As usual, the Liberal Democrats are not getting the coverage we deserve for some pretty spectacular election results. The BBC spent most of its coverage talking up Reform, Lewis Goodall on the News Agents spent a disproportionate amount of time on Farage and not enough on Ed Davey. Everyone picked up Farage going on about what he wanted to do in the future, but paid little attention to the other stars of yesterday, us. I mean, we won more councillors than the Conservatives and Labour and beat the Tories into fourth place in terms of vote share.
It is, frankly, horrifying, to see Reform in charge of so many crucial services and I fear for people from marginalised communities who need the support that the Council provides. Our goal for the future must be to offer a kinder and more compassionate and practical alternative to their divisive rhetoric.
And while the BBC showed acres of Farage and his fireworks in Kent, Ed’s sundown speech in Oxfordshire got a few frames. But, don’t worry, you can watch it here:
We are on track to overtake the Conservatives at the next General Election, he said, adding that the Liberal Democrats will stand up for true British values to counteract the rise of populists like Nigel Farage.
Ed wasn’t the only leader to comment on our success. Alex Cole-Hamilton said:
It’s clear from the spectacular results that the Liberal Democrats are putting up that not only is the Conservative Party toast but if you want to stop Reform we are the party you should put your trust in.
It takes a bit of cheek for John Swinney to talk about populism, deception and false hope. When is he going to cut class sizes, dual the A9 and abolish the council tax like his party have been promising for almost twenty years?
People deserve better. With a year to go until the Scottish Parliament election, my party will be setting out plans to give people swift access to local healthcare and set their communities back on the right track.
The media speak as though two party politics is over. Well, as an activist in the third party in a First Past the Post system, of course I wish that to be the case, but I also wish that it had happened on every other occasion it had been predicted with certainty over the years. I would not counsel holding your breath.
Four years ago the Conservatives did really well in this set of elections. Within six weeks, we had overturned a huge Tory majority in Chesham and Amersham and by the end of the year had elected Helen Morgan in North Shropshire as the electorate became disgusted with Partygate and the Owen Paterson affair.
Who would have thought that just four years later, we would win overall control of Shropshire by some margin? That’s a huge tribute to the work of Helen Morgan MP and a growing army of activists in the county. Regular readers of this blog will be pleased to hear that Duncan Borrowman, formerly of the Campaigns Department and now landlord of CAMRA’s National Pub of the Year in Oswestry, was elected to Shropshire Council by just 32 votes. Unfortunately, his wife Grace lost out by just 23 votes to the Greens in Oswestry South.
And some thought it impossible that Sarah Green could hold on in Chesham and Amersham in the General Election. She did that easily and now has 11 Councillors across the constituency to support her. This is down to the work of Sarah, her team and the indefatigable Candy Piercy to build up capacity and campaigning in the seat and proving that it could be done.
I am very sad that Mike Ross didn’t win his fight to be Hull and East Riding’s first Mayor. He was just 1,500 or so behind Reform in Hull, where he leads the Council, but the gap widened in the East Riding. Having said that, he was still second there, beating the Tories in what is their strongest area. I had been phone knocking up in Hull on Thursday night and was heartened by the enthusiasm that people there had in going to vote for him. And they weren’t all Lib Dems.
I didn’t feel like I could relax until I knew what had happened to friend of this site Ed Fordham in Chesterfield. He knew he was facing a significant challenge from Reform in his division, but he ended up being one of the very few Derbyshire County Councillors to be re-elected.
One face returning to the world of local government is our old friend Gareth Epps who has won a County Council seat in Oxfordshire. It will be interesting to see how an instinctive rebel will cope with the discipline of being part of an administration, but I’m glad he is there.
It’s also fantastic to see former Chippenham candidate Helen Belcher elected in Wiltshire.
Congratulations to all Liberal Democrats who stood and won, and huge thanks and commiserations to those who stood and didn’t win, especially those who lost narrowly. Next time….
This year’s results prove that politics is volatile and is likely to throw up some bizarre results for a while. And we need to be in the best shape we can to capitalise on it. We need to appeal to people’s best emotions, give them hope, and convince them that we can make their lives better.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
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24 Comments
Makes you wonder how well the Lib Dems would have done if we had as much free publicity as Reform from the BBC and others in the last few months.
The media was presenting the Reform gains as inevitable and Farage was being talked-up everywhere. Ed had to run around on a hobby horse just to get 30 seconds of coverage…..
When the Guardian leads with Farage’s w and p, you realise that we are a loser for decent media coverage.
I’ve just watched John Curtice on BBC Breakfast and my blood is BOILING. He is so much talking up Reform and being very “meh” about us.
