Scores On The Doors

There are now two Labour members of Newcastle City Council. Two. That is the same number as on Surrey County Council. Surrey. In his infinite wisdom, Keir Starmer has abolished that authority in his native land, which will be succeeded next year by the East Surrey and West Surrey councils that were elected on Thursday, both under Liberal Democrat overall control and each with no Labour representation whatever. Still, until the appropriate date of 1 April, there will be exactly as many Labour members of Newcastle City Council and of Surrey County Council. The number of Labour councillors in Surrey is of course greater when the 11 boroughs and districts are included, with Spelthorne alone having seven, the same number as Newcastle City Council and Durham County Council put together.

In Starmer's constituency of Holborn and St Pancras, the Leader of Camden Council fled from impending Lib Dem defeat to a supposedly safer seat that he has lost to a Green. Another Green has unseated the Conservative Andy Coles from the Felston and Woodston ward of Peterborough, with Reform UK pushing Coles into third place, so if the Green Party were what it claimed to be, then may we hope that Councillor Ed Murphy (I used to know a Labour one who went by Eddie) will do something to publicise the spycops scandal? The 31 Labour and 31 Conservative councillors in Barnet will carve things up between them rather than work with the one Green because, well, you know this one. If they were suggesting that Councillor Linda Lusingu was herself one of those, then she should sue.

Also tied, on 17 each, are Reform and Labour at Holyrood. Since neither is going to put up one of its MSPs as Presiding Officer so that the other could become the Official Opposition, then they are looking at all manner of fun and games over who sat where, who got to ask the first question at First Minister's Questions, and so forth. Labour MSPs used to say that defeated constituency candidates who had been elected on the list had "got in by the back door". They are now as glad as Starmer of the provision for rear entrance. And it was in fact a Workers Party candidate, Shehryar Kayani, who unseated the Leader of Birmingham City Council at Glebe Farm and Tile Cross, but in Birmingham, Bury, Rochdale, and possibly also elsewhere, the BBC cannot even bring itself to mention the Workers Party, listing it under "Independents and Others". Yet we await news of Reform's only councillor in Bootle, the newly elected Jay Cooper, who posted on Facebook last September that the Holocaust had been "a hoax" since "there wasn't even 6 million Jews in Europe at the time". I am hearing that Reform has already expelled him, but that is unconfirmed, and it did adopt him in the first place.