Local & London Mayoral Elections: Results, Quotes and Comments .........

Labour has just sunk to its worst performance for forty years in Thursday's elections in England and Wales.

Even the Liberal Democrats saw off Labour and received second place in the number of votes cast.

The breakdown of voting was: Conservatives 44%; Lib Dems 25%; Labour 24%.

If this pattern of voting is repeated in the next general election, the Tories could have a majority in the Commons of 100 MPs.

With all 159 councils declared, the figures below speak for themselves, with Labour losing 331 councillors and overall control of a third of the councils they held.

The 'other' figure includes 100 British National Party councillors, which is a new record for the Party.

The Liberal Democrats only managed to hold onto Liverpool because an Independent Labour councillor joined them thus giving the Lib Dems 46 of the 90 seats on the City Council.

Yesterday, Londoners had to wait until almost midnight to know for sure that Ken Livingston had been ousted as London's Mayor by Boris Johnson.

First Preference Votes in London were as follows:

• Boris Johnson (Con): 1,043,761
• Ken Livingstone (Lab): 893,877
• Brian Paddick (Lib Dem): 236,685
• Sian Berry (Green): 77,374
• Richard Barnbrook (BNP): 69,710
• Alan Craig (Christian Choice): 39,249
• Gerard Batten (UKIP): 22,422
• Lindsey German (Left List): 16,796
• Matt O'Connor (Eng Democrats): 10,695
• Winston McKenzie (Ind): 5,389

A breakdown of the vote in each area can be found here.

Livingstone polled 135,089 votes as second preference, about ten thousand more than Johnson, but Boris defeated his main opponent by nearly 140,000 votes in total to become the new Mayor of a great city with many problems caused by years of neglect in many areas and Labour's intensive programme of social engineering based on political correctness, mass immigration, incremental conditioning, monitoring and control.

The reaction from Labour MPs to their party's dismal failure is typically bizarre.

• Former Home Secretary David Blunkett said: "We've got to get a grip and we've got to build on the progress we've made but we can't rest on what we've done. It's about what we promise people for the world of tomorrow."
  
  
• Communities Secretary Hazel Blears told the BBC: "I think it's been a very, very bad night for us. It's a big message and there's two years to go and basically the message is get a grip, sort things out."

• Gordon Brown said, "the challenge of leadership is to take the country through difficult times, as well as through good times. The challenges show that we have the strength and the resolution, as well as the conviction and ideas to take the country forward."

• Gordon Brown: “It’s clear to me that this has been a bad night for Labour. We have lessons to learn and then we will move forward. My job is to listen and to lead and that is what I will do.”

• Gordon Brown: “We face testing economic circumstances with rising fuel and food bills and uncertainty about mortgages and about bank lending." “People want to be assured that the government will steer them through these tough times."

They give the impression that the past eleven years of power was just a dry run and we should now expect them to finally get the hang of the simple premise of listening and acting accordingly.

And at times like these they always reassure us that they will 'move forward' which can mean absolutely anything at all as time ensures we all 'move forward'. It is what we do in that time that is important and Labour cannot be trusted to utilise those days, months and years ahead for the betterment of our country.

They speak as if they are rookie businessmen trying to run a snack bar and have failed to offer their customers popular sandwich fillings, but promise to 'get a grip' and start 'listening' and 'move forward' by offering a promising range of delicious pastries (all empty and stale, of course).

They should think about doing a U-turn and reversing some of their ridiculous decisions and new authoritarian laws.

Justice Secretary Jack Straw said that Labour as a whole should take the blame for Livingstone's loss. He told BBC News: "I disagree with Ken in one particular only, that we all share the responsibility for the defeat that he suffered yesterday."

He said that the row over the 10p tax rate had left some voters "understandably very upset".

That and hundreds of other aspects of a traitorous and immoral regime, Mr. Straw, like using lies to engage in disastrous wars and handing more of our sovereignty to the EU without so much as the promised referendum.

Hedge fund boss David Pitt-Watson waited until after the polls closed to confirm that he would not be taking up the position of General Secretary of the Labour Party in part fearing he may be financially responsible if it went bankrupt.

All-in-all, a rather nasty couple of days for Labour - hopefully the start of their final and permanent reward for their gross maladministration.