Final score

Well. Here it is. The final count of the disaster that was the English local council elections.

Tories are down 27%. This should be a very strong message to Kim Jong May but she is, of course, ignoring it.

Labour are down 4%. Twitter is full of Lefties crowing that the Tories were hit far harder than Labour and on the basis of those numbers, they are right. However, Labour are in opposition to the most appallingly useless Tory government since John ‘Monochrome Man’ Major’s day, and facing possibly the most universally despised Prime Monster ever to soil the hallowed carpets of 10 Downing Street. They should be several hundred seats up. In this situation, they still managed to lose 82 seats. That is not a figure to be proud of.

(Digression: I considered referring to John ‘Curry Dipper’ Major but I thought younger readers might not get the reference)

Lib Dems and Greens are way up. Remainers claim this is an endorsement of those partys’ consistent Remain stance and that it means the country wants to remain in the EU.

What they conveniently, and deliberately, overlook is that Remain voters who wanted nothing to do with Tories or Labour had an option. They could go to Lib Dem or Green. Staunch remain parties.

Brexit voters had nowhere to go in most councils. I hear UKIP didn’t put any real effort into the council elections. Makes sense. UKIP councillors can’t push Brexit. Better to save those campaign funds for the EU elections in three weeks. The Brexit Party is too new to have had time to field council candidates and anyway, councillors are no use to them. This is good, they remain the joker in the pack and nobody can predict what will happen at EU elections. Buy shares in popcorn now.

So, Brexit voters would have either spoiled their ballots or simply not bothered to vote. The Lib Dem/Green boost is all down to Remainer votes. Brexiter votes would have been spoiled or gone to independents or small local parties where these were avialable. If no Brexit alternative was available, I’m betting a hell of a lot of Brexit people just didn’t bother to vote.

The independents more than doubled the seats they hold. I like the idea of more independent councillors. As both the dying main parties insisted, council votes are about local issues, not about the parties. So councillors should be local people, interested in solving local problems, not directed from some distant head office on which Common Purpose bollocks to inflict on their local people that day.

More independents, please. They will work on local issues without being directed from above to waste money on the latest PC nonsense from the main parties.

Well, we have three weeks until the EU elections. My bet is that the EU really don’t want them to happen but Tessie Maybe does. Remainers want them to happen because the council results have convinced them they’ll win. Tessie is taking the result as a ringing endorsement of her stupid ‘we want to be your slaves please master’ deal.

This illusion of Remain supremacy will make them all complacent. I suspect the EU, especially No One Drunker and Guy Thermostat, will have looked at the results and possibly become complacent too. Tessie is in a world of her own and the Tories are happy to leave her in there with her unicorns and her fantasy deals.

I will stay up to watch the EU election results. I’ll get a bottle of the really good stuff in and plenty of popcorn. I have a feeling it’s going to be a very entertaining night.

The morning after, I expect to hear shrieks of ‘Russia!’ through my hangover.