The results are in, and the Greens and Tories have the same number of councillors in Bath and NE Somerset. That’s better news for one of us!

@dominictristram

Local #Election Results in #Bath and NE #Somerset

♬ original sound - Dom Tristram

Generated transcript:

So it’s the day after the local elections. I’m feeling pretty tired because I was at the count last night and, um, haven’t slept. But yeah, we’ve got three councillors in Bath and Northeast Sunset, which is brilliant. Thank you, everyone who voted. Three councillors is tripling what we had before. It gives us the same number of councillors as the conservatives.

And just to put that in some sort of perspective, the conservatives ran the council until 2019. Things can change very quickly. The conservative nationally have done appallingly, of course, but at a local level the Conservatives chose to make their entire campaign based around opposing efforts to reduce traffic.

Anti-anything, to promote active travel and safer streets. So they put all their eggs in one basket and it didn’t pay off because the trouble with the bubble that Tories seem to live in is that they hear a lot about how it’s really terrible that people are trying to make the city livable without using a car. And actually, as was proven in the last local elections when all of the parties, including the Tories, had dealing with traffic in their manifestos and this election where all the parties except the Tories had it in their manifestos again… and lo and behold, the Tories have lost seven seats.

So they’re down to the same as the Greens, though obviously the Greens are on their way up, Tories on the way down. So that’s kind of interesting. The Lib Dems obviously still have a huge majority and even more huge majority now. Labour are now the official opposition in the council, so interesting times. So yeah, always worth voting in local elections, . The Tories telling people all the way through that it’s them all the lib dems and actually hardly anyone voted Tory really compared to what they expected.

So a good thing.