Well, I’m back from my count where I saved my deposit and came within a couple of hundred votes of beating the Conservatives.
I am beyond exhausted, but I will try and pull together what we know so far.
Scotland
The bad news is that we have lost Shetland. It will seem like a big shock to everyone to lose a seat that we have represented in Westminster for 75 years and in Holyrood since devolution. I feel for Emma Macdonald, who ran a busy and beautiful campaign. I think there was some worry about Shetland at the start of the campaign but that we had become more confident. It’s a huge loss, let’s make no bones about it.
In the other group of Northern Isles, Liam McArthur was returned with what I think is the highest percentage vote share of any MSP ever – 70.9%.
He is one of 5 MSPs we have at 5:30 pm. This is one more than we had in 2021 and means that we will be an officially recognised group from the start of the new Parliament.
The others are Sanne Dijkstra-Downie who gained the new seat of Edinburgh Northern which was notionally SNP, Alex Cole-Hamilton, who now enjoys a 13,000 majority in Edinburgh North Western, Willie Rennie who won Fife North East with 63.7% of the vote and an increased majority and Adam Harley, who has just won the constituency of Strathkelvin and Bearsden for the first time in the history of the Scottish Parliament from the SNP.
It’s looking that we might also soon win in Caithness, according to the BBC. Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch and Inverness and Nairn are two horse races between us and the SNP.
Alan Reid missed out on winning Argyll and Bute by 2.500 votes, a seat he held at Westminster between 2001 and 2015.
And they haven’t started on the lists yet, where we hope to pick up another few seats.
Wales
I’m beyond gutted that we didn’t win our two biggest prospects for gains, Sam Bennett in Swansea and Rodney Berman in Cardiff. However, thankfully, Jane Dodds has got back in in the last seat in her constituency so we will still have representation. It’s such a shame that this will be the third term that we have had a sole representative in the Senedd. She will no doubt have an important role, though given the overall numbers between Plaid and Reform.
England
Overall, we are 92 Councillors up, but London seems to be a tale of two halves. In the south, we’ve already had almost North Korean results in Richmond and Sutton – a testament to the brilliant work of our councillors. Kingston added to that with 44 out of 48.
In the north, there is a worry that we are going to lose ground to the Greens.
Elsewhere, we have taken control of West Surrey.
Ed Davey was there this afternoon and said:
As results continue to come in, the Liberal Democrats are winning big in former Conservative heartlands. In areas like Surrey it’s clear the Conservatives are finished and it’s now between the Liberal Democrats and Reform.
We have always been the party of local government. It’s in our DNA – we’re rooted in our communities, getting stuff done.
But what we’ve also seen is that millions of people want a kind of change that’s about building things up, not burning them down. That is the kind of positive change only the Liberal Democrats offer.
Our party now has a huge responsibility to step up and be the rallying point for all in our country who hate extremism, hate division, want our country to be united and crave real hope, not false hope.
Peter Taylor has been re-elected as Mayor of Watford.
We’ll be back later as things develop this evening. The Council stays in our hands with just 4 Labour councillors forming the opposition.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social
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18 Comments
Last year Reform took 41% of the Seats, this Year it seems to be more like 31% – that is unalloyed good news.
Our results are disappointing but this the 8th Year that we have made Gains & we are in equal 2nd place with Labour for Seat numbers.
Ironic that on the 81st anniversary of VE Day we are watching election results driven by those same ethno-nationalistic forces whose partial success in the 1930s gave rise to WW2.
Will we be able to see off the totalitarian far right at less cost in the 21st century than it took in the 20th? Last time the middle classes looked to the totalitarians to see off the Bolsheviks.
This time the liberal middle classes don’t need to be afraid of socialism/communism which has historically failed. There is reason to hope.
@ Tristan Ward What on earth does this mean, “Last time the middle classes looked to the totalitarians to see off the Bolsheviks” ?
“Our results are disappointing ”
TBF I think Caron’s take of ‘OK’ is about right. Very much holding steady/slight improvement in areas of strength which does point to holding a lot of the ground gained in 2024 at a future GE. That would be no minor acheivement in a high-flux political environment. It is dismally poor in other areas though – and I think as long standing councillors in near derelict areas are standing down it becomes harder to hold on.
But whilst I don’t personally like that outcome it does produce a party with a more robust and sustainable base. I’ll just need to book some time from an AI data centre to work out who is best placed to stop reform come the General!
Some of our gains are due to the proliferation of other parties. In East Surrey, 2 Epsom & Ewell wards were won with under 20% of the vote. That is just luck.
@paul barker
“Last year Reform took 41% of the Seats, this Year it seems to be more like 31% – that is unalloyed good news.”
Reinforced by Peter Kellner if you believe him: “Reform have peaked” and “Nigel Farage should be privately worried”.
https://kellnerp.substack.com/p/yesterdays-elections-the-story-so
@ David Raw
Hitler’s “story” was (to grossly oversimplify) “the Jewish communists/socialists are coming – they will take your property and destroy Germany. The German middle class went along with it.
If you look at the history of the USSR (including, according to Wikipedia, the 950,000 to 1,2 million deaths during the Great Purge, including executions, deaths in detention and those who died shortly after being released from the Gulag) you could say Hitler had a point. What is certain is that putting Hitler into power was a catastrophic blunder.
I live in the middle of a trio of Green dominated Boroughs, running along the South Bank of The Thames, opposite Central London. My local Party have 3 choices now, prop up Labour in a Coalition, become a junior partner to The Greens or continue as The Official Opposition. There will be similar stories across Britain.
