A decade ago, Labour had the Conservatives down to one council seat (Lisvane) in this seat, and indeed in the whole of Cardiff. They had the Tories near enough buried, as in places like Manchester, but now the Conservatives are back to the extent that I see Labour are now in third place in terms of seats on Cardiff City Council. Labour appears to have lost councillors directly to the Conservatives in this seat, as opposed to Cardiff West where (excepting Radyr, where a Labour council seat was about the same as Labour winning Kensington and Chelsea in London) disillusioned Labour votes have gone all over the place to avoid the Tories. If this is not bad news in terms of Labour election prospects for this seat, I don’t know what is.

In response to Richard Coombes, I cannot see Julie Morgan pulling out the PR stops now. I recollect from Labour days that she actually had a tougher stance than her husband Rhodri, who was more of an idealist, but she has been in three parliaments now without climbing the ministerial pole, and the Morgan era in Wales appears to be reaching its later stages more gracefully than is usual political fate. Looked at now from outside, it would appear that Mrs. Morgan is likely to stand again at least in part simply because a marginal seat in a difficult year is not the time and place to change candidates.

On a result anything like current opinion polls, Labour will lose Cardiff North. The seat has never been natural Labour territory demographically. So, whilst they would obviously rather win, Labour organisers would not in the past have regarded loss of this seat as a disaster. The trouble is that seats elsewhere in Wales appear to be becoming more difficult for Labour for various reasons. In particular, Cardiff Central has well and truly gone away to the Liberal Democrats. Defeat in Cardiff North, whilst probable, is correspondingly less tolerable for Labour.

A specific point is that voters locally in Cardiff appear to be plumping, outside the safest and best organised Labour areas, for whichever party has the greatest chance of getting out the Labour candidate. And in this seat there is a substantial Liberal Democrat vote from which the Tories can hope to gain tactical support.

This Seat is a certain Tory Gain and judging by the results in the council elections Labour could end up in third as the Lib Dems now have the second highest amount of councillors in this seat.
As for going into Cardiff Central they are more likely to be fretting over Cardiff South and Cardiff West the two seats where they actually have councillors left.

If i was a Labour organiser in South Wales I would send Cardiff North Labour volunteers (what’s left of them, they struggled to field candidates for all the seats in this constituency in the 2008 local elections) to the Vale of Glamorgan.

The Vale also looks good for a Tory gain BUT UKIP have been performing strongly there and taking Tory votes in quite large numbers and the boundary changes have made the working class town of Barry (of Gavin and Stacey fame) more dominant within the constituency. Its also where Julie Morgan MP for Cardiff North actually lives.

Labour have had a bad few years in Cardiff North. They got their arse handed to them by Jonathan Morgan and his massive Tory campaign in the 2007 Assembly election (45%:30%) after selecting loony left councillor Sophie Howe - who lost her council seat in 2008 along with Labour’s other two in Cardiff North. They are now wiped out.

The Cardiff North association is full of really bright minds and isn’t dominated by doddery old fools like some others. One thing you will notice about the Welsh Conservatives is increased professionalism as full-time Assembly Member staffers begin to run campaigns - this isn’t something that Labour has matched.

Cardiff North Combined Local Election Result: May 1st 2008

Vote Share:
Conservatives - 41.62%
Labour - 23.96%
LibDem - 15.00%
Plaid - 7.22%

Seats:
Conservatives - 13 seats
LibDems - 5 seats
Independent - 3 seats

(the Independents represent Rhiwbina, a very strongly Tory ward at all other elections)

I am not sure how you worked out the averages in Cardiff north but if you take the average votes for each part and then calculate the percentage it works out as follows.

Conservative 39.34
Labour 23.22
Lib Dem 16.09
Independents 10.54
Plaid Cymru 7.10

a slight differnce but a cetain Tory gain anyway on Paper. There is a rumour that the Rhiwbina Independents may put a candidate up at the general election. That could cause a problem for the Tories and assist Labour and the Lib Dems.

I took the total number of votes cast across all the wards (giving a mad total of something like 90,000 votes) and then the shares were all the votes received by the candidates for each party. I didnt do mine based on ballot papers because so many people don’t use all the votes they’re given. Your method might be different because both the huge wards 4 seat wards are Tory-held and 2 of the smaller wards LibDem held with Tories 3rd.

The Rhiwbina Independents (or the ‘Jayne Cowan Party’) were expected to put up a candidate (Jayne Cowan) in the Assembly election but never did. They’re proper full-on ‘mad buggers’ (as Independents are so commonly and so rightly known) but I think they know their limits and that Rhiwbina people overwhelmingly favour a Tory government in Westminster.

A belated response to some recent comments, as I have not been on this site recently.

Firstly, I think comments that Labour will have to concentrate on trying to save Cardiif South and Cardiff West are correct. The problem with transferring resources into Cardiff Central to attack the Lib Dem vote is that Cardiff Central has a huge student vote, and similar mobile vote. Central is not therefore amenable to the sustained between-elections effort, e.g. leafletting, that is possible in the more settled areas of the other three Cardiff seats.

Labour need to at least preserve second place, from their point of view. In 1987 Steve Tarbet come second for Labour just 50 votes (if I recollect correctly) ahead of the Liberal Democrats, helped by a very active campaign including excellent posters (by contrast with Cardiff Central where the “hard left” possibly lost the seat for 5 years by poor literature). If Labour had got a hundred votes fewer in 1987, the subsequent history of this seat might have been different.

I agree that Rwibina tends to the right, but the areas was developed as a garden suburb and has a radical streak. I recollect that it voted Labour when Labour peaked in Cardiff.

Adam Johns has made an important point about Tory organisation. I was surprised how little notice has been taken of the fact that the Tories had an excellent candidate in place in Crewe and Nantwich before the bye-election vacancy even occurred. With such a candidate in a seemingly hopeless seat, who are they selecting in the marginals! The Tories are using best practice management techniques, including the use of Assessment Centre techniques, e.g. Occupational Psychologists, to choose candidates (Professor Jo Silvester of Goldsmiths College London published, with colleagues, an academic article on this in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology a year or so ago). By contrast, Labour is a shambles and the Lib Dems simply don’t have enough members to be consistently effective. Adam Johns comment about Tory staffers is right in the United Kingdom generally.

Frederic are you suggesting Labour could lose Cardiff South and West ?

I certainly don’t think labour are in any danger of losing Cardiff South and Penarth. Sure their majority will be well down on what it was in 2005, but its very hard believe they’d actually lose it.

West offers a little more hope for the tories - but its still a very much an outside chance.

North and Central Labour might as well write off now!

Having said that Labour had apparently given up hope of holding onto Cardiff Central before the last election.

i calculated the percentages for Cardiff North by taking the average votes for each party in a ward adding them up and then calculated the percentage.

Mark L. A very belated response, again. I agree Labour are unlikely to lose Cardiff South and West, although clearly one cannot rule it out given what happened recently in Glasgow East.

It is far from obvious to me that Cardiff West is a better prospect now for the Tories than Cardiff South. Cardiff South includes the docklands redevelopment that includes substantial numbers of incoming voters. Nobody would have thought until recently that the Tories could possibly win a council seat in Butetown.

Cardiff West has had less change, and includes a substantial proportion of radical voters who tend towards Plaid, but will vote tactically to keep the Tories out. In the long term, Cardiff West is the Plaid prospect in the Welsh capital, and if Labour were ever to be defeated there I would be less surprised to hear that Plaid had won than that the Tories had, whatever the voting in 2005.