Parkinson's heart

Rubber-gloved cleaners at BBC News Online must have been busy last night with the Mr. Muscle in their Forth Bridge task of dusting, drying and polishing the glass-topped tables used by the authors of this little gem.

Win for Labour in key by-election

Labour has kept control of Barnsley Council after retaining a key ward in a by-election.

Roy Butterwood received 1,520 votes to take the St Helens ward seat and maintain the party's majority of one.

BNP candidate Lisa Brooksbank came second, receiving 590 votes in the election, which recorded a 31% turnout.

Barnsley Council leader Steve Houghton said the result was "tremendous" but that Labour had a lot of hard work to do before next year's general election.

Britain’s special needs Prime Minister will be grateful to hear that if epic understatement in the face of abject humiliation is the electoral campaign formation that will revive the Labour Party’s electoral fortunes, then Steve Houghton is bold Leonidas and the Barnley Labour Party his brave Three Hundred.

ST HELENS BY-ELECTION RESULT

Roy Butterwood, Labour: 1520

Lisa Brooksbank, BNP: 590

Daniel Clive Pickering, Barnsley Independent Group: 171

Neil Robinson, UKIP: 94

Clive Watkinson, Conservative: 89

Eddie Gouthwaite, Liberal Democrat: 78

Turnout = 31%

Total votes cast 2542

Labour plus BNP votes cast 2110

Let’s do some non-climate change model maths with this, shall we?

I know, I know: the richly-funded private schools have all the best teachers and physics, plus superior literature and arithmetic and so they monopolise the Laws of Thermodynamics, Shakespeare, and 2+2=4, whereas those of us unlucky enough to be educated in the state sector have to use poor and ineffective substitutes (as all exam results throughout the land show every single year) such as: bad teachers; the Phlogiston Theory; The Collected Tracy Beaker and 2+2=fuckoffmiss, but we’ll do what we can regardless.

The BNP got 38% as many votes as Labour. BBC to English translation – assuming that the independents, Tories and Glib Dems were largely middle class, then 27% of Labour’s hardcore and founding demographic out voted for the Nationalists.

The BNP received 23% of the total vote.

23 out of hundred Barnsley folk willing to get off the sofa this time did so for a party that rejects immigration and immigrant values, abhors Labour’s non-punishment criminal justice system, and Labour’s willingness to spill British blood in far-off countries of which (I’d guess) many Barnsley folk know rather too much.

When asked if he thought the BNP might have won, Mr Butterwood said: "They thought there was a good chance of increasing their result and reducing the majority.

"I'm sure they're very disappointed with the result."

At this point the BBC journalist’s mobile credit ran out and so he/she was unable to pursue the truth of the matter all the way to the second most successful a candidate. He/she must have been similarly devastated not to be able to interview the trounced candidate of the national party most likely to form the government of, and agree to the design of postage stamps for, the nuclear armed county council that is the government of the UK region of Europe next year. Still, nice to end up with the one and only quotation as anti-BNP and from the mouth of the Labour victor.

The vote followed the death of David Bostwick earlier this year.

Labour, which held nearly all the seats in Barnsley in 1997, would have lost overall control of the council for the first time since the 1930s if it had not retained the seat.

BBC to English translation: This is a place where traditionally they don’t count Labour votes: they weigh them, but you need to chuck about a quarter of the votes into the box labelled by the managed media and the national Westminster parties as ‘Evil Incarnate.’

So, from not existing in 1981 to owning one of the four chambers of Barnsley’s working class heart, that’s not bad going for the BNP.

The Tories got to play the part of the dumb, flat-chested co-ed blonde to the chainsaw-wielding maniac of the white working class as usual in Milltown’s Inferno, and the Liberal Democrats were her plain-Jane brunette room-mate who almost makes it back to the house after getting her insulin from the station wagon in the next scene. I’m sorry to say that my own favoured UKIP barely got the rusty old shotgun loaded before a pair of gauntleted hands flung them to the ground in the penultimate reel.

These numbers won’t translate nationwide of course as Barnsley was until recently a political monopoly where the other national parties with Westminster representation just don’t make it ever. It’s that kind of town.

But still and all, even with first-past-the-post still the norm in proper British elections, what this says for Labour’s standing in its own heartlands is not something about which the BBC cares to speculate.

And as to why the BNP did so well; nary a dicky-bird.

The rest is £800,000,000 per year BBC silence.