County Council and European Parliament elections

[T_i_B]

Now I know we get a bit of speculation about general elections on here but this year we are going to have elections for the European parliament and County councils so I thought it best to start a thread about that instead. I think the date for both of these is the 4th of June.

Please feel free to comments on County Councils where you are and the possible outcome over in your neck of the woods. Over here in Essex the Tories will almost certainly remain the biggest party in the County council by some margin, although results here in Colchester may well be affected by their current attempts to shut local schools.

Please also feel free to comment on the likely outcome of the Euro elections. These are the elections where you choose from a party list rather then choose a party's candidate. These are also the elections where UKIP tend to do well, although they don't have Kilroy-Silk this time around.

http://www.aboutmyvote.co.uk/

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. Are you sure that shouldn't read

"the elections where UKIP tend to do well, and they don't have Kilroy-Silk this time around"? :evilgrin:

My council (Hants) is solidly Tory, and that'll stay the same. For the Euro elections, I wonder if the UKIP vote here in South East England might go down a little - last time, they came second, with 19.5% of the vote, getting them 2 MEPs - but one turned out to be a crook (Ashley Mote), who was then awaiting trial for fraud (subsequently convicted, and sentenced to 6 months in prison, during which he continued to draw his MEP's salary. :mad: ) UKIP had chucked him out of the party after they found out about the charge, but it doesn't say much for their knowledge of their candidates if they didn't know about it earlier.

Last result was 4 Tories, 2 UKIP, 2 Lib Dems, 1 Labour and 1 Green elected. While I suspect the UKIP vote may go down (some voters moving back to the Tories, now they look a bit more successful, and UKIP seems to have not done much in 5 years), and the Green vote up (Caroline Lucas is now the sole leader of the party, and is fairly visible in the media), it seems quite likely that the percentages won't change enough for the number of MEPs to change at all.

[T_i_B]

4. Here in the East of England region...

...we have another rogue UKIP MEP in the shape of Tom Wise, who has also had the whip withdrawn from him.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/7467318.stm
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article1454811.ece?token=null&offset=0
http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news/article4815.ece

Anyway, a more worrying thing that could well happen is the BNP doing well in Euro elections. I can see the BNP getting an MEP or two this time round as people lash out blindly at the polls. :scared:

[T_i_B]

6. And as an update on Tom Wise

Oh dear.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/8008994.stm

A British member of the European Parliament has been charged with false accounting and money laundering.

Tom Wise, 60, from Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire, was elected for UKIP in 2004 but is now sitting as an Independent MEP for East Anglia.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said the UK police inquiry followed a news report in 2005 concerning Mr Wise's use of allowances.

The MEP has been charged along with his then researcher Lindsay Jenkins.

[tjwmason]

7. The B.N.P. is my biggest worry too.

I haven't looked at the psephology, but I can imagine them getting an M.E.P. somewhere - very bad news indeed.

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. I've just been trying to work some things out for this

An informative site is UK Polling Report. They have threads for each (UK) European region, and some reasonable comments (ie not just "my party will smash you all!!!" chest-beating).

It looks like the most likely place for the BNP to win a seat is North West England (so that's where they've stuck Griffin, of course - the Maximum Leader gets first dibs on a seat). Thread here: http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/guide/north-west-european?cp=all#comments

Under the d'Hondt system, for a party to win its nth seat, it must have n times the number of votes of a party that hasn't yet won a seat.

So, for instance, for a party to win 3 seats, it must get at least 3 times the number of votes that a party that doesn't get a seat got. NW England has 8 seats, and if the votes went:

Con 30% (+6 from 2004)
Lab 23% (-4)
LD 15% (-1)
UKIP 8% (-4)
BNP 8% (+2)
Green 7% (+1)
Others 9% split various ways
then it's Con 3 seats, Lab 2, LD 1, UKIP 1, BNP 1 :(

To stop Griffin from that position, 2 out of 5 parties must hit their 'targets':
Tories: get more than 4 times the BNP vote
Labour: get more than 3 times the BNP
Lib Dems: get more than 2 times the BNP
UKIP and Green: beat the BNP

The Greens are calling for tactical voting for them to stop the BNP. Whether that's the really the most likely way to stop them, I can't tell - anyone think my guesses for swings from 2004 are realistic/unrealistic?

