Election Results: local and national (better late than never)

12.09.00am BST (GMT +0100) Sat 4th Jul 2009

The elections on 4 June for Europe and County Councils showed good results for the Liberal Democrats, despite the unjust tarring of our party with the general Westminster expenses scandal.

In Hammersmith & Fulham, we have had a satisfying election, with our votes in the Borough up over 30% from last year's GLA election, and the Greens pushed into third place.

This was in large part to the outstanding efforts of our local European List Candidate, Dinti Batstone, and our campaign team, with extra support from many members who helped us campaign in the borough.

Countywide the results were also generally though not universally good

On the plus side, we have:

• Pushed Labour into third place in the local elections (and achieved a record high vote share of 28%)

• Won almost three times as many council seats as Labour (484 Lib Dem councillors to Labour's 178)

• Added Bristol to the list of major cities run by Liberal Democrats

• Won five of the six county seats in Burnley from Labour (the BNP won the sixth)

• Gained an extra MEP and more or less maintained our vote share.

The news from the South West is much less good, with three councils slipping out of our control. There are lessons to learn to be learned from these losses, but they also show the

power of significant Tory funding.

However, in many of our key Parliamentary battlegrounds across southern England we have done well, holding our own and making small gains against the Conservatives. More generally, we have made net gains from the Conservatives in, among other places, Cumbria, East Sussex, Essex, Hertfordshire, Surrey, Dorset, the Isle of Wight, Warwickshire and West Sussex.

These successes show that where we work hard and campaign on good Liberal Democrat values and action we can beat the Conservatives even when they are supposedly gaining strength.