Good to see the Conservatives trouncing Labour.

While I admire your ability to claim a brutal kicking from the voters was somehow a good thing for Labour, lets get back to your dazzling insight into UK polling techniques. In your immortal words:

“YouGov is a load of rubbish.”

As the head of YouGov has pointed out (http://adamboulton.typepad.com/)

“Our final poll, published on Thursday morning, showed Boris leading Ken by 53-47%. The result? Boris won by 53-47%.”

“Last month Ken Livingstone’s campaign team complained to the Market Research Society that YouGov’s results must be flawed because they were so consistently out of line with the polls by “established” telephone research companies.”

I draw two conclusions from this:

1) Conventional (i,e, telephone-based) polling companies need to take a hard look at their business model; and
2) Ghostie is even more out of touch with reality than I would have thought possible.

Whats this !,Labour INCREASE the number of electorate seats

Um, a net gain for Labour of one; from seven to eight out of twenty five.

Meanwhile, a little story from the BBC Ghostie fails to mention:

Results for the London Assembly show a 6.20% increase in the Tory vote across all 14 first-past the post seats.

Constituency results for Bexley and Bromley and Havering and Redbridge saw 12 and 13-point swings to the Tories.

But Labour was also up by 3.36% across all 14, and the party’s Navin Shah won Brent and Harrow from the Tories.

The Liberal Democrat vote was down by 4.70% across all 14 seats, while the British National Party gained its first seat on the London Assembly.

The BNP passed the 5% voter threshold to take a seat at City Hall.

But the United Kingdom Independence Party’s share fell by 7.05%.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7381469.stm

Who won?
Boris promises no bendy buses and no third runway for heathrow.

BTW, H2 says get with the program, it’s “slippery john” not “sharkey”, “sharkey” didn’t quite catch the imagination enough.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/London-assemWhat'ssults.do?=44

Whats this !,Labour INCREASE the number of electorate seats

Boris is Londons new Mugabe!

Who was it who WON ? again

WE WON YOU LOST GET USED TO IT

end of message

Let Boris win one. The british media will be dancing around the Fire ( except for ES and its stable mates) in delight for waht is too come.
Its going to be a OMG time for GOP ( like nationals 20.9% in 2003) at the end of the year for Congress.

And over in Australia the most senior Liberal elected official is Mayor of Brisbane!!!!. Eat your heart out

Remember your last great hope to win, Sarkozy in France. DPF breathlessly gave us the lastest polls and results. Then of course when he called parliamentary elections the chutzpuah dissapeared , now hes in deep shit … just like Sharkey will be if he wins

…its 3am and the phone is ringing…
. Thanks for calling John Key, I cant answer the phone right now as Im in Hawaii..again. MY new house number is …… but only during breakfast time here as Im sure Simon English will be able to handle it.. Good bye

[DPF: Oh poor Ghostie - the only way he can find solace is in the notion that if the Opposition wins, they be unpopular at times!]

“I watched the main TV channels trying to find some – any– reporting of this election result and found nothing.
\Maybe there was a three second item somewhere but I missed it so we finally turned to BBC and CNN.

Do our mainstream media have a death wish”.

The silence from the NZ Media was deafening re the rout of the Labour party in the UK elections, they all got a call from the ninth floor to STFU. However, the electoral death of the the Labour Party in the UK will parallel itself here.

Do our mainstream media have a death with.
The TV news was still besotted with the Austrian and numerous other murders and accidental deaths and meaningless stuff about sharks and the like.
I wonder if TVOne would have ignored the result if it had been a Labour victory.

And as a matter of interest, the congestion charging in London had absolutely no impact on Air quality.

And is seems Auckland under the guidance of absolutely incompetent leaders is talking of builiding tunnels under the harbour and the FIRST two will be for rail. Don’t they know they already have a bus lane and don ‘t they know there is no point in building a rail tunnel when there is NO rail network for it to connect to?
What does the word RAIL do to the human mind. Of course Lenin loved trains and they were a powerful symbol of the revolution but that was some time ago.

You both are breathlessly predicting a Republican rout. The higher levels of turnout in the Democrat Primaries gets cited as the “enthusiasm gap”. Of course the turnout is high when you’ve got the clash of the titans going on. Of course what the left’s cheerleaders forget is the same 2 or 3 – 1 gap between the Dems and GOP PRIMARY voters occured in …1980 and 1988 – two other years with a contested Democrat primary and the result was …. oh that’s right a Democrat rout each time.

