The Lib Dems finished 5% ahead of Labour on vote share so give them credit for that!

And the net loss of seats for the Lib Dems is -4 (as reported by the BBC) not -48.

BBC saying Lib Dems only down 4 seats - what is this based on? Would also argue that anyone expecting big Lib Dem gains hadn't really been looking at the seats up for grabs

I have to disagree here - 28% for the Lib Dems - much worse than expected ?!!! What on earth were we expecting them to get

Stephen,

Without doubt, Labour's result was disastrous. But as we say above, this is not an analysis of the positions of the parties - purely how the results fared against expectations. And the only real surprise was that the Lib Dems lost rather than gained.

We prioritise the seat numbers over the vote share because the vote shares are much smaller ranges - they were individual choices for the panel, not the range between a lowball and highball prediction. In the case of both the Lib Dems and the Tories the predicted range was correct, but it is less remarkable.

Freddie Sayers
Editor

The Tories won 30 out of 34 councils, are the largest group on 2 of the three No Overall Control and 2nd largest on the third NOC and the one council won by the Lib Dems. They won 65% of all the seats available. Four of the councils now have no Labour councillors, and on only four ot the 34 councils are Labour the second largest group after the Tories.

Which part of WIPEOUT does Gordon not understand.  

I think the -48 (From Sky) is based on losses from representation in previous versions of Councils operating under new boundaries/structures - Wiltshire, Cornwall, Shropshire. The BBC decided to make no change calculation for these authorities.

Come on everyone- read the comment below the table and you'd see:

"Note: this is not an analysis of the absolute positions of the parties or their success or failure; it purely shows how they fared against expectations. The Labour losses and Conservative gains were of the anticipated order of magnitude. The only true surprise was that the Liberal Democrats, instead of gaining seats, lost seats."

I was stuck in a traffic jam this morning on the M25 listening to Ken Livingstone on the radio attempting to spin the line that there was a 2 per cent swing to the Labour party at the local elections on Thursday and that there was no appetite for a Cameron-led Tory government.  In the light of your poll - is poor old Ken living in a little Marxist dream-world of his own?

Why are you so hung up on some back of the envelope 'projected share'? Its a meaningless figure - very few of the areas that had elections this year did so last year and vice versa.  I dont think it is spin to suggest that the LDs going into these elections controling three county councils and coming out with none (Conservatives gained two outright and got largest party in the third) is a disappointing result for the LDs.

There is some confusion about the number of seats changing hands because there were reorganisations in a number of areas which alterd the number of seats being contested and direct comparisons can't be made. In the areas where direct comparisons can be made the Conservatives gained 268, Lab lost 306 and the LDs lost 20 net.

The posts of the likes of Mike and Ed Randall are absolutely risible - celebrating some imaginary vote share of 28% while they lost control of every council they started with

As you can see from the link given by PoliticsHome, its from Murdoch's finest, which wrongly places the two minority administrations we had (Devon and Cornwall) as being ours beforehand, and also shows losses from unitary councils that didn't exist before which is untrue as they're not equivalent.

It's not great news for the Lib Dems - but in those areas at least we've taken the flak both for people like Richard Younger-Ross and for not being able to stop the unitary authorities being imposed.