Liz Brighouse
Leader of Oxfordshire County Council’s Labour Group

I would start off by saying that Oxford East and the city was completely different to the rest of Oxfordshire.

We had a massive swing to the Labour Party in those areas and this tells us something.

In these areas the telling thing was the amount of work candidates did getting out on the doorstep and talking to people.

That makes a massive difference.

Having said that, it was absolutely devastating that we lost so many seats and we’ve got a Conservative Government for the next five years.

Going forward, rebuilding needs to be done from the grass roots and communities upwards.

It needs to be done on the streets and the roads of every town in the country.

When Andrew Smith lost his seat in 1992, he stood up and worked hard and encouraged the rest of us to get out on the streets. We need to be doing it all year round.

We do need to speak up for the poor and we do need to speak up for those people who are suffering, and we have to remember the economic crisis was caused by the banks, not by the Labour Party.

But we want to make everybody’s lives better.

We don’t want to make some people’s lives better on the backs of others.

Above all, we need to carry on with what we are doing on local councils and in our communities and show people that we are the alternative.

Some rural areas of Oxfordshire may well be untouchable for Labour because some of the issues around poverty they just don’t see.

They may talk about it but they don’t feel it in their everyday lives. It’s a great shame if people don’t understand these things.

There’s been an awful lot of selfishness in this election and I would include parts of Oxfordshire in that.

It was the kind of election where there had to be something in it for people.

Now it’s going to be very difficult for us to make an impact with a Conservative government that will be pushing ahead with more privatisation of services and more austerity cuts.

But we need to be exposing what the issues are and make sure we protect the most vulnerable people in society.

The two main issues in Oxfordshire as far as I’m concerned are adult services and children’s services.

Children’s centres in Oxfordshire already have to make huge cuts, so that is going to be a major issue.

Care for the elderly is also a major problem, with the fragmentation of services and the difficulty in finding enough carers.

In terms of development it makes no sense not to build homes in Grenoble Road.

I would favour that site ahead of anywhere else in the city, certainly ahead of the green lungs of the city such as the Oxford Golf Course.

For South Oxfordshire and the Vale of White Horse district councils to talk about building in the green lungs of the city is ridiculous. The roads are already in place in Grenoble Road and it already has the infrastructure.

We need to keep the health service within the public domain.

We’ve got a massive hospital in Oxford, it’s one of the best places in the world to go and we have some of the best minds, but we also need a district hospital which can deal with the more simple operations which help to make people’s lives better.

In education there’s absolutely no evidence to suggest that free schools or academies are making any difference in terms of outcomes. Schools need to be accountable to local communities.

There are schools in Oxfordshire which pick and choose students and the county doesn’t have any say in it. We don’t want to go back to having this kind of selective system.

These are the issues we will be fighting to change over the coming months and years. We just have to keep giving a voice to those who don’t have a voice.