County council results

I was going to have the day off the election but... well.. that was probably too much to ask.

How did the Greens do?

Firstly congratulations to Simon Segwick-Jell who has just been elected the first Green Party County Councilor in Cambridgeshire on over 40% of the vote in Abbey Ward. Last time we stood, in 2005, we came fourth with 12%. Quite a leap!

Not got time to do a proper analysis yet but it looks like in the non-target seats where there was little campaigning the Greens over doubled their vote in comparison to 2005. In Colchester the Greens beat the once strong Labour in seven of nine wards although we didn't quite manage to win a seat.

At the time of writing we appears to be up six county councilors across the country (to 15), although sadly this includes three losses in Oxfordshire leaving just two. This certainly isn't the trend which appears, at first glance to be overwhelming up. In Suffolk we won a ward with over 50% of the vote which is absolutely splendid work.

Far less sad is that in Norwich (site of an upcoming by-election) the Norfolk County Council results have produced a massive shock wave. There are 13 county council seats in the city, the Greens now have seven of them (up three), the other three parties having two each. The fact that the Greens can chew up the other party's in a first past the post election like this is a real testament to the awesome power of the Norwich machine.

Norwich look on track to return a Green MP to Parliament.

Labour utterly, utterly screwed

Labour chose this election to stop campaigning and go into full on crisis mode so it's no surprise they did so poorly. They started the election controlling four counties, they now control none. They lost 187 seats. The Lib Dems also lost seats, 23 over all. In fact the Lib Dem vote looks down which does not bode well for them for the Euro elections where they had hoped to do well.

BNP, UKIP and assorted what nots

The BNP have won their first county council seat, a ward in Burnley. Not exactly a spectacular result or the arty that was pinning everything on the region. Nick Griffin appears to be playing down expectations at the moment so it looks like they are not confident that they'll win a seat with most of the grumpy xenophobe vote siphoned off to UKIP.

Speaking of whom UKIP seem to have performed very well. They have won at least five county council seats for the first time (they also came second in one Colchester ward which shocked me) and I suspect they will do well at the Euros. Can I just take a moment to thank them for attracting a whole layer of the fascists' vote. Thank you.

Links:

Green Party election results page.
BBC local election results page.
Lancaster Unity should be an excellent resource for watching the BNP results.

I'll be updating this results page a number of times over the next couple of hours, feel free to leave interesting info you think should be included in this post.