Posted on 05/13/2009 9:02:39 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
Labour faces the possibility of being all but wiped out in the South in next month’s council elections, putting a swath of its parliamentary seats in jeopardy at the general election.
Gordon Brown will launch the party’s local and European election campaign today in Derbyshire, one of Labour’s last four counties, all of which could fall on June 4.
Although the four in jeopardy are in the Midlands or the North the Prime Minister will be equally worried that Labour councillors could disappear from a string of counties in the South.
Labour has seen its local government base fall alarmingly since the mid-1990s, when Tony Blair led the party to substantial gains all over the South. In 1996 it had 10,929 councillors and the Tories only 4,276. This has now reversed, with Labour having 5,279 and the Tories climbing to 9,884.
Only three district councils in the South and South East, outside London, are controlled by Labour — Stevenage, Luton and Slough — after a haemorrhage of support from Kent to Cornwall in the past five years.
Local government experts predict that the party could also lose the few seats that it holds in county councils across the South, with Labour on course for its worst results in 30 years.
Buckinghamshire is already a Labour-free council after one councillor defected to the Liberal Democrats last year and the other resigned. But other counties along the M4 corridor and south of the M25 could also lose their rump of Labour councillors.
In Surrey Labour has only two council seats out of 80, in Wiltshire three out of 98 and in Somerset, Hampshire, Dorset and Devon it has four from totals of between 45 and 80.
Tony Travers, local government analyst at the London School of Economics, predicted that Labour would soon
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
For those of us who are not fluent in UK politics; does this mean that Britain is becoming more conservative/less liberal/something else?
More Tory conservative. Margaret Thatcher is a Tory.
yitbos
Thanks. Maybe they're getting fed up with the Leftie nonsense.
Hopefully, that sea change will portend well for our next elections, in the US.
The REAL conservative party is the UKIP (UK Independence Party), but they have only a few local office holders and something less than 5% of the vote.
-ccm
The other party growing in the BNP, or British Nationalist Party. It’s basically “England for the English” party. Given the amazing, overwhelming immigrant influx, much of it angry Muslims who do their little jihadi nonsense every year or two, it’s not too surprising that the a ‘nationalist’ party has so much appeal.
Like our own situation both major parites have supported virtually open borders for a decade. The current citizens were first not consulted, and were then insulted for daring to think that England and the UK sholud be for the English, Scotts and Welsh peoples. The UK leads Europe in absurd hate crime laws and prosecutions. A young girl was recently prosecuted for saying she’d like her study group at school to be English speakers.
The back-lash has been guaranteed, how big it gets, how successful the BNP will get is the real question. (Recall that the less sophisticated Jean LePen in France made it to the runnoff election a few years ago. At which point the “right” and “Left go together to defeat him. Politics does indeed make for strange bedfellows.
17% last time I checked (which is almost on a par with Labour right now)....
Rather ironic that the BNP, the ultimate anti-immigration party, should have a Spitfire from 303 Squadron on its posters, which was an entirely Polish unit....
"But we don't want the Irish."
Good catch. Those Polish pilots saved Britain's bacon, and all they got was "Yalta'd".
I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that they made the difference between victory and defeat in the Battle of Britain, but they certainly made an important contribution. They were the only Polish unit offered a victory parade in 1946, apparently, but they refused to take part because no other Polish unit was invited in the post-Yalta sell-out environment of the time..
I would say more cynical...
LOL...why would we want foreigners?
Well, that’s what Ireland (southern) wanted. Home rule. Self-government. United Ireland.
They want it, they get it. They can’t come crying to us if it goes wrong. Screw them.
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