AN ELECTION row continued today as Pendle MP Gordon Prentice urged Paddy Ashdown to order an Liberal Democrat Euro election leaflet to be corrected.

Mr Prentice wants a correction slip inserted into the official European Parliamentary election leaflet being delivered to millions of households in the North West.

He said the leaflet claimed the Lib Dems were running major councils like Liverpool, Stockport and Pendle. But Pendle Lib Dem lost overall control in the May election.

He said: "Millions of voters across the North West are being told the LibDems are running Pendle Council when a month ago the voters gave them a bloody nose. It's as if the verdict of the people a month ago hardly matters."

In his letter to the Lib Dem leader Mr Ashdown, Mr Prentice says the Lib Dems most certainly do not run Pendle Council having lost seven seats outright and holding on by their fingertips in three other wards.

Mr Prentice says: "Given this situation I think it is absolutely monstrous that your Party should be so cavalier with the facts that it distributes a week before polling day an election leaflet which is false and misleading and must have been known by you to be so."

Lib Dem regional media co-ordinator John Ault said the leaflet, printed before the elections, did not say they still ran Pendle, but that they ran councils like Liverpool, Stockport and Pendle.

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