Friday 4 May 2018

Local Election Roundup

Labour was mocked for "celebrating losing" last year's General Election. But no one is mocking the Conservatives for celebrating losing last night's local elections.

Following its best local elections since 1971, Labour has won more seats than all the other parties combined, it has come out in control of more councils than all the other parties combined, and it has enjoyed the biggest net gain in seats. If there needs to be a Leadership Election, then that needs to be elsewhere.

Not that this has been the most thrilling round of local elections ever. Little change in London (although Labour did come within 80 votes of winning Wandsworth), and swings and roundabouts everywhere else. One wonders which way knife-edge Swindon might have gone if it had not been a pilot area for voter suppression, but there we are. There will be none such at the General Election.

The row over anti-Semitism may have won the Conservatives Barnet, but it does not seem to have won them anywhere else among London's several centres of Jewish population. The Windrush scandal would have swept them out of great tracts of London if Labour had not expelled Marc Wadsworth because, astonishingly, it now had 50 MPs who had no idea who he was or why he mattered. Several of those abstained on the Windrush motion, which might have helped their nominal party tremendously on the eve of poll.

UKIP has collapsed, but we knew that, anyway. That more of its voters have gone back to the Conservatives is simply because more of them came from there in the first place. But UKIP had already collapsed at the time of the last General Election, so there is no wider ramification here. And have the Leave heartlands of the North turned from red to blue? Of course not. By contrast, there are the first signs that the Remainer heartlands of the South are turning from blue to yellow.

All in all, it is practically certain that there is going to be a hung Parliament, and it is highly likely that, while Labour will be the largest party, there are going to be a lot of Lib Dems from the better-heeled, more pro-EU parts of the South. Making it all the more important that they are not the only holders of the balance of power. I know for a fact that I am not going to be the only one of our people in the field, but I am the first one already declared.

My crowdfunding page has been taken down in the service of the Chosen One, so called because she spookily did not have to undergo any kind of selection process in order to become a parliamentary candidate. Likewise, Oliver Kamm spookily had my Google Ads taken down in the early days of this site, costing me a small fortune over the years. But you can still email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com instead. And while Google Ads, at Kamm's spooky insistence, still maintains that that address is fraudulent, nevertheless it accepts PayPal.

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