London looks less likely for the BNP (8 seats again, but the BNP got just 4% there last time); Yorkshire & Humberside is probably the BNP's next target (6 seats, and they got 8% there last time). South East England has 10 seats, but the BNP only got 3% there last time - but if there's a mass defection from UKIP to them, it could happen there too, I suppose (and that might go for East Midlands too, where UKIP got a huge vote last time).

[tjwmason]

9. I can see a definite danger in N.W. England and Yorkshire

There was an article in yesterday's Catholic Herald about an argument between the Bishops and the B.N.P., in it there was reference to polling data which has got some optimism among the B.N.P. they were claiming that they need to hit 11% in Yorkshire up from their result of 8% last time...that's far too close for my liking.

The big problem then is that they've got a person or two people who wander around with the letters M.E.P. after their name - which adds to the perception of credibility which they have been working hard to build; it's like when they first got a couple of councillors, they can be paraded around as part of the "we're a real party being oppressed by the liberal establishment" line which they so love.

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. And now we have a Euro poll - with Lib Dems making big gains in northern England

The poll, taken for the Sunday Times by YouGov, is here - http://extras.timesonline.co.uk/results0905.xls - an xls spreadsheet. It puts the LD vote for all of Britain (Northern Ireland isn't in the poll) at 20% for the Euro elections (up from 15% last time), and for the North of England (NW, Yorkshire and NE combined, I'm pretty sure - the weighting in the whole GB population works out for that meaning), it has the LDs climbing from about 16% last time to 27% (with Labour dropping from 28% to 25%, and the Tories going up from 23% to 33%). BNP in the North, polled at 6% (actually less than the 7.0% the got in the 2004 election).

There's some analysis here; they point out the very small parties (eg English Democrats) haven't really turned up at all in the poll, where in the real 2004 election, they, combined, got about 5% of the vote.

But if NW England swung the same amount as the whole of the North has (and it's the largest part of it, so that's not unreasonable), then it'd work out as
Con 33.9%
LD 26.8%
Lab 24.2%
BNP 5.4%
UKIP 5.1%
Greens 3.1%

Now, the "I'm ashamed to tell a pollster that I'll vote Bigot Party" effect probably means the BNP real vote will be bigger; UKIP and the Greens have little chance of beating the BNP. So, going back to my earlier "2 out of these 5 things must happen", the Lib Dems will clearly get more than twice the BNP vote, so one other thing has to happen - 1 of:
Tories get 4 times the BNP (so seats are Tory 4, LD 2, Lab 2)
Lib Dems get 3 times BNP (Tory 3, LD 3, Lab 2)
Labour get 3 times BNP (Tory 3, LD 2, Lab 3)

If we trust the poll (and the sample size for the whole North isn't huge - 513 people, so this is all a bit of a guess), I'd say there's a reasonable chance of one of those happening. If the BNP get up to about 8.5% or above, they might still get that last seat. If they get 9%, they stand a good chance. That means the BNP need to add about 60% on to the support that people admitted to in the poll.

Similar number crunching for Yorkshire and Humberside works out at the BNP needing about 11% of the vote, with their number in this poll being around 7%. Just as in the north west, it looks like the Lib Dems might overtake Labour in the region, and the fight could be for Labour to get double the BNP vote to catch the last seat - though the swing to the Tories could even be enough for them to take 3 seats out of 6 - which would shut out the BNP, unless neither Labour nor the Lib Dems got double the BNP.

