British local elections
A sign of things to come?Colorful Tory Beats Laborite to Become Mayor of London
"As votes were tallied across the country after Thursday’s elections, it emerged that the Labor Party had suffered its worst local election results in at least 40 years.
"With final votes in for the 159 local councils in which seats were being contested, Labor lost 331 seats overall, and the Conservative opposition gained 256. The Labor Party took an estimated 24 percent of the overall vote, placing it a woeful third behind the Conservatives, with 44 percent, and the Liberal Democrats, with 25 percent.
"But it was the mayoral race, in which Mr. Johnson, 43, defeated the experienced Labor incumbent, Ken Livingstone, 62, by 1,168,738 votes to 1,028,966 votes, that was the biggest shock — a sure sign of a deep national weariness with the Labor government...
"Except in the case of the mayoral contest, the election results were more important for their symbolism than for their substance. Local councils have little actual power, but British voters tend to use local elections to express relative degrees of displeasure with the government in office...
"The prime minister admitted bluntly that the result was terrible, as did an array of cabinet ministers dispatched to spread the message that the government was listening to the public and that it would try to improve...
"But historically, poor results for the ruling party in local British elections are not necessarily harbingers of poor results in subsequent general elections...
And from the BBC:
BNP wins seat in London Assembly
"The anti-immigration British National Party has won a seat on the London Assembly after getting 5.3% of votes.
"Richard Barnbrook, who is BNP leader on Barking and Dagenham Council and who came fifth in the mayoral contest, will take up one of the 25 assembly seats...
"London voters elected 14 of the London Assembly members directly, with the remaining 11 divided between the parties in proportion to London-wide votes...
"The BNP campaign focused heavily on tackling crime and stopping recent immigrants jumping ahead of people who had been on council housing waiting lists for a long time.
"There were also pledges to scrap the congestion charge, pull out of the EU, plant more fruit trees and provide solar panels on public buildings.
"But immigration is the BNP's best known policy area - they want an immediate halt to it, deportation of all illegal immigrants and they propose offering money for 'voluntary resettlement whereby those immigrants who are legally here will be afforded the opportunity to return to their lands of ethnic origin'..."
Labels: elections, politics, UK
posted by Ken Wedding @ 7:10 AM
1 Comments:
I wish to correct an inaccuracy in the title of this post "British local elections". The local elections referred to occurred ONLY in England and Wales which are parts of Britain, so they were NOT British. Local elections in Scotland were held last year alongside the Scottish Parliament elections.
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