Cat is Out of the Bag - Central Ward Challenge

I’m delighted to announce that Liverpool Green Party is now going to target to win an additional seat in the local elections. We have been looking to double our numbers to 4, with wins in St Michaels and Greenbank, with an additional challenge in Mossley Hill. Our excellent candidate Hannah Clare lives in the ward and has extensive experience working with both students and residents. Central is the ideal ward for her. We will be trying to take the seat from the Labour incumbent Cllr Nick Small. This won't be easy, but we have the opportunity to do it.

If the Liberal Democrats locally have a good election and hold 2 seats they are defending, they will be down to 5 councillors. If they have a bad election, they will be down to 3. It therefore makes sense for us to make a push to become the official opposition in Liverpool and take a 5th seat, given that we are seeing some very healthy polling numbers and canvassing returns in the city, and that we have additional resources coming our way.

We’ve delivered a direct mailshot to every postal voter in the Central ward of Liverpool. We expect Labour to poll around 1000 voters. We got 195 last time. We think we can get 200 to 300 local Labour voters from the “left” of Labour to switch to us at this election on issues such as air pollution, HS2 and their commitment to Trident instead of protecting services and our "under the radar" campaign is going well so far.

We are going to be bringing in national and regional resources to mount a huge polling day operation to get 500 to 600 student votes, and today we have an advertising blitz across the region. We think we may just have caught Labour enough on the hop and that they had taken winning Central ward for granted in this election.

Finally, it is the unpredictable effect of the local UKIP candidate that might make the difference. Some Labour voters are being attracted by the simple (but false) arguments UKIP are putting forward. There is little overlap between those people and the ones we are targeting, but a local UKIP presence may make our job easier. We'll see just how close we can get to snatching the seat.