‘People have had enough of lies’

THERE is a Venn diagram of people who are awake at 3am: those who can’t sleep due to age or ill health, those with small children who do not sleep, and those people with a fanatical interest in elections.

At 3am on Friday, May 5, I found myself in two of those groups as I avidly scrolled Twitter whilst feeding the baby, hooked on the local election results that were rolling in.

For the Liberal Democrats, it was a historic victory with our best result in decades.

Liberal Democrats gained majority control of 12 councils and held control of all 17 councils we were defending.

We gained 407 councillors net, with net gains in more than 100 councils. In total, we elected 1,628 councillors in these elections.

By the following morning, my Lib Dem WhatsApp groups were getting very excited and people were stopping me in the street to remark that ‘you’re having a good time, aren’t you’.

In the aftermath, The BBC’s projected national vote share put the Liberal Democrats on 20%.

This is the highest it has been since 2010 and just 6% behind the Conservatives’ current polling.

We did not have local elections in

Wiltshire.

Yet in recent by-elections across the county we have been winning more than 60% of the vote against Conservatives.

I am sure there are many Conservative councillors across Wiltshire who were grateful to not have had to fight for their seat on May 4 and I wonder at the confidence of our Conservative Wiltshire MPs facing a general election.

For no doubt, the message nationally and locally is that people are fed up with being let down and taken for granted by this Conservative Government - it is time for a change.

Knocking on doors recently, the anti-conservative vote is strong.

People are tired of the cost of living crisis, the NHS crisis, the policing crisis.

People are fed up with the strikes, the sewage, and the scandals.

They have had enough of the lies, the cover-ups and appalling mismanagement of the economy.

Next year’s general election is going to bring about change and I, for one, am looking forward to it.