AS THE final votes were counted, Annette Medhurst warned that austerity will worsen and ‘devastate our communities’.
Reflecting on the evening Annette Medhurst, Labour candidate said: “Election night is always an exciting time. And obviously, the result hasn’t necessarily gone how I would have hoped from the boxes that are coming out.
“And you know, I’m sad for the Labour Party because we’re not going to have a great night.
“People work so hard, you know, really, really hard all the activists and campaigners.
“But I’m also really sad for the country, to be honest, because, unfortunately, it looks like we’re going to have more years of conservative rule, which I think is devastating for our communities.
“In the run up to the election, I said to a friend of mine, if we end up with another conservative majority government, I think my children will be sitting in classrooms with buckets next to them because schools won’t be able to afford to fix the roof.
“I think the numbers of children growing up living in poverty is just going to go up.
“And so I just think that there are lots of pockets of our community who are struggling as a result of years of austerity, and it’s just going to get worse to them because of conservatives.
“I don’t believe they will do anything to address a lot of these problems.
On policies, she said: “We’re so distracted with Brexit, and that has hit us really badly tonight.
“I really hope that there could be some level of resolution on that moving forward with all the other things that are going on in the country, you know, the NHS, obviously, education, all these kinds of things that really, really need to be addressed now.
“So I’m sad, that might not happen.”
Reflecting on the performance of the Labour Party across the UK, she said: “Labour really needs to take time to reflect on what’s gone wrong.
“And there will be lessons to be learned.
“There’ll be a lot of conversations and discussions to be had about why we haven’t been able to hold on to our votes in some of these lead communities.
“Where have we have lost a lot of our vote, and why is that? What what are the reasons behind it?
“And how can we move forward to address some of those issues.
“So there will be a lot of soul searching I’m sure and a lot of thoughts about how we can move forward. But they will be conversations for tomorrow morning.
Thinking about her role in the Labour Party, she said: “Obviously, we’ve got local elections coming up in May.
“And who knows what the future holds from that point of view?
“At the moment, I’m just really grateful for all of the work that the team has done for the campaign.
“You know, I very much wanted to have a campaign as quite positive message. I didn’t really want it to be sort of negative things about other people. I wanted to be about positive things that we would do.
“I’m really grateful for all the people that have actually voted for me.
“To be honest, at the moment, I’ve got to think about Christmas.
“I’ve got two young children. I really need to do some Christmas shopping and get the tree up.”