@Tristan,
“Last time the middle classes looked to the totalitarians to see off the Bolsheviks”
Are you referring to the events in Germany in the 1930s? I would say it was more the ruling classes who were concerned about losing their possessions. They also had the money and connections to facillitate the rise of the far right. Large sections of middle classes would have sided with them but not all.
The other option they would have had was a military coup, as happened in Spain, Greece, and Chile at various times in the 20th century. The somewhat spurious justification being that democracy had to be suspended to protect democracy.
Hywel,
Of all people, you have quite enough real intelligence (i.e. judgement and experience) to work out who is best placed to stop Reform come the general election. You certainly don’t need AI, although a spreadsheet might help a bit.
The problem is how to persuade some people to drop their self centred so called progressive radicalism and instead focus their skills on being sensible mainstream Liberal Democrats competent enough to run a council and a country. That is what the vast majority of British people want.
It is also exactly what the country needs and what only Liberal Democracy can provide.
“Reform have peaked”
Possibly. See the graph in the link below. The same can be said for the LibDems albeit a less prounounced peak.
The results of the local elections are broadly consistent with the results of the pollsters. In a five party system (more like 6 in Scotland and Wales) the outcome at the next General election could depend which parties are more capable of forming coalitions, either informal or otherwise.
I wouldn’t be too optimistic about it being the Greens, LibDems and Labour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election
The problem with thinking about Reform is finding a balance, not complacent or terrified.
The BBC estimates The National Equivalent Vote for Reform in these Elections as 26%, in line with their current Polling range of 21% to 28%.
That range is 8% down over the last 7 Months, The Next General Election is 36 Months away. There is no guarantee that Reform will continue falling till they collapse or that they won’t.
What we do know is that their Councillors seem to behave much the same as UKIPs did, they don’t look like a Party preparing for Government.
Living in a row of 4 counties Governed by Reform for a year now, my impression is that experience of Ref UK running the local Council will have some impact in discouraging future Reform votes, as they seem to adopt a “rabbit in the headlights pose” for about 6 months, then panic as the budgetary process arrives like a freight train. They are also very variable – from (roughly) old style UKIP (before Farage ran away as they were too extreme) to Tory retread careerists to quite extreme extremists.
It’s a good time for sales of JCB Pothole Repair Machines.
This cohort of Ref UK also have their first defenestrato, in the person of Jay Leslie Cooper elected for Bootle West, in Sefton. Farage was told a fortnight ago, but did nothing until he was elected and the media started asking questions. It’s a tricky one to combine with reaching out to the Jewish community.
JLC stated on Facebook last year of Hitler: “I don’t agree with him murdering innocent people. But the Hallocaust [sic] is a hoax. There wasn’t [sic] even 6 million Jews in Europe at the time. Propaganda.”, amongst a lot of conspiracy theories.
I hope Mark Pack will keep a log again, but there will likely be more this time.
I think we have hit peak Reform but the decline will be a slow one. Although, from personal experience, they seem to have mobilised a part of the electorate that doesn’t usually vote, it’s not clear they can keep those voters active to prop them up. Indeed, locally they might even have helped awaken another part of the non-voting electorate that are anti-Reform.
Reform swanned into our local count thinking they owned the place and were smugly anticipating sweeping up across the board (some predictions had them as the biggest party). Instead, they took just 9 out of 60 seats up for grabs, while we became the biggest party on 20. I think those new Reform councillors will struggle when they come up for re-election – most of them didn’t seem to have any idea about local issues or what the council does, so it’ll be interesting to see how they cope with the deluge of casework.
@Peter Yes, I agree that Reform have probably peaked – it was becoming clear towards the end of summer last year. Farage is a weasel, and he will go pop as in the nursery rhyme.
To my mind Farage is a marketing man, and has little under the surface, but he relies on holding an impossibly broad support coalition together by flim-flam. And there is now a money-driven social media network that benefits from driving ever-greater extremes. For example there has been some effective reduction in immigration (whatever we think of it), so NF has refocused onto established Muslim communities for his targets, and various figures – notably Rupert Lowe – are proposing varieties of “send them all home”, which amounts to a potential policy of ethnic cleansing.
A question for me is how firmly have the Reform voter base been siloed inside the Reform cycle of fairy stories, and how can that be broken. Just better Governance, which Starmer has been doing gradually in many respects, will not do it on its own. For me Starmer has needed effective comms, and to drag the Right in to a fight on centre or centre-left ground, which is where he has failed and why he may be defenestrated.
@ Peter Martin
Yes of course the German ruling class were instrumental in putting Hitler into power, but I suggest that in a post 1789/ and post 1848 world the middle classes were decisive.
If you don’t know it, can I recommend Michael Burleigh’s “The Third Reich: A New History” where the author argues that the Germans’ acceptance of Hitler’s totalitarianism and Nazi philosophy stemmed from their desire for economic prosperity and a national identity, which slowly developed into a collective conscience and religious fervor.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Third-Reich-New-History/dp/0809093251
@ David Evans 9th May ’26 – 10:13am
I agree with the thrust of this. One question that needs be answered is “what is “progress” and what do we want to “progress” to? And is that destination “liberal” and “democratic”?
That is not to say that the dismissal, bullying and repression of people who are “different” is acceptable: it is not. Everyone must be able to make their way in the world and participate.
@Pul Barker
FWIW I recommend staying as the Official Opposition.