Reform won five seats at Colchester City Council and eight at Southend-on-Sea City Council, but once again, both councils remain under no overall control. <\/p>\n
Labour lost three seats to Reform in the coastal city<\/p>\n
Southend council leader Daniel Cowan said there had been “no talk of local services” during the campaign.<\/p>\n
“That really concerns me,” Cowan said.<\/p>\n
“People have been elected on a national message, but nobody knows what their local mandate is. These elections are about local services, not national politics.”<\/p>\n
Reform did not replicate its gains in Harlow, where the Tories won all 11 seats on the district council that were up for election – increasing their majority.<\/p>\n
It has been a mixed picture for the Lib Dems in the county.<\/p>\n
At Brentwood Borough Council, they won enough seats to remain the largest party, but it remains under no overall control.<\/p>\n
Colchester’s leader, Lib Dem David King, said it reflected “national discontent with established parties”.<\/p>\n
The Greens managed to retain their seats on Essex County Council, and made two gains at Southend – but otherwise have not had huge breakthroughs so far in Essex.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Reform won five seats at Colchester City Council and eight at Southend-on-Sea City Council, but once again, both…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":572864,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-572863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=572863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572863\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/572864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=572863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=572863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=572863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}