Labour Leadership: How did Lewisham Labour vote?

I just noticed that the Labour Party has rather neatly published a breakdown of the recent leadership vote in which Ed Miliband won. I thought it would be interesting to have a look at how Lewisham Labour Party voted in the election.

If you take all three constituencies the breakdown looks like this;

Which looks like this in numbers (you can click to make them clearer);

The obvious headlines are that Labour Party members in Lewisham pretty heavily voted for a candidate that did not win and that in the West there was a surge to Balls and Abbott, in the East to Burnham...

Any explanations for this? It looks on first examination that the East, with it's heavy vote for David Miliband (and Burnham surge) is certainly the most right wing party of the three.

You can also see how the MPs voted here. Lewisham Deptford's Joan Ruddock cast her vote for Ed Miliband and gave none of the other candidates her second preferences (just as well he won I suppose).

Heidi Alexander, from Lewisham East, voted Andy Burnham [1], which may explain the East's Burnham vote or be a product of it. Her second and third preferences were for David and Ed Miliband.

Jim Dowd of Lewisham West took a leaf out of Joan Ruddock's book and only voted for one candidate. However, like many of Lewisham Labour members he choose the losing Miliband brother, David.

Mail picks up Lewisham 'No Fry Zone' story

Lewisham council has the dubious honour of being mentioned in the Daily Mail today. The Mail says that Green councillor Ute Michel, pictured, is proposing a 'No fry zone' (good pun) around schools to ensure that kids can't get their greasy hands on burgers and chips during the school day.

Some of the comments at the site ask why councillors don't know that primary schools don't let their kids out at lunchtime and other such 'political correctness gone mad' comments. Sadly not many of the comments question whether the story itself is accurate, which is surprising as it appears in the Daily Mail.

If you want an accurate version of the story you can always go direct to Lewisham Green Party's press release here which explains that far from being on the brink of some sort draconian measure shutting down local businesses we are rather more modestly *talking* to the Mayor about whether it would be inappropriate to allow *new* junk food outlets to set up shop next door to schools as a measure against childhood obesity.

I know a 'no fry zone' sounds really exciting, kudos to the person who thought of it, as "writing a special town planning policy" is a bit less funky but when you have commentators screaming that the council wants to 'ban frying' or 'Don't ban food. Ban the nanny state instead.' I wonder how helpful this Mail article has been.

Councils make zoning decisions all the time about what kind of premises is appropriate where, and schools are an important factor in that. It might be nice to have some kind of local diversity rather than a host of new chicken places to cater for the school break rush, however, I'm not quite sure it's the equivalent of banning food though.