Given the recent County Council election results, which saw the Lib-Dems winning all three seats in Abingdon, the victory of Lib Dem candidate Layla Moran last night was not completely unexpected. BBC South Today showed that while most of the region is now Conservative blue, Oxford East remains Labour red, and Oxford West and Abingdon has turned Lib-Dem orange, and now has Layla Moran as MP.
Nicola Blackwood has worked hard as MP and very much hoped to continue as she showed in her passionate end of hustings speech on Monday. However this constituency can switch sides, as it did suprisingly to Nicola in 2010 when she beat Dr Evan Harris by 176 votes on a turnout of 65.3%. 
In 2015 she got a larger majority of 9,582, beating Layla Moran, as the Lib-Dems suffered after being in coalition with the Conservatives. This time round Layla Moran got 26,252 votes, and won the seat by 816. There was a record turnout for the constituency of 79.6%.
I hope Ms. Moran cares as much about her constituents as Nicola. She helped me a great deal and would not accept ‘no’ from the head of a local health body. Good luck Nicola, she made a noticeable improvement to the quality of my life.
Peter, I’m very glad that your elected representative managed to get a good one off deal for you from a health service that she and her party have, and given the chance will continue to, run down. The fact is though that no-one should be put into a position where they need to lobby their MP in order to get the service they need and deserve.
Many people’s experience of Nicola Blackwood was very different to your own although there are one or two fortunate people like yourself who for whatever reason managed to motivate her to do her job. Once again, I’m very pleased that you managed a good outcome for yourself and an improvement to your quality of life, but you must see that everyone deserves that same quality of service and support, not just a lucky few?
What happened to me was nothing at all to do with party politics. I was perfunctorily examined by a beautiful young woman who said I was fit. I appealed to Nicola for help, as I clearly have a problem. When approached by Nicola, the head of Oxfordshire’s welfare department, looked into it and wrote a long letter explaining that all procedures had been followed and the conclusions were sound. Nicola refused to accept this and insisted on another, proper, assessment by someone who understands the need of the disabled elderly.
Eventually they agreed.
I think her tenacity can be partly explained by herself not being particularly healthy and often in pain.
Very pleased to see such a high turnout. I hope Layla will be able to ‘ease our worried minds’ [sic].
I am not surprised at the result. The Conservatives have ruled over austerity which has seen widespread cuts to services. Also not content with poor and disabled bashing the Conservatives announced the Dementia tax. We were not convinced that the Conservatives would be able to deliver the diamond interchange in North Abingdon which meant that once again Abingdon would be let down.
I’ve got to be honest, my experience of Nicola Blackwood was extremely poor. She appeared far more interested in her own career, than being a solid constituency MP. Let’s hope Layla Moran can improve on that.
As has been said by the great and the good before; its about being visible, and it’s about that bloomin diamond interchange. That’s all she needs to do in order to be a success. A quarterly update on the progression to the start of the interchange build would be a good starting point.
This doesn’t superceded what people might want from their MP…but it IS what Abingdon needs.
Kind of off topic, but just walked into town, via St Helens wharf, and the flowers really do look lovely – even despite brexit.
“A worrying new influence” it was my birthday last Friday and some friends took myself and my wife out for lunch, a well known pub, part of a chain a couple of miles outside of town.
After perusing the menu a young waitress began to take our order, “did you vote yesterday?” I asked inquisitively, “Yes, labour” was the reply, “why labour” said I, “coz they’ll abolish tuition fees”-“but what about Trident, Brexit, Tax thresholds and things like that? don’t know or care too much about that, was her reply, so I said that Corbyns promise of abolishing tuition fees has been termed unachievable? It must be true, she said, he’s promised it!
Off she went and a while later our food arrived via another very young waitress and I asked her the same question ” did you vote?” And so began another identcle conversation except at the end of it she admitted no one had given her any impartial advice nor did she seek any, instead she said she felt compelled to vote that way because of the immense pressure from social media !
Apparently labour targeted young voters by bombarding them, almost by the hour via Facebook, snap chat, Insta gram and all the other platforms the younger generation use, she went on to say that the pressure/persuasion was almost to the point of harassment.
Now that begs a very big question as to where reasonable campaigning ends and bullying begins and also who polices ( from an election point of view ) the internet? No wonder Corbyn wants the 16 year olds to vote! Personally I would raise the age to 25 !
Did you seek out any impartial advice before casting your vote CK? sounds like a rant because they dont share your view
I’m yet to identify a party that represents what i want – in every possible way and whose every single policy i agree with.
I know plenty of older people who get all of their information from newspapers and since most of them only read one, two at most, they are entirely at the mercy of the line being peddled by that one. It has been going on for years. More recently large sections of the broadcast media have also come under the control of politically-motivated owners.
Social media is just the latest development – and at least if you ge a message from a political party it is transparent – many newspaper readers have no understanding of the source of their “news”.
And finally as has been extensively reported in the press and BBC recently Labour are not the only ones using sophisticated social media campaign techniques!
And at least they voted! Mr Corbyn’s sums may or may not have added up – but, again, at least he published his figures.
I like the outcome of the election, locally and nationally. Governments with huge majorities are not good for democracy since those in office aren’t held sufficiently rigorously to account.
It will be interesting to see how long this administration lasts…
May seems to have had a rush of common-sense to the head and brought Gove back into the Cabinet. Now she’s got someone there who supported Brexit on principle, understands the problems (because he’s thought about them) and, when he had the late realization that Boris is just an opportunist, had the guts to try and stop the buffoon becoming the PM. I’m sure that he realized that this would make him unpopular, but he followed his conscience. He speaks and acts as he finds.
I’m no fan of the man, but he’s of a higher grade than all the other waffling poseurs who occupy the higher reaches of British politics. All things are relative.
Is it just me that’s worried by the arrival of Michael Gove as environment minister given his record of trying to remove climate change from the national curriculum and support for slaughtering badgers and fracking under national parks?
Given the DUPs climate denial and May’s sycophantic support of Trump I hope we are not heading for a ‘cost saving and sovereignty restoring’ exit from the Paris agreement.
Reference post 9, I can’t help but comment that someone who will harangue young people when they are simply trying to get on with their work, by requiring to know whether they voted and for whom they voted in an otherwise secret ballot, is not the best person to be pontificating on perceptions of ‘bullying.’
… as opposed to ‘a profligate subjection to Brussels’, Reductio?
Alas, CK, did she not ask you for impartial advice?
Ah ha Sarah sadly she did not, as I said earlier she, or rather they, were not the slightest bit interested in anything other than the promise, (via their media platforms) of abolishing tuition fees, nothing about a diamond junction? trident? Our contribution to NATO ( I doubt they even knew what NATO is?) austerity, climate change or even Corbyn the IRA sympathiser and that was entirely my point!
There is some scientific support for the adage that “with age comes wisdom”.
I would therefore be happy to see the voting age lowered BUT with the proviso that we had our votes weighted by age.
Any thoughts on whether it should be a linear or exponential formula?
Age is no guarantee of anything other than distance from birth.
I checked the research abstracts on wisdom and age; the results were interesting for the absence of an agreed definition of ‘wisdom’.
However, research on age and dementia (for which there are clearly agreed parameters) indicates that dementia is more common among the elderly – of whom I am one – that among the young.
So perhaps we oldies should have our votes down-scored.
Of course, such an idea is bunkum. The fact that some elderly people lose rationality is not a reason for marking down everybody’s card once they reach 70. Similarly, the fact that some young people choose to place their X against a candidate for reasons I disagree with is not a reason for putting a tariff on their vote.