McCain leads Obama and Clinton in most head to head polls – Obama is sinking gradually under the weigth of his objectionable and left leaning associations and yet the Dems seem intent on electing him. Nothing would please McCain more than to fight the neophyte dove. Recent opinion on the war in Iraq has shifted in the US but the anti-war left is clinging to old polls and last year’s narrative. Americans still dont like this war but there is now a plurality who want to give Petraeus the benefit of the doubt to consolidate the demonstrable gains made with his change of strategy. Both Clinton and Obama have bowed to the anti-war leftwing faction of their own party in promising as quick a retreat of troops as possible – a policy that is not out of step with US opinion.

The Democrat candidates have indeed raised more money than the GOP contenders but they’ve squandered it fighting each other for so long. When you look at the down-the-ticket fund raising numbers, the RNC has almost 5 times as much money to fight Congressional races as the DNC and that’s with the Hillary Obama race still yet to go another month. The fund raising gap will be nowhere near as great come the autumn general election and, as we’ve seen with Obama’s 3 -1 spends in OH, PA and TX and Romney’s huge money advantage over Huckabee and McCain, money doesn’t guarantee you win.

Ken hung himself and deserves all he’s getting. I spent my afternoon today at Boris’s first press conference and it was great to see a mayor so up front and passionate about the city of London. Ken can sod off to his mate Hugos house as far as I care.

Gold, pure comedy gold.

Are you seriously suggesting that the support of a single London newspaper editor is responsible for the Boris Johnson win?

If editors were that powerful, polititians wouldn’t bother to campaign at all. And you omitted to explain how the fevered opposition of the Guardian, the Independent and the Daily Mirror somehow failed to cancel out the overwhelming force of the Standard’s support.

Red Ken lost because people were tired of him. He was seeking a third term. He has looked increasingly arrogant and out of touch. There are serious unanswered allegations of corruption and cronyism in city hall. And finally, he ran an extraordinarily negative campaign, based entirely around demonising Boris. It didn’t work.

Does that sound at all familiar to anyone here?

The Liberals in Australia got their kicking a few months back. Iraq and the lies they told to get Australia into that mess also featured in the defeat.

In the US, voting turnout suggests that the Republicans are in collapse and – again – their performance in relation to Iraq and its consequences feature largely.

In Canada, the relatively newly re-formed Conservative Party are being held at bay, hemmed in by minority government. They can’t get high enough in the polls as they are crippled by wider voter antipathy to their agenda, closely tied to the US conservative agenda as it is. Canadians soldiers coming home every month in body bags from Afghanistan is a constant reminder of the serious failures of the broader US foreign policy that got Canada into that quagmire.

Here in New Zealand, the Labour party can be said to have run its course. Perhaps too much has been made of its failings and not enough of its successes, but that is all debatable. The core question is: Will National be any better? For example, how will policies that give even more power to employers to sack workers for no reason, like the 90-day probation policy, result in higher wages? Under existing policies there is ample evidence wages can’t rise to match rising prices. I can’t see how reducing the power of workers further will improve that situation. I would think we would se even more people flee to Australia to escape the low-wage policy regime already operating here. It’s been in place since the Employment Contracts Act came in under National in the early 90s and Labour did litle to change it. Wages have been under pressure ever since, while profits have often been spectacular.

So…is there a great wheel turning to conservatism worldwide? I can’t see it. The two prospects for tory parties in the offing are the two places where they have been kept out of power for so long due to the animosity they earned in prior cycles: NZ in the 90s and the UK under Thatcher. Neither country wants to return to those days. But at the same time, they may well want to rid themselves of a government that have grown tired of. That is certainly the case in the UK where Iraq is relevant in a way that it simply is not here.

I think the gap will narrow between Labour and National as the year goes on as more focus comes onto policies. Certainly, though, Labour is always in danger of the exhibiting the arrogance that got them into trouble in the first place.

Getting too excited guys – it’s just the usual swings.

Yes and no, Paul. Labour had its worse local body election result — and lowest share of the popular vote — in almost sixty years, which I wouldn’t dismiss quite that glibly. Especially if I was a Labour backbencher in a marginal seat, who’d seen my constituents give their Labour councillors the middle finger salute. It’s certainly not a ‘usual swing” for Conservatives to win overall control of councils in places like Bury and North Tyneside. I think David Cameron is striking the right note — great achievement, but there’s still a lot of work to do and no room for complacency.

You boys heard of Australia? Did you miss the flogging that Howard got earlier this year??

Yes and apparently yes.

I’ve heard of Australia. Now what flogging this year might you be referring to?

The message we should take from all this? Governments that are in power too long get stale and the voters don’t like it. And Helen is in trouble.