The amount of support I got from you on the day coupled with the many calls. emails and people just coming up to me in the street to congratulate me has been a very humbling experience for me. I’m almost lost for words to describe how I feel.

The result was –

Candidate	Party	Votes received
Bashir Hajran	Labour Party	466
Martston Glyn	The Conservative Party Candidate	504
Shires Ian	Liberal Democrat Focus Team	1191**H
Wycherley David	UK Independence Party (UKIP)	438

** Elected
H or G: Hold or Gain

When they had finished counting all the votes early on Friday morning it became clear that the Tories had lost their tenuous grasp on power as the Parties came out as follows:

• Labour:     28
• Tories:       25
• Ukip:            3
• LibDem:      2
• Ind:              2

This leaves the Council not for the first time on a knife edge which could leave contentious issues being decided on the Mayor’s casting vote. It is important that we play our part in providing some stability over the next two years so we will be talking with the other like minded Parties in order to find some common ground on which to build an administration.

We will not be selling you down the river. There has to be some checks and balances put in place if we are to avoid what happened last year when Ukip handed power over to a minority Tory administration who promptly went on to abuse that power by using the Cabinet system to act as if they had an overall majority which they clearly didn’t.

We will only proceed if it was right for you. We have put together a set of proposals based around things which would be to your benefit. We will keep you informed of any progress we make.

As your local Councillor I am here to work for you. If  you  know  of  any  issues  that  you  think  we  as  Liberal Democrats should be taking a look at, please get in touch and we will see what needs to be done to resolve them.

Finally once again I would like to say thank you for all your good wishes and support.