Saturday 3 May 2008

London is turning Blue

I was all ready to sit up all night and watch the election results come in - before I discovered that London weren't even starting the count until Friday morning. You can find out the President of the most powerful country on earth over night, but not the mayor of London.

I was even more disappointed to find out that they weren't expecting to have a result until after midnight on Friday. No point staying up then.

I woke up about an hour ago after an uneasy sleep with a sore back (really must get the back exercises booklet out) to find that the results were in and Ken's reign was finally over. Boris is the new London mayor. A lot of people I've spoken to don't think that he is right for the job... I just don't think that he can be any worse than what we've had already. I couldn't believe it when Ken Livingstone was elected in the first place, let alone given a second term. I might only have been seven years old when my family moved out of London, but I still remember my Father's rants against the GLC (run by Red Ken as they called him then).

Hopefully these election results are a wake-up call for Labour. Not that I care particularly if they do get thrown out at the next election, but it would be nice to think that they might realise now that an awful lot of people don't think that they are doing much of a job. Seriously, BBC projects have them in third place after the Lib Dems on this weeks polls. Pretty poor, I'd say, in what is always labelled as a two party system.

Annoyingly (although not surprisingly) Labour held the Greenwich vote. However it would appear that on the basis of the Mayor and Assembly London is now a Conservative city. 11 Conservative, 8 Labour, 3 Liberal Democrats, 2 Green Party and 1 British National Party. A BNP Assembly representative? Shame on London.

Anyway, enough politics. A Bank Holiday weekend stretches before us and hopefully there will be some nice weather at some point!