If, like me, you’re a bit sad you’ll no doubt have enjoyed looking over the figures from the recent local elections in England and Wales!
I suspect that if it’s true to say that the Lib Dems did well and that the Tories did very well then it must also be true to say that Labour have done spectacularly badly on a level not seen for somewhere in the region of 40 years, or so I hear.
In the end the Tories made significant gains both in terms of councillors and councils gaining control of 12 of the latter and 256 of the former, meanwhile Labour took an utter trouncing succeeding in placing some 331 of their councillors on the dole queue and losing control of 9 councils. The cherry on the top of the cake as far as the Tories seem to be concerned is gaining control of Bury and North Tyneside, apparently a former Labour stronghold.
Of course as a far a Labour are concerned things could have been worse. Much worse. They could have been fighting elections in Scotland too. At least one Labour MP in Scotland has been quoted as saying:
If we’d have had elections up here [in Scotland], it would have been worse, we would have been tanked. we are not satisfying our heartlands, we have taken them for granted.
From the horses mouth then, so to speak.
It seems though that Labour’s party in Westminster has been paying close attention in how to deal with defeat from their Holyrood counterparts by dropping into a state of denial. Geoff Hoon stating:
There is no crisis. This isn’t something that’s going to effect the fundamental stability of the government.
Maybe not, but how many Labour MP’s are going to sit by and watch their jobs be sold down the river by the Labour leadership? I’m guessing that things are about to become very difficult for Gordon Brown and if he doesn’t start sorting himself out he’ll either be going into the next General Election as a lame Prime Minister with no hope of winning or he won’t be going into the General Election as Prime Minister at all.
Just watch now for a raft of populist and ill-conceived policies to be brought forward and hastily implemented in order to sooth an electorate looking for blood. The Labour leadership’s rambling about economic difficulties being responsible for the poor result is pathetic.
It won’t be the economic downturn that does for Labour it will be their poor management of it … witness Northern Rock. This Labour government is unravelling at a frightening pace from it’s inability to formulate a budget which won’t hammer the poorest to their diplomatic failures to deal with the Holyrood Government to their management of the devolution settlement and the issues which that has brought to the fore.
New Labour is in danger of disintegrating and in this local election effectively finished third behind Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats. Remember that name, Nick Clegg, he could well be the next leader of the opposition …