[fedsron2us]

11. I have so far seen nothing to suggest the BNP are going to make the gains

that they hope for and some people on the left fear. To be honest such parties really need the vote of the established Conservative party to collapse to make significant headway and I can not see that happening at the moment even though the Tories are bound to be caught up in the MPs expenses scandals (their elected representatives invented many of the scams after all). The idea that white working class voters will cross over in large numbers to vote for a fascist party is a delusion that seems to have taken hold among certain left wing intellectuals and Labour MPs who obviously believe all the rubbish that is posted about chavs on the internet. Anyway Griffin is starting to look a little shop soiled. If he can't make gains when all the political winds are in their favour then it might be time for a new Fuhrer.

By the way this is not to underplay the danger from the Far Right, rather just my belief it will not fully manifest itself until after the next Tory government has failed to revive the economy. It will also probably be a 'New' party with a 'New' leader not the tired old BNP, and will have more middle class than working class members (just as Hitler's National Socialists was dominated by people from middle class and lower middle class backgrounds).

As I have said before if a fascist government ever gets into power in Britain it will not have to pass much in the way of new legislation to create a totalitarian state since the existing Labour government has done most of the spade work for it.

[muriel_volestrangler]

12. To make significant headway, no, but there was always the chance they could take the UKIP votes

which could get a few of them into the European parliament - not where they could affect decisions significantly, but where they'd have unfortunate amounts of publicity (think of how annoying Farrage is, and then convert that into anger seeing Griffin appear as often, talking about 'my electors').

[fedsron2us]

13. UKIP have plastered pictures of Winston Churchill all over their leaflets

Completely ignoring the fact that Churchill was in favour of the idea of a European Union and actually laid out a blue print for it in a speech as far back as 1946

http://www.europa-web.de/europa/02wwswww/202histo/churchil.htm

Liars and chancers, who are as quick to put their hand in the public purse as any of the established political parties.

[T_i_B]

14. I'm wondering if we are forgetting the BNP's chances in County Council elections

I wonder if we are too preoccupied with their chances of gaining at euro level when the level they could do best at is more local.

Here in Colchester the BNP are standing in all county council wards, although none their candidates seem to be from anywhere near the borough of Colchester, in marked contrast to everyone else on the ballot papers. Kinda funny for a militantly nativist party to be carpetbagging on such a scale but there you go. The BNP are not the party to sort out the current mess in British politics in any way shape or form.

But looking beyond my own doorstep, I can certainly imagine the BNP gaining county council seats in a lot of places. :scared:

[muriel_volestrangler]

15. You'd need to know the areas

The county council wards are larger, so they need to have more widespread support, in comparison to the local council wards they sometimes pick up (and I suspect several of their successes have been where it's a local candidate in a smaller ward is known by a lot of people, some of whom try to ignore the 'BNP' tag).

Looking at the list of councils voting, and a list of their current local councillors, I don't think they have anywhere obvious (Stoke and Burnley are unitary councils, so not in the county elections) where there are elections this year, and they have more than an individual councillor.

But if the expenses scandal drives up all the smaller parties votes, I suppose they might snatch something somewhere.

[T_i_B]

17. "You'd need to know the areas"

Well in that case I ought to ask what the situation is down in Hampshire?

Looking at the situation in Essex, I can see the BNP doing well in the Epping and Basildon areas. If nothing else most of their county council candidates in North Essex seem to be from those areas.

And on another note, am I the only person who's noticed a real lack of activity from political parties thie time around? I've only had leaflets from the Tories and the Lib Dem's so far and I've only seen one poster on display (and that was for the Green's!) Maybe political activists are either too afraid of public anger or too disgusted with MP's behaviour themselves? :shrug:

[muriel_volestrangler]

18. None standing at all in my immediate area

Though the lists of who is standing in the county elections are put here on a separate web page for each district council, so I haven't bothered checking them all.

According to a BNP page they have 3 or 4 candidates (one may be just a by-election) in the whole of Hampshire. West Sussex has about 20, though.