We never really had an election where both Labour and the Conservatives completely imploded at the same time. It was usually one or the other.
It was the same in the 2019 Euro elections when Reform’s grandfather party and us shared the spoils. Everyone said how well they had done and did not give us equal credit.
This is the John Curtice who was wheeled out by the “Guardian letter” leadership critics to try to get Ed to change our approach pre-General Election.
Supposedly Ed was uncharismatic, not cutting through, and we needed to campaign on important issues like the Single Market and PR, not trivialities like social care and health. Back into the comfort zone; let’s lose with Sir John
John Curtice has constantly underestimated, misunderstood and deprecated the LDs. Please, no one ever cite him again as a great political
strategist.
I always remember him saying during the Dunfermline by-election that the fight was clearly between Labour and the SNP, completely ignoring what was happening in the world.
It made our victory even more satisfying than it was.
But I don’t think the Guardian letter group were entirely wrong, to be honest. We capitalised on tactical voting and the determination of the entire country to rid themselves of the Tories. So we could get away with what we did then. However, that is not going to see us through in the future and I think, to be honest, that Ed and his team have recognised this. He’s being very punchy on things like Trump and Ukraine and getting closer to the EU in a way that is both getting noticed in the media AND approved of within the Party.
I’m sure that if my old friend of sixty years, Michael Steed, as still with us, he’d betelling us that Professor Curtice was an extremely well qualified highly rated academic who looked at all the political parties with an unprejudiced dispassionate eye.
I don’t understand why they keep on wheeling Curtice out. He offers neither great insight or accuracy these days – is there really no one better available?
It is very disappointing to see that when faced with some analysis that doesn’t accord with our feelings, otherwise sound Lib Dems suddenly charge off down another rabbit hole of passionate character assassination rather than look dispassionately at the data and try to consider where these results leave us.
Quite simply this result means that over the next few days some of us (actually 263) will be making the most important decisions we will have had to make since 2010.
If we get it right and think before we charge off to slay our next evil dragon who has said something we don’t like, we will build a structure that will consolidate our position as the third party of British politics (counting Con/Reform as a transient phase of the decline and fall of the old Conservative party). If we get it really right, it will enable our party to take the twin successes of the last 12 months and build once again to take on Reform and to put Nigel Farage back in his box of perennial disruptor and moaner in chief.
If we get it wrong, we will find our triumphs in Shropshire, Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire, and excellent results in Hertfordshire, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Devon and Cornwall under massive attack because taking control of an underfunded council whose financial reserves have been run into the ground by decades of Conservative misrule can become nothing but a nightmare of blame and recrimination
and Nigel Farage is very, very good at that.
Sir Ed, “We are the party of middle England”
That’s a bit limited, and how does it play throughout the rest of the UK ?
I spent a while this morning browsing the BBC lists of results. It’s a bit hard to interpret because they only list numbers of seats won, not numbers of votes in individual councils, but from the distribution and from the estimated national vote shares, it looks to me like Reform are basically sweeping the board in areas where the LibDems have no MPs and no substantial organisation (which unfortunately is, most of the country outside the SouthWest and the London commuter belt). But in areas where the LibDems are well organised, Reform gains were more limited, and lots of seats were falling to us rather than them. To be fair those are also culturally more liberal/’Remain’ areas which probably had an impact too. But there’s possibly a lesson there about our need to establish decent organisations in areas where we currently have no MPs.
The really annoying thing about the coverage is that it uniformly suggests a Swing to the Right, in fact the number of Left Councillors went up slightly, in effect the Right & Left blocs stayed much the same size, the shifts were within them.
Politics continued to fragment & moved towards both Left & Right.
I had to do a double take. “Liberal Democrats the antidote to Reform.” Whether it was Gladstone and his slogan “Peace, Retrenchment and Reform” or the Whigs introducing the Great Reform Act, it is the Liberal Democrats and their predecessor Parties which have been the Party of democratic change. Farage has twisted a noble calling for radicals into crude reactionary populism.
More news from Grace and me
https://www.shropshirestar.com/news/politics/2025/05/03/local-elections-2025-lib-dems-take-all-but-one-of-the-18-seats-up-for-grabs-on-oswestry-town-council/
What really annoyed me was the fact that yesterday the BBC led with Prince Harry instead of the election results.
I’m guessing the David Vasmer elected to Shropshire CC is the David Vasmer from the old Liberals Campaign Team? Either way, a great result
And of course, this morning, dear objective unbiased Kuenssberg offers spokesmen from Labour, Conservative and Reform…
Grr.
