Cllr Iain Lindley's Diary

I’ve been flicking through some of the old Salford City Council results over the last few days. I’ve got some interesting analysis which I will share with you on this blog in due course, but also a few question marks, the first of which is this; what happened to the Salford Liberal Party?

Now I don’t mean, of course, the Liberal Democrats, who are still very much with us, although I haven’t seen much of them in Walkden or Worsley over the last few years! I mean the Salford branch of the rump Liberal Party.

The Liberal Party consistently fought a number of inner-city Salford seats until 2004, after which they disappeared abruptly. They performed creditably in Langworthy, coming within 84 votes of victory in 2000 and polling over 500 votes in the revised Langworthy ward in 2004. If I remember rightly, they took out papers for the 2005 by-election in the same ward but did not complete them. This was surprising as they had finished a decent second there in 2004 and could have had a shot at actually winning in the by-election. Electorally I have seen and heard nothing of them since.

So where did they go? Do they still exist? Why do they not run candidates any more? Anybody know?