Luton local election results

I’m finally getting round to writing up the local election results in Luton.

This is my result in the Barnfield ward:

Martin Pantling, Liberal Democrat: 904
Rachel Hopkins, Labour: 822
Andrew Strange, Liberal Democrats: 808
Graham Costello, Conservative: 691
Bryan Davey, Labour: 679
Saeed Akhtar, Conservative: 657
Simon Hall, Green: 171

As you can see my colleague, Martin Pantling, topped the poll with myself narrowly losing out to Labour candidate Rachel Hopkins. I lost by only 14 votes!

Given the bad night that the Liberal Democrats had across the country it wasn’t a great surprise that I lost. What was a little surprising was that it was to Labour in a ward that until eight years ago was Conservative held. Yet, I wasn’t greatly surprised that the Labour candidate I lost to was Rachel. She is the daughter of Luton North MP Kelvin Hopkins and it is likely that the name recognition helped.

You can find the results for the other Luton wards here.

The new council make up is:

Labour 36
Liberal Democrat 8
Conservative 4

While there is no disguising the fact that we had a bad night,what is encouraging is that we continue to have Councillors in wards outside of our “eastern heartlands” and had a relatively strong showing in a number of others. It was bad but it was not the “wipe out” that some in Labour were predicting.