Election Results 2010

Peter Andras' statement: "I thank everybody who voted for Liberal Democrats in the constituency of Washington and Sunderland West. This was a vote for real positive change. While we did not win locally, and nationally our results are a bit dissapointing, I still hope that we are on the way to get closer to making the changes required by the country. I think that we can build on the result that we achieved in the general election and aim to improve our share of vote next time. I hope that by then we will have some form of proportional representation in place. This will make more likely that those who vote for Liberal Democrats in Washington and Sunderland West will be represented by their chosen MP in the Parliament."

The Liberal Democrats general election result in Washington and Sunderland West is 6,382 votes or 17.1% of the votes. This is within the range of our expectations based on earlier results (16-20%), and represents an additional 1% compared to the notional results calculated for the 2005 general elections. Of course, we had somewhat higher hopes, but still this is a good result.

The local election results are also good. Although we did not manage to win any of the seats in the local council we increased significantly our share of votes with the exception of Washington Central, but even here we kept our share of votes close to our previous result. In all wards we increased the number of our votes by over 300 votes, the biggest increase being in Washington South with an additional 943 votes (making the total count here 1,333 votes for Liberal Democrats). We managed to increase our share of votes to around or over 20% in all Washington wards and St Anne's ward as well. This is a promising result and we can build on it by aiming to get some council seats in next year's local elections. For this we will need to increase our vote share to over 35% of the votes. This will not be easy and will require active campaigning, but is not impossible, especially in wards with over 25% share of votes for Liberal Democrats (notably we managed to increase our share of votes by around 10% in some of the wards compared to our 2008 results).