2021 Elections: great results for the CLP!

May 2021 was a really successful election campaign for the CLP – building on years of hard work by our members and activists! We dedicated the election to our late friend and comrade Chris Deane, who played a major part as strategist, election agent and candidate, in addition to his work to rebuild our CLP after years of division.

As you’d expect, the CLP Executive Committee undertook a detailed analysis of the results and reviewed ‘What Went Well‘ and what could be ‘Even Better If‘.

Overall, we celebrated some truly outstanding CLP results, including:

• Our first ever Labour County Councillor: Cllr Jackie Meade now represents Folkestone East Division at KCC
• Our highest vote ever in Folkestone for both the Central Ward (Town Council) and Folkestone West Division (KCC), with 900+ votes and almost 1800 votes, respectively.
• Laura Davison fought a superb campaign here to add 1000 votes to her previous tally and bring Folkestone West within 300 votes of victory: now firmly a winnable seat.
• A swing to Labour across the CLP, ranging from 3.5% up to 15.5%
• An increased Labour vote across all 5 KCC seats contested (adding up to well over 5000 votes)
• A strong performance in Hythe West, Cheriton & Sandgate, Romney Marsh, building our base for future campaigns.

Huge thanks go to all members of the FHCLP Campaign Team, including all our branches.
A special thanks goes to members of the joint Folkestone Campaign Group who coordinated joint working in both Folkestone divisions, our 80 amazing volunteers who joined in the drive to distribute 35,000 leaflets, thanks to our Membership Team and our Comms Team for successfully driving up our social media reach to new levels.
The CLP helped to bring together a number of new or updated election systems, including online candidate discussions, key activists contact work, leaflet distribution runs, targeted messaging and social media boosts within an overarching election campaign plan and diary.
Building on this, the CLP Executive agreed plans to establish the FHCLP Campaign Committee which allows us to work on continuous campaigning and to organise within the CLP going forward so we are well prepared for future elections.