You're right about Epping, though - I was stupidly thinking it came in under London (I have a tendency to think of anywhere I see on the Tube map as part of London). That does look like somewhere they could get 1 or 2 county councillors.

Just as I read your "lack of activity' sentence, I heard the post arrive, and found, as well as post, leaflets from UKIP and the BNP! What to do with BNP leaflets I have had the normal newsletters from Tories and Lib Dems (this is marginal area for them for Parliament, local and county councils, so they both do that heavily in the months up to elections).

Mind you, I haven't had my "fear the swine flu" leaflet yet. I though those were sent out a couple of weeks ago?

[LeftishBrit]

19. I got the swine flu one, and the UKIP one with Churchill on it...

but nothing yet from the Bloody Nasty People. Hope it stays that way. Maybe the BNP and the swine flu are sufficiently similar that one leaflet can do for both?

[moggie]

20. Now that's unfair

You can't compare the BNP to the swine flu! The flu virus evolves.

I'd forgotten about the swine flu leaflet. None came to my block.

[muriel_volestrangler]

29. You were right - they've won one in Lancashire

:(

BNP wins seat on Lancashire County Council after Burnley success

The BNP today won its first county council seat in Lancashire in the party's stronghold of Burnley as Labour faced a routing in the town's local elections.

In the first three results to be announced from the count, the far right party won one seat on Lancashire County Council and the Liberal Democrats two seats, from Labour.

Previously all six seats were held by Labour since 2005, with three more results to come.

Burnley, scarred by race riots in 2001, already has four BNP members who sit on the local borough council.

http://www.24dash.com/news/Local_Government/2009-06-05-BNP-wins-seat-on-Lancashire-County-Council-after-Burnley-success

I was wrong about Burnley being a unitary council. It seems there was a proposal for that, but it was turned down.

[fedsron2us]

32. BNP have picked up several County council seats

including one Leicestershire where they took 12.1% of the vote throughout the County (enough for a Euro seat if replicated over a wider area)

http://www.leics.gov.uk/index/your_council/local_democracy/election_results/election_2009.htm


They also got a candidate elected in South Oxhey in Herts

http://www.hertsdirect.org/actweb/election/divcandidates64.htm

I think in the long run these may turn out to be more significant than any successes in the Euro elections because Local council seats can provide a base for a national election push, although I do not expect them to make any inroads there until after the next General Election. At the moment they are chasing disaffected Labour supporters. It is after Cameron has failed as PM when the BNP pick up disgruntled Tories that they will become really dangerous.

[muriel_volestrangler]

33. Apathy, or opposition to the established parties, let them in

They got just 8.9% of the electorate in South Oxhey; 10.7% in Coalville; and 10.7% for the Burnley one. Compare that with 24.0% (of the electorate) for the winning candidate in my ward; the 2nd place Lib Dem got 16.2%. Also, in all 3 of the seats, the other parties got significant amounts of the votes that were made - none of those BNP candidates got more than 30.5% of the votes cast.

[TheBigotBasher]

37. Thankfully the Counties the BNP did not do especially well.

Two Nazis as Councillors. Despite not entirely agreeing with his politics, I helped a Liberal Democrat paper candidate who had no real team (he was expected to come 4th), but I didn't want to see the BNP make headway in his ward. Turns out he came second and beat Labour. The Nazis remained in 4th place so I had a good day.

He began to worry that he may actually win (which he could not afford to).

With regard to the British Nazi Party and the European elections, I am more concerned about the results from the West Country now than the North. They poled quite highly in Bristol and Devon. A consistent 10% and came near to winning in one Ward.

That is the stupidity of the closed list Party system of voting we now have I guess.

[T_i_B]

21. Now here's something that annoys me actually

The Greens are calling for tactical voting for them to stop the BNP. Whether that's the really the most likely way to stop them, I can't tell - anyone think my guesses for swings from 2004 are realistic/unrealistic?

