The Local Council elections yesterday have provided a few interesting results – the Conservatives, (our so called official opposition) won 35% of the votes, Labour and the Liberals won 30% each and all this on a dismal turnout of about 30% of the eligible electorate.

Two items I thought interesting were the collapse of the Muslim vote bank in Birmingham and the success of the British National Party in Burnley. The former resulted in Labour losing control of the Council in Birmingham for the first time in about 20 years and the latter has propelled the BNP into the position of being the second largest party in Burnley.

I debated these issues with Khalid about a week ago where I suggested that tactical voting by Muslims could be fraught with difficulty and would result in success for the BNP.

In reality, the Muslim tactical voting resulted in success for the Liberal party for the relevant council seats in Birmingham but it looks like it was the collapse of the traditional white working class votes in Burnley that lost Labour those council seats. So the one didn’t directly affect the other but both taken together were symptomatic of a more general malaise.

Blair’s New Labour is rapidly losing the plot and the impoverished intellectual and moral state of the official opposition party means that Iraq isn’t the only country that may suffer from a post war political vacuum.

Labour’s Shaheed Malik asks us to ‘put things into perspective’ by citing the statistic that the BNP has won only 16 out of the 22000 local council seats available in the country. That’s just not the point! – I imagine that the BNP are, to many working class whites, starting to look like a credible opposition.

I can almost understand these people like you or even me!