Labour lose Derbyshire to the Tories

Vulture

At last! You might also wake to the fact that Liebour have lost Staffordshire and Lancashire too!

TrevorsDen

Isn't this the most utterly shambolic labour reshuffle ever - and given the history of the last 12 years thats really saying something ???

I mean when Beckett walks off in a huff because she has not been promoted - I mean how do you defend that??

Brown is it seems giving a press conference. It will be interesting to see just how ineptly the press hacks handle this one.

Verity

I think you meant to refer to a bell-wether. It has nothing to do with the weather.

Paul B

Excellent result, along with with the Conservatives gaining Somerset off the Liberals.Its turning blue.

egh

Ah well, Verity...
Whether the weather be hot
Whether the weather be cold
Whether the weather be [wether] or not...

Sick is the state of Denmark!!!

Mel King

What a shame for all those whose services will be slashed to ribbons now. The protest vote is going to hurt a lot of vulnerable people.

Susan Hill

Derbyshire has been one of the most solidly Labour councils for donkeys' years so that really is the writing on the w. I can hardly believe it - Derbyshire going TORY .. jeeez.

Dan Brusca

My particular ward in Derbyshire has had the same Conservative councillor for 40 years!

Hysteria

Verity - interesting - I never knew this

A bellwether is any entity in a given arena that serves to create or influence trends or to presage future happenings.

The term is derived from the Middle English bellewether and refers to the practice of placing a bell around the neck of a castrated ram (a wether) leading its flock of sheep.[1][2] The movements of the flock could be noted by hearing the bell before the flock was in sight.

There must be some clever comment re Brown , Balls etc but damned if I can think of one !!

Erik Bloodaxe

Mel King, services will be slashed come what may, because Brown has run out of our money.

David Lindsay

The removal of Labour from even Opposition status across great tracts of the English countryside, and the removal of the Lib Dems from the running of certain counties, is as big a story as the banishment of the Tories from the council chambers of the great Northern and Midland cities.

The Rural Myth is that the Tories have some sort of ancestral right to represent the countryside in Parliament. But that is contrary to the plain facts of history.

Moreover, in the "long nineteenth century" glory days of the old Liberal Party, and in the early days of the Labour Party (wholly mistakenly assumed to have been a purely urban phenomenon), those MPs returned by agricultural workers and smallholders, and those trade union leaders (often the same people, such as Joseph Arch) who represented those interests, were frequently more radical than their urban-based brethren in demanding democracy, liberty and social justice. In this, they fully represented the views of their constituents and of their members.

And such views are still widely and deeply held in rural Britain. Indeed, much of today's lack of radicalism in the face of rampant poverty, ignorance, ill health, squalor, homelessness, unemployment, war, corruption and anti-democratic practice is attributable to the silencing of those voices.

It is very high time to make them heard again.

Ben Elford

Bellwether, bellwether. Even if you don't have a sub-editor, you don't have to make mistakes like that.

Verity

Ben Elford, agreed. Hysteria, it most often was a year-old castrated ram or calf, but usually a ram. Anyway, the wether who wore the bell to lead the rest of the flock was the bellwether.