There's a number of parties claiming that you should vote for them tactically in order to stop the BNP in the Euro elections. Now call me what you will but wasn't one of the main reasons for introducing PR at the European elections to make tactical voting irrelevent? Why then am I now seeing a number of parties trying to persuade people to vote tactically rather in the Euro elections?

Surely the best way to stop the BNP is simply to persuade others not to vote for them? They are the worst party on the ballot paper when all is said and done and there's plenty of choice with all the smaller parties on the ballot paper.

[muriel_volestrangler]

22. Maybe you'd call it 'marginal tactical voting'

It means that the big parties will always get someone in for a constituency; but rather than who gets 1st place, with (probably) only one other party realistically able to take that away from them, you end up with the marginal "will they get in?" question down at the BNP/Green level; and, theoretically, several parties able to stop one particular party getting a seat.

Yeah, the multi-seat, closed party list system doesn't eliminate tactical voting, but may decrease it a little. That's why we need Single Transferable Voting (my particular hobby-horse) - in which you vote for your favourite candidate (not just party), and if they get lots of votes, they're not wasted, because the excess gets redistributed to 2nd, 3rd etc. choices - so you can still try to get in the people you really prefer, and show your preference for Greens, Raving Loonies etc. over the BNP bastards.

Surely the best way to stop the BNP is simply to persuade others not to vote for them? They are the worst party on the ballot paper when all is said and done and there's plenty of choice with all the smaller parties on the ballot paper.

Yes, but you have to live with the fact that there's a certain proportion of idiots who will vote for them, and reason won't work on them. So the question becomes 'how do you add up enough non-racists to push the racist vote sufficiently far down the result?' 'Plenty of choice' is, in a way, part of the problem - if some of the left wing/centre vote goes to No2EU, some to Socialist Labour, some to Libertas, some to the Jury Team, and some to the Greens, they could possibly all end up with less than the BNP.

[T_i_B]

26. Er no, I'd call it a load of old crap actually.

Yeah, the multi-seat, closed party list system doesn't eliminate tactical voting, but may decrease it a little.

That's not what we were being told by the proponents of PR when this system was introduced. At the time the argument was that it would allow people to vote their conscience without worries about who would be "first past the post", now the same people are arguing that we should engage in tactical voting in case somebody else we don't like is 4th or 5th past the post. :eyes:

And simply using a more complicated form of PR is no solution. Really we need to be getting back to first past the post in EU elections so people at least know who their MP is and what they stand for as individuals. The reform we should really be looking at for EU elections is a directly elected executive but I doubt that the proponents of PR will be too interested in advocating that.

you have to live with the fact that there's a certain proportion of idiots who will vote for them, and reason won't work on them. So the question becomes 'how do you add up enough non-racists to push the racist vote sufficiently far down the result?

It's very dangerous for politicians to write off any portion of the population. That way you simply end up failing to engage with people, thus giving ever greater opportunities for the extremists. The challenge is to confront them and their arguments.

It should not be difficult to argue against the BNP when all is said and done. Their record when they do get elected is abominable, and goes to show that they are the worst option for anyone who wants to "clean up" British politics or get more competent elected officials in power. They are hopelessly dishonest campaigners (their election leaflets have been debunked in the national media at some length) who are the biggest astroturfers going and here in Essex are engaging in the worst carpetbagging you are ever likely to come across in the County Council elections.

And that's before you even get to the whole psychotic racist problem. To be fair their are people out there who are confronting the BNP's arguments. Anti-Facist campaigners have been prominent here in Colchester for instance. The trouble is that the people who should be in the best position to argue against the BNP are the mainstream parties with the big platform their status allows, and mainstream politics is in deep trouble right now.

[muriel_volestrangler]

27. You disappoint me, by saying STV is too complicated for you

That really isn't something I'd expect from you.

