County council results: final version

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! The prize is sweeter still as Simon ousted the leader of the Labour group in order to achieve his new high office.

Not got time to do a proper analysis yet but it looks like in the non-target seats in Cambridge 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 appear to be up six county councilors across the country (to 15), although sadly this includes three losses in Oxfordshire leaving just two. The two of the three seats we lost were new candidates to the seats and the two retained were sitting County Councilors which may well have something to do with the result.

However, 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 five), the other three parties having two each. The fact that the Greens can chew up the other parties 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 and I'm very interested to know how they'll approach the Norwich North by-election which may well have all sorts of people standing in it from all over the country.

Overall this means that the Greens have 123 councillors on 42 councils. Once again, as with every previous year for some time we see another modest increase which, when I'm feeling pessimistic I think is all too slow and when I'm feeling good I think it's rather pleasant never to suffer set backs.

Oh, and the other thing is that the Green Party membership has grown by 8.5% in the last six weeks. Let's see if we can retain those new members!

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 have lost 250 seats at this point in the evening.

As an example of how poor the results were in St Ives Labour were beaten by the monster Raving Loony Party. This is not normal.

The Lib Dems also lost seats, 8 over all. In fact the Lib Dem vote looks down in most places which does not bode well for them for the Euro elections where they had hoped to do well. I had thought they would have benefitted from the anti-politics mood but it looks like they've lost a lot of their vote to the Tories - but again that's from a scan rather than proper analysis.

BNP, UKIP and assorted what-nots

The BNP have won their first three county council seats, in Burnley, Hertfordshire where they beat Labour by just 27 votes and Leicestershire. Not exactly a spectacular result for the party 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 into UKIP.

I'd also like to point out that this gives them the same number of seats on Lancashire County council as The Idle Toad. So let's not get over excited.

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.

Hartlepool has the weirdest Mayoral election results. Not only do they elect a monkey to his third term as Mayor, even though he reneged on his promise to give free bananas to all the school kids, but also they have vast numbers of independents who seem to do very, very well. Unlike the Lib Dems. Odd.

Not as odd as the fact that the new Mayor of Doncaster stood for the English Democrats. They must feel over the moon, but as he appears to be utterly racist I'll not raise a glass to him thanks. Again the second candidate (only 400 behind the winner) was an independent. (Thanks Sue for the spot).

And a few left candidates

There weren't many County Council candidates from the hard left as far as I can make out, but there were a few.

In the ward where I live at the moment, Romsey,Cambridge, Tom Woodcock (who previously stood for Respect and then Left Alternative) stood as an independent candidate saying there was no viable left party at the moment. He received a very respectable third place on 17.6% of the vote.

In Bristol Jerry Hicks, who has always seemed a very good sort, came third on just under 15% for Respect.

In Barrow (Cumbria) the Socialist People's Party stood a range of candidates and, ahem, won a seat! Well done Jim Hamezeian for winning in the Ormsgill ward with almost half the total votes (word doc). ps Duncan adds a little info saying that the BNP tried to have Jim barred from holding office because he was born in Iran. Extra marks then to the good people of Ormsgill.

In Cornwall Mebyon Kernow won three county councilors, one with over 70% of the vote. I suspect the now infamous LibDem leaflet denouncing one of their number as a "greasy haired twat" probably helped rather than hindered their success.

Links:

Green Party election results page.
BBC local election results page.
Lancaster Unity should be an excellent resource for watching the BNP results.
There's also the Hope not Hate candidates map tracking 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.