in Eaton, Rosalind Wright is standing down after 4 years as a city councillor. Wife to Norwich South MP, she explains her own work commitments, not her husband’s, are her reason for stepping down: “It seemed like the right time and it’s difficult juggling it with a fulltime job.” She believes the Lib Dems stand a good chance of holding her seat in Eaton, putting their prospects as “reasonable.”
And in University ward, the long-standing Labour councillor, Roy Blower, is stepping down due to ill health, having been diagnosed with the early stages of Parkinson’s disease. But he says he’ll stake his reputation on a Labour win in his ward, confidently predicting they’ll win the seat tomorrow night.
In south Norwich, the hard work and reputation of these 3 well known councillors is likely to help new candidates hold the seats.
But what could be interesting is if any of the seats elsewhere in the city change colour. Just one third of the seats are up for re-election this Thursday: 5 held by Labour, 4 Green, 2 Lib Dem and 2 Conservative. Overall of the 39 seats on the City Council, 16 seats are held by Labour, 14 by the Greens, 5 Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives 4.
A win for the Green Party, putting them ahead of Labour, and as a result, the first Green run council in the country, is unlikely in 2011. But depending on how the night goes, there’s a slim possibility that Labour and Greens could end the night with an equal amount of seats. If that’s the case, negotiations between all parties will begin straight away. Claire Stephenson, leader of the Green Party on Norwich City Council said: “Nobody knows what would happen. It’s never happened before.”
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