If we used FPTP for the 2009 European election, I expect the Tories would get over two thirds of the seats. Look at the 1994 results for Britain:

Party  vote% seats
Labour  44    62
Tory    28    18
LibDem  17     2
SNP      3     2

And no-one else got any seats at all. 74% of the seats on 44% of the vote. They weren't an accurate representation of Britain in the Parliament.

Saying that FPTP means we know "what they stand for as individuals" is ridiculous - they'll get voted for by party, especially in the roughly 800,000 population seats there would be. The European system just doesn't make it easy for individual MPs to stand out. It'd just be a case of the largest party or two in the area deciding their candidate internally, and in they'd get. A few seats would be close; most would be a foregone conclusion. STV gives a far better way of differentiating individuals than FPTP. If parties held primaries, so non-paying members got to help choose a candidate, it would be a different matter.

A directly elected executive might be interesting - true transnational elections, with candidates having to campaign in multiple countries where they have no party links. I don't see it has anything to do with the PR argument, though.

The Greens, and everyone else, are campaigning against the ideas of the BNP too. But they think they can persuade a few people that a switch from, say, a Lib Dem vote to a Green vote may stop the BNP, perhaps without even affecting how many seats the Lib Dems get.

[LeftishBrit]

2. Oxfordshire County Council is currently under Conservative control

and is doing all sorts of things I don't like; especially with regard to the health service - e.g. rewarding GPs for *not* referring patients to consultants.

The best that could be hoped for is that they'd revert to No Overall Control.

My ward has two councillors, both in opposition, one Lib Dem and one Green. I will probably vote to re-elect both; I've had little contact with either, but in a situation where the aim is to get the Conservatives out of overall control, voting for two sitting opposition councillors seems to make sense.

As regards MEPs, I'm in the south-east England constituency. A mixed group by party, but too many Tories. I'll have to think about my choice this time - when Mike Woodin was alive and standing, I just always automatically voted Green (if the Greens had enough votes to get 2 MEPs, he'd have been the second, after Caroline Lucas who did get in). I'll very likely vote Green again, but I'll try and find a bit more about the different party candidates.

[fedsron2us]

3. Tories here on the South Coast have started squabbling amongst themselves

over County Council seat nominations. This sudden enthusiasm for office seems to have mysteriously coincided with a big rise in the amount of money that County Councilors receive in West Sussex. As a result a number of sitting councilors have been deselected and there is much bad feeling in the Tory ranks. There is even a sneaking suspicion that the Lib Dems might nick one of the County Council seats here in Adur, if they can find a half way decent candidate rather than the dead beats they have been putting up in the past.

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. Site (run by political scientists) predicting EU results (including in the UK)

The opposition Conservative Party is running well ahead of the governing Labour Party in the polls. However, the Labour Party did extremely badly in the European elections in 2004 and the electoral system (regional districts with d’Hondt) should mean that Labour should not lose any seats and may even win one or two. The main losers of the election are likely to be the Eurosceptic UK Independence Party, many of whose voters are likely to go back to the Conservative Party or to the extreme right British National Party, who could possibly win a seat.

http://www.predict09.eu/default/en-us/state_analyses.aspx#united

Note the total number of MEPs from the UK decreases (down to 72, from 78), compared to 2004, due to enlargement/treaties. Their current prediction is for no BNP seats; they also think both Greens will lose their seats, and UKIP will shrink from 12 to 4; while Labour and Lib Dems will gain seats. And they think Libertas, the pan-European sceptics, will fail totally (not just in the UK).

[muriel_volestrangler]

16. Surge in European polls for UKIP after expenses scandal

but no intention to switch to BNP apparent, yet - Green vote seems to vary:

http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/blog/european-elections

Labour, Lib Dems and UKIP are all battling for 2nd place, it seems.

