Voters in Southport returned no Labour and no Conservative councillors at Thursday’s all-out Sefton Council elections, an outcome without modern precedent, while a surge in votes for Reform UK did not translate to seats.
A change of ward boundaries meant that all 66 seats on Sefton Council were contested jointly for the first time in over 20 years.
The Liberal Democrats took 17 of the Southport’s 21 council seats with Reform UK taking the other four.
Five Southport wards – Ainsdale, Cambridge, Dukes, Kew and Meols- delivered Liberal Democrat clean sweeps while Birkdale returned two Liberal Democrats and Reform UK’s Mike Ryder. Norwood went to Reform alone, with John Costello, Charles Robert Denton and Thomas Swaney each polling more than 1,250 votes.
Both of the Conservatives’ sitting Sefton councillors lost their seats in Southport. Tony Brough was beaten in Ainsdale on 771 votes. Mike Prendergast lost his Dukes seat on 1,136 while Sir Ron Watson did not defend. Across the borough as a whole, the Conservatives polled 8.2% of all votes cast and won nothing.
Three sitting Labour councillors also lost their Southport seats: Sonya Kelly in Birkdale, Janet Harrison Kelly in Ainsdale and Nina Killen who had transferred to defend Cambridge.
Cabinet Member Councillor Mhairi Doyle, who had transferred from Norwood to the newly-created ward of Bootle West, dramatically lost her seat by just 16 votes to Reform’s Jay Leslie Cooper. Farage today said that Cooper, who has allegedly labelled the holocaust a ‘hoax’ is ‘not welcome’ in the party.
Across the rest of the borough, Labour held an overall majority but lost ground. The party returned 36 of the council’s 66 seats, three above the threshold for outright control and down from 39 sitting councillors going into the vote. It is the thinnest Labour majority on Sefton in years.
Reform UK won five seats in total: three in Norwood, one in Birkdale and one in Bootle West. The party polled 26.9% of all votes cast across the borough, second only to Labour, but converted that vote into 7.6% of the seats.