Friday, September 05, 2008

Leadership election results!

The results are in and the Green Party of England and Wales has it's first ever leader and deputy leader.

On a turnout of 37.9% (up from 20% for the principal speaker posts last year) of the 7,565 members I can announced that the results are as follows;



For leader;

Caroline Lucas 2,559
Ashley Gunstock 210

And for deputy;

Adrian Ramsay 2,785

Congratulations to the candidates. In her acceptance speech Caroline spoke of the "honour and responsibility" leading the party in a period when there is "such a vacuum in the mainstream parties" who have no answers for the extra-ordinary problems facing the world today.
Green politics she said was essential to counter "the politics of paralysis".

Ashley, conceding defeat gave warm praise to his opponent. He also described himself as a "Green Party member and will do my best to make the leadership work - but you never know I might be back."

Adrian Ramsay, accepting the post of deputy leader said that up until this point he had been concentrating on building the party in Norwich but we were gaining ground all over the country. Adrian left us with the thought that son we'd have seats in Parliament and the opportunity to put policies into practice.

I can also reveal, in confidence, that there were barely any re-open nominations - which I was really surprised about. Just 79 RONs for Caroline/Ashley - fantastic! (edit: there seems to be some confusion over the RON figures for Adrian although all the numbers I've heard have been very low, but I thought in light of the difference of opinion I'd remove my possibly inaccurate version)

7 comments:

Green Gordon said...

Hi, it's the blog comments man here:

Did you mean 60 Rons in the Deputy Leaderhsip eleection or
79 '1 Ashley 2 RON's and
60 '1 caroline 2 RON's?

Anonymous said...

I voted for RON in both cases.

I think the way in which the Green Party has decided to structure itself like the grey parties very depressing.

Noel Lynch said...

Rather unprofessionally, the ERO did not announce the RONs.

I believe that it was 78 for Leader and something like 180 for Deputy Leader.

weggis said...

To complete the picture we need to know how many of Ashley's first choice voters gave their second choice to Caroline, and vice versa?

Jim Jepps said...

I don't think they count them if they don't have to weggis - sorry.

I'm sure there was a lot of cross over though - ROn seems rather out of fashion for these elections - quite the opposite to the committee posts!

weggis said...

and the results for the committee posts were??????

Vicky said...

Wow. That's an absolute landslide of a victory for Lucas.