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On Thursday 1st December, at around 11:00pm it was announced that Labour’s candidate for the vacant Crewe West seat on Crewe Town Council had won the by-election. It was a fantastic and hard working effort. Not just from this local Labour party but from those who travelled down to campaign with us from far and wide. A big thank you to everyone that helped out.

The turnout was low at just over 15% but was expected for a town council by-election on cold December day. The final breakdown of the vote was:

Tasha Maroni (Labour): 736 votes Steven Edgar (Conservative): 228 votes Brian Silvester (UKIP): 215 votes

Announcement and Candidate Selection

On September 26th 2016, it was announced by Crewe Town Council that Councillor Mike Russan had sadly passed away after a short illness. Known well to people in Crewe, he had taught French to many at Ruskin Road School (now Ruskin Sports College). He was chair of Crewe Town Council’s Finance and Resources Committee and led improvements made to festive activities and Christmas lights.

A by-election was called at the end of October with polling day on 1st December. This meant the candidates had only a month to get votes! We put forward Tasha Maroni as our candidate. Although a fairly new member she had a lot of experience with issues within her community. This included the problems around Valley Park after the Baths closure and outside schools at busy drop-off times.

The Twitter Explosion

As is standard practice, we setup campaign pages on social media. Our Twitter account for the campaign was in it’s infancy and had only a handful of followers at the time. After a tweet was put out by @EastCheshire stating that two of the candidates had Twitter accounts, UKIP’s candidate tweeted this response:

I have 9737 followers

My Lab opponent @tasha4ctc has a massive 17.

Tory Candidate is a paper candidate only, with no chance of winning. https://t.co/WODmUPsGnB — Cllr.Brian Silvester (@CllrBSilvester) November 14, 2016

What happened next was unforeseen… a few people bemused at the apparent gloat starting asking their followers to follow the campaign account. Within 24 hours we had gone from 17 followers to almost 15,000 – far surpassing Brian’s 9,000. It was covered locally in the press and then started to get coverage nationally.

This took all of us involved by surprise but we were all happy to see such a fantastic reaction (and get some free press out of it!).

The Campaign Itself

The Crewe West ward has an electorate of around 7,700, knocking on every door in the ward within a month is not really possible but we were determined to reach a good percentage. The Twitter explosion brought this Town Counil election to the attention to local Labour party’s across the country and many offered to send help. We had help from Stockport, St. Helens, Derby, Stoke-on-Trent, Keele and even London! Many members offered to knock on doors and telephone voters and overall we reached well over half the ward by the end. This included former Derby North MP Chris Williamson who was a great help.

We would like to use this opportunity to thank every single member who came out and helped. For a Town Council election in December the amount of time and effort given was amazing.

Also a big thanks has to go to Steve Beckett as the campaign coordinator and unofficial agent of the candidate who organised everyone and made sure the work was done.

Post-election

Now the work starts for Tasha Maroni. She has promised to be a voice for the residents in her community and we are sure she will see that through. She cares greatly about where she lives. Again, a big thank you to the residents of Crewe who voted for Tasha Maroni and a big thank you to all the volunteers who turned out to help.

The Labour Party in Crewe & Nantwich continues to work for the people of Crewe. We are all residents too and want to see Crewe prosper.

Thank you.