Bridgwater Town Council leader on local election results

Here, we just had the Police & Crime Commissioner one, but across the country they were electing Mayors, electing councils, having by-elections and people were generally exercising their democratic right to have their say.

People across the board all agreed the Conservatives got a drubbing. It’s not hard to see why when even Boris Johnson turned up to his polling station without his ID.

Why is this important? Well, it was only two years ago that Johnson's own Government made taking your ID to vote compulsory.

The fact that he didn’t bother to do it himself did rather smack of ‘do as we say not as we do’. 

Although I expect people will have forgotten those Covid parties by now….

The Tories really didn’t do well, apart from the one Mayor up in Teeside who made sure he didn’t wear his Tory rosette and said he was looking forward to working with Labour when they won the general election.

Keir Starmer also had to face a bit of a kick back from the consequences of not calling early for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Who would have realised how much that mattered? Massively.

The Moslem vote was reluctant to turn out to back him – although they did in areas where Labour candidates had called for a ceasefire early.

Khan in London and Burnham in Manchester both did.

And he also faced a wake up call in Bristol where years of slowly slowly community campaigning by the Greens saw the entire inner city change political colour.

But maybe it was the Bristol vote that swung the PCC election in Avon and Somerset.

A Labour win for the first time. Clare Moody ousted the sitting Tory PCC. There was a big turnout in Bristol and a rather poor turnout in Somerset.

As I walked from polling station to polling station clerks told me ‘very poor turnout’, 'worse I've seen' and ‘is there an election on?’ 

The point is though, if you don’t vote it means someone else is voting for you. And so if you didn't, I’d suggest you don’t try complaining about the result.