Labour's Grim Night

At the time of writing this, results are still coming in but there can be no mistaking the overall direction that these council elections went in. It was a serious drubbing for Labour. For a quick glance at the results click here and here.

It will be interesting to see how the Labour Party spin meisters will dress up last night's results as some kind of major victory for them. Labour has almost been cleared out of London and has lost well over 200 council seats nationwide. The surprise winners were the Conservatives who took most of the seats Labour lost (maybe it wasn't so surprising after all; Labour has stolen so many Tory policies, perhaps people thought they might be better off with the originals). The Liberal Democrats made hardly any progress at all with a small net loss. The BNP did do well but their share of the vote is too small to have much impact in the country. Margaret Hodge MP is being blamed for the BNP gains in true 'shoot-the-messenger' style. The predicted percentage of the vote is: Conservatives 40%, Liberal Democrats 27%, Labour 26%, Others 7%. (including those councils that went to 'no overall control').

Tony Blair is said to be having a cabinet reshuffle today in the hope that this will deflect attention from Labour's disastrous results and give the impression that Blair is still in control. It won't! This reshuffle looks like being the cosmetic farce that has been predicted with DPM John Prescott singled out as the main fall-guy and Charles Clarke moved to another department instead of being sacked. Frank Dobson MP said the reshuffle would be like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic (see video); just about every politician being interviewed today is using this old but very apt cliche. Blair's smoke and mirror tricks just won't work any more. We now impatiently wait for a change of leadership.

Tags: Blair, Nu Labour, UK Politics, Democracy