Cons: up 1 council and 10 councillors
Libs: down 3 councils and /233/ councillors

(and the lib total was lower so as a proportion that's huge)

I mean seriously, I know it's just spin but they really need a new line. At best they look stupid, at worst they look oblivious.

Same here - a swing of 10% or so from labour to snp. Round here, there are about twenty people who vote tory and huge swathes of labour-for-life voters, so I imagine a fair bit of that swing came from disenchanted lib dems.

It's weird that the media are reporting this as, by some magical mechanism they don't quite explain, people deserting the lib dims because of the tories' spending cuts :?

 

Does that make any sense to them when they're writing it?

 

Seems to me this clearly many people feeling like I do - that the lib dems betrayed those who voted for them, turning a vote for them into a vote for the tories. And it seems (unless I'm delusional about that) weird that that is not being reported.

I voted against our local Libdem because he replied to my email with, "Thanks, but I disagree, so I'll vote how I want on [issue]". Second time that's happened. He still got in though.

Just up the road got these results :(

Depressing :(

38% Turn out.

Found it quite interesting that Keighley Central get a 51% turn out, generally quite poor run down houses in centre of town but the outer mini suberbs, some of which are rather well to do get 42% and 35% turn outs.

S'interesting. Maybe labour's old-labour base is starting to wake up after 20 years of hibernation or whatever. Hope so.

I didn't go to vote at all, I didn't realise there was a council election here, I thought it was just the AV thing :$

(not that it'd've made any difference, been a tory councillor for about 9000 years)

I think they are trying to get all the other stuff done before they start on the AV vote counting

(Polls say "no" won)

God, that is awful. Thankfully there was no BNP on my ballot paper. The big 3 and UKIP.

Need 65 seats for a majority.

 

And I seriously doubt Scotland would actually vote in favour of independence, which is a shame :(

I thought it was a fairly poor choice

do you want to switch to an even shitter system than the current shit system?

It's not shitter though.

Urgh.

We've stayed Conservative, like we always do :(

I voted against our Lib Dem candidate too, but for no other reason than I hate their their spinelessness and lack of commitment to their manifesto in their so called "Government" with the Tories.

Fuck 'em.

yes it is

I would like to move away from FPTP as I think it's stupid someone can win with over 70% of those who bothered to vote voting against them

but this AV thing just means a wierd compromise just about every time

I think it should be changed, but not to AV

Like Xen said, I suspect that any independence would be at the cost of the Tories ensuring that Scotland ends up even more economically badgered than now. Especially the way the banks are.

Wonder why salmond hasn't been going on about how we could be just like Iceland and Ireland this time round :'D

I suggest you start lobbying then.

I voted yes, though I don't think AV is that much of an improvement. I don't really see why coalition governments, compromises and actually talking stuff over is such a bad thing. It's a lot closer to what I would like from government that simple "One Party Rules".

I kind of think it /should/ be difficult to govern and stuff /should/ take a while to happen. The problem (as I see it) is that government is so directly ingratiated with so many aspects of running the country that this means stuff doesn't get done. If government were to extricate itself slightly from the actual day to day running then things could tick over whilst parliament was actually sorting out the higher level, important stuff.

Then again, that kind of thing is never really going to happen I suppose.

It's funny really, I think that if I were American I would kind of have to be Republican (in the purest sense of the term) as I would be for more local government. In fact, I really think Scotland etc. /should/ be fully devolved, though not necessarily independent.

I fucken hate politics sometimes (fail)

Apparently we were Labour in '96 ;-)

 

But very annoying trying to vote yesterday. Someone had pinned up a 'No to AV' leaflet by the instructions on how to vote IN THE POLLING STATION. I didn't think that was allowed?

 

Add to that, that my only choices for councillors on one of the sheets was Conservative, Labour, or BNP - what sort of choice is that??!

No it's not allowed. You should have complained.

The lack of choice was the crappiest thing about it all. They should have had an abstain option on the voting papers if they were only going to give us 3 to choose from.