FFS don't people realise that they are supposed to be voting for local candidates on local issues and not as a proxy to send a message to the government.

You're probably right Barmy, but what a sad state of affairs where important local elections become nothing more than an opinion poll on the sitting government.

The telly was full of it yesterday - compositing the total number of local council seats and making analysis that the Tories were 200 seats "ahead". 200 seats ahead in what? In a BBC video game popularity contest?

FFS don't people realise that they are supposed to be voting for local candidates on local issues and not as a proxy to send a message to the government.

I'm quite concerned that the BNP have won a seat, that's not good!

With all the results in bar London, the BNP now appears to have 55 councillors. The party went into the polls with 45, down from 50 immediately after last year’s elections and made a net gain of ten.

Although the BNP gained 13 new council seats, the party’s average vote was down in many areas.

The gains were in Nuneaton and Bedworth (2), Rotherham (2), Amber Valley (2), Stoke-on-Trent (3), Thurrock (1), Three Rivers (1), Pendle (1) and Calderdale (1), where the BNP has retaken a seat in Illingworth and Mixenden, a ward from where the party had previously been routed.

Despite the one gain in Thurrock, the result there is disappointing for the BNP, which threw serious resources into the borough, as it did last year without success.

But in Stoke-on-Trent the three new councillors join six others, giving the city the largest BNP council group nationally after Barking and Dagenham, which has 12.

An excellent result came in from Epping Forest District Council, where the BNP has lost two of the three seats it was defending. Pat Richardson appears to have got it right by moving to her husband’s safer seat as her old seat was one of those lost. The BNP is now down to four seats on the council. The good news was slightly tempered by the fact that the BNP took five seats on Loughton Town Council, but at least the party has stayed confined to the three wards where it has previously won seats.

In Burnley the BNP has retained a seat it was defending in Hapton with Park, but failed to make any gains in the borough. Another piece of excellent news is that David Exley lost the seat he was defending in Kirklees.

In London Richard Barnbrook received just 69,710 first preference votes in the mayoral election, which amounted to 2.89%. The only BNP candidate in the constituency part of the London Assembly election, Robert Bailey in City and East, received 18,020 votes, amounting to 9.6% in what is the BNP’s best area. Unfortunately however the BNP passed the 5% threshold for election to the London Assembly in the London-wide top-up vote with 5.3% (130,714 votes) but has only gained one seat, which will be taken by Barnbrook.

At the latest count we think the BNP stood 612 candidates in district and county elections in England and Wales, of whom 584 were in England and 28 in Wales.

In desperation the BNP is claiming it now holds over 100 council seats for the first time ever. The party is being disingenuous. If it is correct at all, the figure includes a large number of parish, town or community councillors, most of whom were elected unopposed to this lowest and usually non-political tier of local government.

Other far-right parties standing were: the National Front (5 candidates), England First Party (7 candidates + 1 parish candidate) and Democratic Nationalists – the new party registered by the rebels who fell out with the BNP over the December 2007 January 2008 period (9 candidates, all in Bradford). None of these parties achieved any success and some of the Democratic Nationalists seem to have had difficulty even persuading their friends and family to vote for them.

I'm afraid the blame really lies with New Labour: Tony Blair & Gordon Brown.

They have been truly awful and people have realised quite what a mess they have made of this country.

Ken's vote actually held up quite well - this actually wasn't about personality - it was about the people falling out of love with NuLabour.

They are finished - they are over. Get used to David Cameron - he's the next PM.

Oh and as far as the RMT goes (re the Ken Liningstone thread) - yep I agree with Pete - they will be in opposition to Boris.

And it will be a disaster for the left, like the Unions in the 70's they'll only end up helping the Tories.

I'm afraid the blame really lies with New Labour: Tony Blair & Gordon Brown.

Hackney North's Labour MP Diane Abbott said Mr Johnson was "an accident waiting to happen".

Well, the Tories will have to "parachute" (to use the new trendy phrase) people in to support someone who is clearly completely inept.

This is a man who is so thick he could probably run for president of the USA, and outdo Bush in a stupidity contest.

He's a buffon who is now well out of his depth and will end up looking even more completely stupid than he does now.

Boris is much smarter than Bush. I'm sure he'll put his foot in it a fair few times, but I'm not convinced it will damage him.

The man did Classics at Oxford

Jeez and we used to laugh at the Americans for electing George W. We've just lost that right.

Vanessa Feltz, Frank Furedi, Munira wassname, Talksport, DailyMail hasn't told him yet

tell her what you like Damon. no i tell you what, tell her what SPIKED likes. or dotun. or debs orr. just don'tt waste my time talking about it here.

Will the real Boris please stand up?

Contrary to what you might have read, the blonde buffoon and new mayor of London is neither a friend of liberty nor an evil Thatcherite.

So, has Boris Johnson, the new mayor, come to liberate London or destroy it? Is he, as a hastily constructed Facebook group claims, a ‘new dawn’ for the capital, who will release the city from the ‘tyranny of Ken’ and allow us once more to ‘drive our cars where we want, or even have a fag over a pint in the pub’? Or is he the ‘son of Thatcher’ in a bouncy blonde wig, a sinister, posh Tory who has hoodwinked the London electorate into believing he is a loveable oaf with a speech impediment?

He’s neither. Boris is not the anti-Ken lover of liberty that his supporters claim - nor is he the living embodiment of old-school Toryism depicted by his opponents. In fact, he’s a very modern politician, one who, in the absence of core convictions, trades on his personality and celebrity instead. Boris is business as usual in British politics… but the responses to his election are telling indeed.

