Sometimes, I just want to give John Cole a big piece of cake…

…because he brightens my day with an awesome rant like this.

Nice one, John – you should take your righteous anger out for a walk more often.

ETA: As the missus pointed out to me, the thing at the end about being antagonistic is a little ill-considered, but that’s just our JC.

Johnson’s Election

Well, they did it. Boris Johnson is now London Mayor.¹ I’m aware that this comes a few days after the actual event; I do have a life, people.

Labour suffers big council losses

Labour is on course to suffer its worst performance in at least 40 years in the local elections in England and Wales.

BBC research suggests the party has fallen into third place nationally with 24% of votes, with the Conservatives on 44% and Lib Dems on 25%.

So far Labour has lost more than 160 seats with the Tories gaining 147.

Conservative leader David Cameron called it a “big moment”. Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman said the results were “very disappointing indeed”.

But Labour’s chief whip Geoff Hoon insisted there was “no crisis” for Gordon Brown.

‘Exceptional results’
The margin is similar to the drubbing received by Tory Prime Minister John Major in council elections in 1995, two years before he was ejected from Downing Street by Tony Blair.

Emphasis mine.

Just goes to show.

Local elections are a somewhat useful thermometer for the general health of government; by this measure, it appears the Brown regime has colon cancer.

Nothing much will change, inasmuch as actual policy is concerned; local government powers are actually mostly limited to administration and the like. Setting their own budgets is about as powerful as most of them get, so the effects may consist at most of some kind of slow down, and even that’s not a given.

The larger effect will be in a kind of feedback loop – the people don’t like the Government and inflict a massive blow on its credibility, which causes more people to consider voting outside the Labour field, and so on.

I’m trying to think of an apt simile here, but it escapes me; that aside, the Brown government is on its way out.

Rough Draught: Parliament

Before I go into the exact details of the system I have in mind, I’d like to go over a few details. This is for explanatory purposes – partly for any readers who may not understand the different usages and terminology and partly to discuss why I think they should or should not be used.

A few questions for my fellow English Nationalists…

We all want our own Parliament and government – without half-baked, disenfranchising measures like the “Regions” or a Grand Committee in the UK Parliament.

We all have different political viewpoints; on observation, many of you seem to be centrist or centre-right in your politics, while I am a democrat, republican and syndicalist.

That all being said, what form do you envisage for our Parliament? I have a few ideas of my own, but I’d be really interested in finding out what you see our eventual national assembly looking like. Would it be a bicameral clone of the UK Parliament? A unicameral form like those used in Scotland and Wales? Would it be first past the post or PR?