disaster

no matter how you look at it last night at the polls was a disaster for gordon brown and the labour government.
cameron is right to talk about it being a "big night" for the conservative party.
the electorate have given the clunking fist of brown a bloody nose and it is likely that the london mayoral election is about to land him with a black eye.

yet brown is also right to say that the results are due to the fact that there are some unusual circumstances out there at the moment.
labour is paying the price for not just these events but also for the fact that they have been in powere for a long time and that they have forgotten that they have to pay attention to the electorate.

cameron took the chance to once again point out that this was a vote against labour's top down approach to government. in this he echoes the mantra of thatcher. so under cameron we can expect less government and more local action.
but the point is what people really want is a government who will protect them from the wider world's mistakes. we want them to make the big hard decisions that will stave off the problems brought on by stupidity of greedy banks.
that is what we want we just don't want to admit it.

brown has been punished for the credit crunch, he has been punished for the rise in petrol prices (but not to worry the two companies involved with petrol just released record profits), he has been punished becuase of the rise of food, yet we know tescos will release figures of record profits and the farmers will complain that they are not paid enough for what they grow.
bad transport? it is the government - even if the rail and airlines are privately owned.
it is a long list of what is going wrong and blamed on the government. (even eard a banker blame the recent problems in the banking industry on the bank of england for not spotting the banks own recklessnes...)

but brown has problems of his own. he heeds to drop policies that are pointless and just there to make headlines - forget about id cards, forget about the 42 day limit. concentrate on what it is that labour should stand for. the people, the working people. work towards protecting them and rewarding them.

do that sort of thing and watch the votes come flooding back.

meanwhile i am going to go off and sulk as boris becomes the mayor of london.