I think these two guys are missing something. Reading and listening to these various broadcasters, journalists and magazines (in my opinion) can lead one to having a wider view. (Not a narrow one).

The 1990 Trust is the first UK national Black organisation set up to protect and pioneer the interest of Britain’s Black Communities. Their approach is to engage in policy development and to articulate the needs of Black communities from a Black perspective.

Key figures in the organisation include Lee Jasper, David Weaver and Karen Chouhan. It works closely with the National Assembly Against Racism and Operation Black Vote.

The 1990 Trust uses the term 'black' as a political term, in common with the rest of the British anti-racist movement, to refer to all people of African, Caribbean and Asian descent.

Its stated goals are:

To establish and influence the practical implementation of the principle that ‘Racism is a violation of human rights’ for example via the monitoring and analysis of public policy and parliamentary legislation to assess the implications for and effects on the quality of life of Black communities and to keep Black communities informed of progress on these initiatives
To establish an international reputation for excellence and innovation, as an exemplar organisation demonstrating the benefits of African, Asian, and Caribbean communities working collectively in tackling racism
To develop self organisation and community leadership to empower Black communities in tackling racism and in reaching their full potential

Apologising for and publicly disavowing his ‘beliefs’ has become Boris’s most recognisable character trait. One of his most controversial attacks was on the Macpherson Inquiry into the murder of black London teenager Stephen Lawrence. In a stinging critique published in the Daily Telegraph in 1999 he laid into Macpherson’s undeniably authoritarian recommendations, including its proposal that the law should be changed so that people could be prosecuted for using racist language somewhere ‘other than in a public place’. That is, at home. ‘Not even under the law of Ceausescu’s Romania could you be prosecuted for what you said in your own kitchen’, he wrote. Yet when, last year, journalists and Stephen Lawrence’s mother, Doreen, cited Boris’s attacks on the Macpherson Inquiry as evidence that he is ‘not fit to be mayor of London’ (apparently Londoners are forbidden from publicly criticising any aspect of Macpherson), Boris said he was sorry if his seven-year-old comments caused any offence.

Legislation like that needs testing.
I suggest a Circle Line party...ain't done one of those since the 80's either.

You will be arrested by an elite group of community support officers who kneel on your windpipe 'by accident' as you fight to hold on to your Tennants Super Tramp Juice.

Following his public apology to the people of Liverpool in 2004 (after his then magazine the Spectator criticised the city’s ‘victim culture’), and his apology to the people of Papua New Guinea in 2006 (after he wrote about the Tory Party being consumed by ‘Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing’), Boris has said he needs to organise a ‘global itinerary of apology’. Some call it gaffe-making; it also smells a lot like political cowardice. Boris clearly has no firm, long-standing connection with the words or ideas that fly from his gob.


The myth that Boris is a man of conviction or a ‘liberator of London’ should have been exploded by his first day in the job of mayor. He once compared the smug, penny-pinching, anti-masses campaign against climate change to a ‘new religion’, arguing that some people ‘want the sweet moralistic feeling of telling someone to stop doing something… the moralising mumbo-jumbo becomes more important than the scientific reality’. Yet now he has declared his opposition to expanding Heathrow airport, banned London officials from flying around the UK, and announced his intention to plant 10,000 trees to ‘tackle global warming’ - which will do precisely nothing to change the Earth’s atmosphere but might do something to convince London that Boris, like Ken, is green to the core.

Boris responds to complaints of a Stalinist/nanny state under Red Ken and New Labour by... banning alcohol consumption on the transport system. Doubtless to be reinforced with a system of swingeing fines.

It's not that I think this is a bad idea, but weren't many of Boris's voters hoping for a new age of tax-free libertarianism and do-what-thou-willst (as long as thou isn't a chav)?

As I read it, this is the first step in trying to ban public drunkeness, so I'd wonder if the next step is to reintroduce smoking in pubs?

I'm sorry, your new Mayor might suck, but not even close:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jh...itle=rustbelt-f

Excellent! I have visions of tanked-up hordes stepping provocatively over the line that divides Greater London from everywhere else, and back again, taunting the cops. They will be wearing Boris Johnson masks and comedy police helmets. Of course, the really drunk ones will quickly become confused, staggering 'back' triumphantly into the arms of grim-faced plod.

Do you think that someone should tell Boris that most of the train companies serving London actively encourage the consumption of alcohol on their trains by, er, selling it!

The reason why Boris and a coterie of like-minded Tories could pose as the ‘defenders of freedom’ in recent years is not because they are truly devoted to free thought, speech and to more choice in our daily lives, but because the left turned freedom into a dirty word, leaving it open to being co-opted by elements on the right.

Under Labour and its left-liberal supporters, freedom of speech has come to be viewed as the harbinger of hate and violence; freedom of choice is seen as deeply unhealthy (people will smoke, eat fatty foods, and have sex without condoms); and freedom of association - especially between adults and children - is a positive minefield of potential abuse and mayhem. Indeed, the left’s degraded view of freedom is personified in ousted mayor Ken Livingstone, who is insanely hailed as ‘the most progressive politician’ in Britain on the basis that he is serious, sour-faced, austere, illiberal and willing to force changes in people’s behaviour in order to ‘save the planet’. In short, to be left-wing is to be No Fun.