Following on from my invitation to be part of Greg Clark’s conference session this year, here’s a little blog from me on the ConservativeHome site today;
A few weeks ago at Party conference, I was given the amazing opportunity of taking part in the session with Greg Clark, the Communities and Local Government Secretary, to talk briefly about our success in May’s local elections and my group’s role in running the council in Stoke-on-Trent.
In a couple of minutes, I briefly touched on what we did to break the stranglehold of Labour in their city heartland, where not so long ago they held every seat on the council, and the idea of a non-Labour MP was unthinkable.
As in many cities, there were always pockets of Conservative support in Stoke-on-Trent, and historically we have returned councillors here in small numbers. However, the sheer dominance of Labour locally has often snuffed out any revivals outside these areas before we’ve had time to capitalise on them. A boundary review in 2010 left us with just two councillors by 2011, when we moved to all out elections, which highlighted to me that any future success needed to be built on real, solid foundations and not the cyclical populism we’d previously relied on.
You can read the rest of it here.