Originally Posted by Aardvark

When I was in Witney Tories, Cameron country, the branch had up to 1500 paid up members with 300 or so who would attend meetings at various times. We got 80-100 for supper club! At the next GE they will canvass virtually every house in the constituency. They have voting and canvass records going back years, a stack of funds of immense proportions (over £100k banked) and a high public profile. They will actually get a surge in the run up to the election as well.

Witney UKIP would need a membership surge of several hundred per cent just to get an activist in every ward. At the last GE I was the only UKIP person who visited polling stations, the Tories had manned virtually all of them with tellers.

What the Tories do here Labour and Lib Dems do elsewhere. We need to be realistic about our hopes and aspirations in some areas. Bob FM might be correct that his branch is doing well, but up the road in West Oxfordshire there is little activity.

If the Tories have 250,000 members and only 1 in 4 is active at the GE or thereabouts that will still mean the best part of 100 Tories per constituency. If we had 4000 activists we would have barely 6 activists per constituency. A 25% increase for us would equate to 1.5 people per consituency giving 7.5 total. The Tories could take a 20% cut in active supporters and outgun us at every turn.

It is a numbers game, but we're not the only ones playing it.