The results in Chesham and Amersham were amazing. The party rose from 1 seat on Buckinghamshire Unitary to 11, taking all seats in Amersham & Chesham Bois, Chesham North and Chesham South.
It also took every seat on both Chesham and Amersham town councils. Tories who had been councillors for years were defeated, including the deputy chair of the Conservative Councillors Association, who lost both her unitary and town council seat.
They may try to make the story about Labour and the Tories losing to Reform, but if you look at the numbers (BBC)
Tories -674 Reform +677,
Labour -187 Ind – 20 LD +163, Green +44 (LD + Green +207)
it’s obvious that the right wing voters abandoned the tories for Reform, while the progressive left abandoned Labour for LDs + Greens.
Next election could see both Lab & Tories down to a small number of seats each, with the real contest between Reform or an LD/Green coalition.
I’ve seen predictions that a similar swing against the Tories in a GE would leave them with 12 seats 🙂 How lovely.
@ Jenny,
“it’s obvious that the right wing voters abandoned the tories for Reform, while the progressive left abandoned Labour for LDs + Greens.”
It might look this way superficially, but you’d really need to investigate voting movements in a deeper way. It’s quite likely that many former Tory voters sided with the Lib Dems, or even the Greens, whilst many former Labour voters switched to Reform.
The end result would be the same.
So, some good results in the leafier parts of “middle England”. Meanwhile, the UK as a whole is drifting towards Fascism. What are Lib Dems going to do to stop it?
It’s not “Reform”, it’s Revenge. Blame a scapegoat. Pretend that all Britain’s problems would be over if we booted out ethnic minorities, re-erected statues to slave traders, sacked half the council staff, and then blame everyone else for the chaos.
Starmer isn’t making these points, he’s too busy trying to avoid the blame. The Lib Dems could make the running.
If Farage has learnt some good tactics from the Lib Dems, then perhaps they could learn some good tactics from Trump. Call the enemy hurtful names. Call them the Revenge Party.
Jenny is correct. I’ve seen those same projections, and I’m sure Mark Pack will stress them too. If (and remember that all projections are hypothetical), IF the Tories polled in the 2029 GE the same % of the vote that they did on Thursday (i.e.15%), then they would indeed be reduced to 12 seats. I noticed Justine Greening (as an ex-Conservative cabinet minister) saying on TV this morning that she thinks that the Conservative Party is toast, although it will take another decade for the crumbs to disappear. The difficulty is not going to be for the LibDems to overtake the Conservatives, which will be comparatively simple as the latter are on their way out; the LibDem challenge will be for them to face up (electorally) to the Reform populists who are replacing the Conservatives. Doubtless Farage and his colleagues will make a hash on many of their actions on local councils, and with an increasingly volatile electorate (meaning voters are not prepared to give ANY group of politicians enough time for their policies to have effect). But we should not make the mistake of treating Reform as uniformly right-wing! Their published policies include a mix of views (including a fair degree of nationalisation!). Remember that in the 1930s the Hitlerian mob defined themselves as National SOCIALISTS (yes, that’s what NaZi is an acronym for), even though their concept of what “socialism” means is not something we would agree with.
“Doubtless Farage and his colleagues will make a hash on many of their actions on local councils…”
Since they have no track record this seems a distinct possibility, given farage’s statements about a war on woke and on council staff working from home (especially if a staff member’s duties might mean that working from home is the most cost-effective way of getting the job done).
Thank you, Caron, for supporting the ‘Guardian letter’. As one of the movers of the letter, I’d like to say its underlying message is even stronger after last week’s election results. The message to emerge is that there is a gap for a bold and radical liberal party that offers hope where other parties offer only criticism, and which celebrates the good in people rather than seeks scapegoats. And the message from the Canadian and Australian elections is that we have to call right-wing populism out for what it is, not try to appease it. I agree that Ed is being more punchy for the EU and against Trump, and that’s good, but he will have to be punchier still if we are not to get overlooked in a ‘new three-party system’ the way we often were under the ‘old two-party system’. To get regularly noticed, we need to be an anti-system party that is a more attractive option to voters than Reform.
Liberal Democrats now have the best opportunity to maintain a strong national profile than at any time since the Iraq war over 20 years ago. We need to follow the example of the leader of our sister party in Canada and stand up both to Trump’s bullying, and Starmer’s appeasement policy. And we need to stop running scared of old Brexiteers (most of whom would never vote for us anyway) and continue to demand closer links with our European neighbours inside and outside of the EU.
So when Trump visits, lets be in the forefront of the opposition as Charles Kennedy was in 2003, and let us speak out loudly against the carnage and collective punishment being carried out in Gaza and in support of Ukraine.