I’ve been away for the past fortnight, mostly riding on trains, occasionally walking around small, but interesting, towns, many a bit off of the beaten path. This rather lovely piece of local government architecture is Tartu Town Hall, which has a carillon in its bell tower. if you’re in the area, I recommend dropping by.

What that meant is that I missed our reinstated local elections here in Suffolk, unlike so many of you out there across the country. Were the results good ones for the Liberal Democrats? Well, after my esteemed colleague, Caron Lindsay, offered us her streams of consciousness over the weekend – and well done, Caron, on preserving our deposit in Almond Valley! – we’ve been inundated with views from a wide range of members and activists across the country. How to deal with Reform, how to deal with the Greens, why we need to be more radical, more pro-European, more… well, you get the picture, I suspect.

David Vigar will kick us off with some thoughts on how to deal with the threat from Reform, and there’s no doubt that we did lose seats to Reform in some places, and that they denied us wards we thought we would win or hold. Shaun Ennis, from Trafford, has some thoughts of the impact of party strategy on campaigners in the North of England (and I define the word “north” more liberally than Shaun might do).

We have another first time contributor, the Chair of London Young Liberals, Johan Prinsloo, who has some ideas about national messaging and how it did, or didn’t help local campaigners, whilst Gareth McAleer, looking at the impact of the success of nationalists in both Scotland and Wales, wonders aloud about the threat to a United Kingdom. And, of course, we’ll have Mathew Hulbert back, and I’m sure that he’ll have some views about the campaign, particularly with a Midlands focus, I suspect.

The Lords are back, sort of, on Wednesday for the Kings Speech, and we’ll be looking forward to that during the afternoon. Yet again, I don’t get to wear a frock, and the tiara stays in its box, but I’m sure that I’ll cope somehow.

There has been a lot of talk about casting the Greens as extremists and I, like many, have mixed thoughts about that. Those of us who face rural Greens, like we do in Suffolk, would find it difficult to picture them as extremist – indeed, they’re more like Liberal Democrats in these parts. On the other hand, urban Greens aren’t like that. They’re younger, more radical, often disillusioned with Labour – they’ve learned what many of us learned years ago that, when push comes to shove, Labour are authoritarian and often not terribly progressive either.

If I had to describe the Greens, it would be as a potentially uncomfortable mix of rural moderates and urban radicals. If I had to discuss their key problem, I would suggest that, having recruited tens of thousands of members, they are still establishing what they’ve got, and whether or not that fundamentally changes the Party going forwards. Zack Polanski was not what the old leadership necessarily wanted, but having won the leadership as overwhelmingly as he did, he does have the mandate to take the Party where he believes it needs to be. My fear is that his cadre of young radicals will discover that running services with ever-declining funds will pall very quickly, as it did in Brighton not so long ago. What happens next will define the ceiling that a more left-wing Green Party has.

Reform, on the other hand, may struggle with a corps of councillors who didn’t really expect to get elected, have no idea what they’ve let themselves in for and may well find the task of dealing with stroppy residents a bit more than they fancy. Here in Ipswich, the local Chair of Reform UK has forbidden the elected councillors at County and Borough level to talk to any media other than GB News. Whilst I’m sure that their plans for Suffolk are exactly what GB News wants to cover in depth, it does suggest that their newly elected cohort of councillors aren’t trusted enough to face any media questioning. It will be interesting to see if this becomes a standard way of dealing with local media where they are in power.

But Monday lies ahead of us, and I don’t want to stand in the way of our contributors, so let the debate continue…

* Mark Valladares is the Monday Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice.