Just to wrap this up properly..
Results for all but 1 of the 176 local councils in which seats were at stake are in - and below you'll see what it looks like.
The results that have come in since last night (many from London) have worsened the assessment on how Labour did, improved that of the Tories, and continued the pattern for the Libdems.
They also put George Galloway's Respect on the map; it got 11 seats in Tower Hamlets, the heart of London's Eastend, alone, pushing the Conservatives and Libdems into third and fourth place there. (Its gains were notably at the expense of the Libdems, not Labour.) Respect still expects more seats in neighbouring Newham, the one council where counting apparently isnt complete.
Note: If I understand it correctly, the total number of councillors on the right, below, is the total number of the respective parties' councillors
in the councils where elections took place. There were also many councils in which no elections took place. Eg, the total number of BNP seats across the country now is 47 (if I got it right), not 32. Same for other parties.
Code: Councillors
Net +/- Total
Conservative +317 1830
Labour -317 1385
Liberal Democrat + 2 909
Residents Assoc - 13 35
BNP + 27 32
Green + 20 29
Respect + 12 13
Liberal - 2 8
Others - 49 117
Judging on the neat
Guardian guidelines to measure the parties' success with, yesterday was thus, compared to prior expectations:
- For Labour, slightly less than OK, but not bad
- For the Conservatives, OK up to good
- For the Libdems, close to disastrous.
To relativate both the scope (-317) and the significance of Labour's losses, just read through this
BBC overview of earlier eye-catching local elections. In 2003, for example, after the Iraq invasion had started, Labour lost 812. And in 1995, still nationally under John Major, the Tories lost nearly 2,000 seats - and that was at the end of a decade of already progressively worse scores.
Nevertheless, the reaction of the Labour council leader in Stoke, Mick Salih, who lost his seat last night, is telling: he said the party had become "a Tory party in disguise". He told BBC Radio Stoke he had had "enough of the Labour party". "I shall not be renewing my membership and that is a fact. It is not the Labour party I joined years ago." (
bbc).
