Now the dust has settled from last Thursday’s elections, the overall picture from a Green Party perspective is clear. The results proved that when a Green group gets established on a council, people like what they do, like what sort of councillors they are.
In Brighton, we leapt from six to 12 councillors, in Lancaster from five to 12, and in Norwich we reached 10 councillors. (They have annual elections there, so leaps don’t happen quite the same way, but we missed out by ONE vote on getting another seat – and that was an enormous swing to us. That would have made us the second-largest group on council, and was in Thorpe Hamlet ward, where I made my contribution with an eight-and-a-half hour canvassing day – if I’d only done nine hours…)
Norwich is particularly interesting because in the parliamentary constituency of Norwich South we achieved the highest overall vote of any party. That’s a seat currently held by Charles Clarke – and the Norwich Evening News is already acknowledging that fact by including a Green comment in a piece on Clarke’s political future.
I haven’t seen the breakdown figures on Brighton, but we must also be doing very well on overall votes there.
As for the back story to Lancaster, I don’t know a great deal, but it seems it was seriously a shock result that saw the Greens unseat the Labour leader on council.
There’s a complete listing of results here.
It is clear that what the Green Party has to do now is get a lot more footholds, that can make the same sort of leaps as these cities have made… sounds simple when you say it quickly!
(Jim also has a summary, from a slightly different perspective.)
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