All Aboard The Double Dip

Not content with putting people out of work during a recession, the Government has decreed that public sector workers are now to be paid less, and thus to have less money to spend in the private sector, for doing the same job outside the South East.

Presumably, this is the South East's reward for going back to the Tories in 2005, and if only Labour had been anything like that loyal to the North East. But the Tory gains in the South East made no difference to the 2005 result. General Elections simply are not won and lost there.

That the Tories still cannot manage an overall majority is because they still cannot make sufficient gains in Scotland, Wales, the North and the Midlands. At this rate, they are looking at losses there that will make 1997 look like the narrow loss of a single by-election to a safe Tory council.