A great showing for Remain parties at the local elections will hopefully give May and Corbyn a wake up call

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The Conservatives had a net loss of 1,269 seats in the local elections; Labour a net loss of 63. Both Tory and Labour leaders maintain a Leave stance, despite there being no consensus on what a Leave deal might look like, and the votes did not go their way.

The Lib Dems, the Greens and independent candidates, on the other hand, had net gains of 676, 185 and 242 seats, respectively – a combined net gain of 1,103 seats.

The responses of the leaders of the two main parties simply highlighted their intransigence. Theresa May claimed the message from the electorate was “...to get on and deliver Brexit”. Jeremy Corbyn asserted the message was “a deal has to be done on Brexit”. Did neither stop to think that, perhaps, there has been a swing towards Remain? Are May and Corbyn both short of a political analyst or three?

Beryl Wall
London W4

Poor deluded Ms May claims that the sorry showing of her party and Labour in the local elections means that people “just want to get on with Brexit”.

On the contrary, it means that most people want to stop Brexit, or at least to be allowed another vote.

Susan Alexander
Frampton Cotterell

In the local elections voters overwhelmingly preferred pro-EU parties. These results are being represented as an electoral command to commit Brexit as soon as possible. By what sophistry is this interpretation achieved?

Michael Rosenthal
Banbury

A piece of his own medicine

So Gavin Williamson feels aggrieved that he has lost his job as a result of a flawed investigation and the officials involved refuse to engage with him to justify their decision. As a member of a government that has done this routinely to asylum seekers, families of the Windrush generation, universal credit claimants and personal independence claimants, I wonder if he has heard of karma?

Perhaps he could take his case to an employment tribunal – except he may not have been employed long enough to qualify.

David Maddison
Address supplied

Plastics aren’t the problem – it’s how we recycle them

“Plastics” have come in for a lot of bad press lately. The problem is waste not plastics. Plastics are used in computers, garden furniture, TVs, all modes of transport and many other day to day items.

The problem is that we do not deal with plastic waste properly. We only recycle around 45 per cent of plastics in the UK and thousands of tonnes of plastic microfibres end up in our rivers and seas every year. If 100 per cent of plastic waste was dealt with in a sustainable manner, there would be no problem. Again the resolution of the problem and the will to achieve it seem to be poles apart!

John Laker
Marlow

The message from the local elections is unclear

So far I have not seen how many voters actually went to the polls on Thursday, but I am sure very many stayed away.

The results will only become completely comprehensible when we know whether many more people actually voted, for example, Lib Dem, or whether the absentees enabled a similar number of votes as in the past to give many more seats to the Lib Dems.

Many thousands of ballot papers were spoiled by frustrated Brexit supporters – what proportion of the overall number of votes did they represent? These people did not have a clearly pro-Leave party to vote for – this should also be taken into account in predicting the result of a general election.

The country is split, that’s for sure, and both Remainers and Leavers are saying the elections sent a clear message to the political parties. It seems they sent two equally clear messages – get out; stay in.

Penny Little
Great Haseley