Posted by National anger at the Labour Party has allowed two British National Party candidates – including its Leader Nick Griffin, who has a spent criminal conviction – to win seats in the European Parliament in the North of England.
The party has also been pushed in to fifth place in the South of England by the Green Party, although its number of seats has not changed. Nationally, with Scotland and Northern Ireland yet to declare, Labour came in third, behind the Conservatives and UKIP.
The BNP, described recently by Lord Tebbit as ‘Labour With Racism‘, took seats from Labour in the North West (Nick Griffin) and Yorkshire and the Humber (Andrew Brons), causing accusations that Labour’s failing government was to blame for the ‘terribly sad moment‘.
Labour’s Deputy Leader Harriet Harman was forced to admit that they had suffered a ‘very dismal result‘ in the European elections, facing the worst defeat since 1922.
In the South East, which includes Medway, and in the South West, Labour came fifth, trailing behind Conservatives, UKIP, Lib Dems and even the Green Party. Although no seats changed in the South East, in the South West, Labour lost one of their two MEPs to the Conservatives.
The result will put even more pressure on Gordon Brown, who is today facing a crunch meeting with the Parliamentary Labour Party, to resign.
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Yes: looking at the votes — whose went up, whose went down, and where the “lost” votes ended up — shows very clearly that it was Labour’s failure to hold much of their vote from 2004 that allowed the BNP to get two seats. the change in number of seats for the UK from 78 in 2004 to 72 this time will have had a small effect at the fringes, but nowhere near enough to produce this outcome.
This is the more remarkable as the electoral methodology — based of huge multi-member regions — makes it very difficult to change party in any seat. This is why most results this time were exactly as they were five years ago, after allowing for the seat reductions.
Effectively, only seven seats changed hands, resulting in just five overall seat changes. This is remarkable in the present climate.
One of the biggest putters-off to voters in regard to the Euro elections is this lack of power to make a real change, rather than what the media prefer to suggest. We aren’t even picking those for whom we vote in the Euros — each party lists its candidates in the party’s preferred order.
If we’d had a decent electoral system in operation, the results would have been significantly different. For one thing, it is almost certain that we’d have no BNP MEPs…
John is right – attending the count last night it was clear that the Labour vote had collapsed. Apathy and direct transfers to minority parties were evident.
Im also assuming that a large % of UKIP voters would transfer to the Tories in a General Election. This fact is not remarked upon by pundits. A key theme is the movement towards right-of-centre parties. Low turnouts also favour the right-of-centre parties.
There is no way to hide the facts that the results were very very poor for Labour.
The worrying trend was the number of votes for the BNP in Medway which remains stubbornly high. More work needs to be done from all parties to challenge this threat.
Medway has highest BNP vote in the South East Region 7.9% and is probably the only Place in the South East where the BNP out polled the Greens
As the two preceding comments indicate, Medway has become a target area in the county for the BNP, and they have been fielding candidates here since the 2003 local elections.
This has allowed them to build up enough patronage to out-do the Greens, as was shown most clearly in the single-seat by-election last year. The BNP received 257 votes on that occasion, and the Greens just 104.
Of course, all this was overshadowed by our Trevor’s vote of 1,847, which shows that the minor parties are unlkikely to win any seats here in the foreseeable future — provided we don’t end up with oddball voting systems and huge multi-member constituencies that could allow them inagainst the people’s overall wishes..
2 BNP MEP NOW—- THE MAJORITY ON THE COMMONS TOMMORROW. HELL WE NEED BNP IN U.S.A. & CANADA. THANKS TO THE SOCIALIST FASCIST DEMOCRATIC PARTY IN THE USA WE MAY JUST HAVE A BNP ANSWER TO THE BANKRUPT DEMOCRATS & REPUBLICANS VERY VERY SOON, THANKS TO THE MESSIAH BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA. IN CANADA TWEEDLE STUPID “LIBERAL PARTY” & TWEEDLE STUPIDER THE “SO-CALLED PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE PARTY” SAME **** DIFFERENT PILE.
Before we all bang on about how Nick Griffin has a spent criminal conviction, I would like to point out that Harriet Harman was found in contempt of court by Sir Hugh Park in the important civil liberties case, Home Office v. Harman, the conviction for contempt being upheld on appeal, before becoming MP for Peckham in a by-election in 1982.
People are only voting BNP due to the rubbish job that the maim three political parties are doing with our country and our peoples rights, any party that promises to look after those who are native to our country instead of the foreigners and illegal immigrants will do well as the population are sick of becoming second rate citizens in their own country, the three main parties need to realise this and fix it before it is too late..
The Nazi’s rise to power was very similar to the current climate and BNP rise, history is their for a reason – it allows us to avoid mistakes of the past, for Christ sake use it!