Thank you for the help and support you have given North Derbyshire Liberal Democrats over the last few weeks.
Many of you, me included, didn’t get into politics because we wanted an easy ride, we got involved because we wanted to make a difference and stand tall on our social and liberal values.
Elections are never easy as one of the smaller parties in a first past the post electoral system, but as predicted, what we saw here was the collapse of the Labour Party that gifted the Tories this majority, and a significant increase to the Lib Dems votes across the UK to 3,696,423 (an increase of over 1.2 million).
If this was under a proportional electoral system, this result would have delivered 74 MP’s for the Liberal Democrats.
More locally this meant we double our vote share in North East Derbyshire to 6.1% and had a slight increase in Bolsover to 3.8%. This is something for you and our ever growing team of activists to be proud of.
What became absolutely clear from analysing the data was that where we work the areas with regular leaflets and casework, we are seeing support grow, not only in local elections, but they are transferring into national votes too.
Time and time again you all amaze me with your generosity to help us achieve our goals across North Derbyshire and the whole team is forever grateful.
We must now take these positives and focus on the future of developing yet more local Council seats across our area.
Please keep promoting our party and lets grow our membership to give us those activists to push us forward.
Now is the time for us to have a little rest over the Christmas period. We need to regain the energy to push on in the new year as we prepare for the County Council elections in May 2021.
North Derbyshire Lib Dems will be selecting candidates for this in due course, get in touch to express interest in standing for your area.
Thanks again and best wishes,
Cllr Ross Shipman
P.S. Share this link on your social media to help us recruit more like-minded amazing activists to our cause: www.libdems.org.uk/join-local