[muriel_volestrangler]

23. European opinion polls are all over the place

Summary here: http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/blog/european-elections

Poll published today:

The Conservatives drop four points to 30 per cent, compared with the poll three weeks ago. Labour drops nine points to 16 per cent, and the Liberal Democrats fall eight points to 12 per cent. UKIP are the beneficiaries, rising 13 points to 19 per cent, ahead of Labour and the Liberal Democrats. The Greens rise to 10 per cent, and the BNP is up three points at 5 per cent. A change in methodology for today’s poll could account in part for the higher figures for the smaller parties. They were included in the main “prompt list” for respondents. In the earlier poll they were included only in the prompt list for those who said that they would vote for “another party.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6390069.ece

[non sociopath skin]

24. Our buddy Bulbousdog and his pals are positively salivating over the possibility ...

... of big gains for the Baggy Trousered Misanthropists of the UKIP.

Why the main gainers at the moment are the wankers who set the pole in right-wing hypocrisy, expenses-fiddling and sheer unbridled corruption is something I can't understand. But, I suppose, better the Monday Club than the Nazis.

O tempora. O mores. O fuck.

The Skin

[Anarcho-Socialist]

25. regarding the British Nazi Party

if the polls have shown any consistency it's that the supposed BNP breakthrough isn't likely to happen.

[TheBigotBasher]

28. I would tend to agree with you.

I think that the so called "rise of the BNP" has been pushed by Labour to give them some succour if this does not happen. I would find it absolutely appalling to see the Nazis even having one voice in the European Parliament as representatives of the UK, but thankfully I do not see it.

[fedsron2us]

30. Interesting County Council Results round here

The Tories won all the seats County Seats in Adur but their majorities took quite a kicking in a couple of wards from UKIP who contested all the seats and were by share of the vote the second most popular party. Turnout was not great at about 33%-37%. The UKIP vote may be a sign of things to come in the Euro results.

Labour naturally were annihilated and came last all but two seats. A shame really because the candidate in my ward is a nice chap who deserves better. Difficult to believe but 10 years ago Adur District itself was a Labour controlled council.

http://www.worthing.gov.uk/xmloutput/LiveElectionResults2009/elections09_web_adurdc.html

[muriel_volestrangler]

31. Labour lost 3 of the 4 seats they had on Hants council

and came 4th to UKIP in several seats (UKIP didn't win a seat, though). In my local area, the Tories kept my seat (it was close in 2005; this time the Tories got it fairly comfortably - turnout was way down compared with the election held at the same time as the GE - from 74% to 47%), and the Lib Dems kept the other 6 in the borough council area.

[T_i_B]

34. Labour very nearly got whitewashed in Essex

They lost 12 seats and now only have 1 seat on the County Council. In many places they came last behind Greens and BNP.

It's not hard to see how this came about. For one thing Labour's local campaign was pretty much non-existant. I did not get a single leaflet from them and the one leaflet of theirs I came across was just pure fearmongering.

Labour seems to have nothing positive to say, and the in-fighting over Gordon Brown's leadership starting before polling day was just suicidal. Add to that the state of the economy and the sleaze of recent weeks and it's no suprise to see the Labour going down the drain. What's worse is that many of the anti-Brown plotters don't seem to understand that Labour's problems go beyond the leadership of the party.

[T_i_B]

35. English Democrats win mayor vote in Doncaster

Not the greatest result when you consider that the English Democrats are somewhere to the right of Ghengis Khan.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/south_yorkshire/8084538.stm

An English Democrats candidate has been elected the new mayor of Doncaster.

Earlier this year it was disclosed that serious case reviews were under way into the deaths of seven children known to the social services in the town.

Independent Mayor Martin Winter decided not to run for re-election amid criticism of his handling of the issue.

Peter Davies won the second round of counting to be elected mayor. The Labour and Conservative candidates were knocked out of the contest earlier.

[LeftishBrit]

36. Tories increased their majority on Oxfordshire County Council, grrrr!

The Tory gains were all outside the city. In my ward, the Lib Dem was re-elected, and the Green was defeated by her Labour opponent - perhaps because the Labour candidate was already well known as a City councillor. At any rate, I won't be directly represented by a Tory. But the County Council will continue its bad policies.