Animal Welfare Party is celebrating some of its best results to date in the London Mayoral and Assembly Elections and in Lothian Region in the Scottish Parliament Elections. 

In the London Mayoral Election, AWP’s Vanessa Hudson received 16,826 first preference votes and 63,619 second preference votes.

In the London-wide Assembly election, AWP stood a party list of six candidates and received 44,667 votes from across the capital (1.7% of the vote) – ranking seventh overall and gaining almost 19,000 more votes than the party received in this election in 2016 (an increase of 0.7%).

Across the two elections, AWP received over 125,000 votes from Londoners. 

In Scotland, AWP stood for the first time in the Lothian Region with a party list of two candidates, Vivienne Moir and Gavin Ridley. Here AWP received 2392 votes (0.6%) and ranked 8th out of 19 parties standing.

AWP Leader, Vanessa Hudson commented, “Although we didn’t win seats this time, we are delighted with the progress these results show for our party. We contested these elections on a platform of ending speciesism and, although we are entirely run by volunteers and don’t have huge campaign budgets, we believe our results show a clear appetite for our policies and for our assertion that animals and the environment matter – that our exploitation of them must end – for the sake of our own health, our planet, it’s biodiversity and, ultimately, perhaps of our own existence.

As Victor Hugo said ‘Nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time has come’. Looking at the results that have come in for our party in Scotland and in London, we know our time has come.”