By Election blues

The Main Stream Media (MSM) were unanimous in declaring the Sedgefield and Ealing Southall by elections as disasters for the Conservative party. I thought it seemed pretty bad for Labour but decided it wasn't worth blogging about Labour holding two very safe seats albeit with a reduced vote, then I heard Jack Straw on BBC radio demanding the time he had been promised to denigrate the Conservative by election performance. Today I found a nice article on www.politicalbetting.com showing the results in a nice easy to follow table, that even a modern day A level Maths student could follow. In Sedgefield the Labour vote dropped by 14.1%, the Lib Dems rose by 8% and the Conservatives rose by 0.2%; seems somewhat more disastrous for Labour to me. More surprisingly the BNP took 8.9% of the votes up from nowhere at the General Election. In Ealing Southall, Labour lost 7.5%, the Liberal Democrats gained 3.3% and the Conservatives gained 0.9%.

I was about to type that I cannot see how this can be represented as a Conservative polling disaster and then I realised that that is how the Labour Government and hence the BBC want to portray it. The BBC hero worshipped Tony Blair from well before the 1997 election until just before the Iraq invasion, whilst dismissing all Conservatives as "nasty". The attacks on Blair whilst being slightly softer on David Cameron were merely a hiatus in the campaign. Now that Gordon Brown is safely in power, the arse licking of a Labour PM has re-started and the Conservatives must be ridiculed and put down at every opportunity.

Labour used to bleat that the Media was against them in the 1980s and it was true that most of the papers were, although not the BBC who longed for a Labour win, remember my previous post where the BBC's Jane Garvey said remembering election night 1997 "I do remember I walked back in...and the corridors of Broadcasting House were strewn with empty champagne bottles. [Hearty laugh from Peter Allen] I'll always remember that". Now the BBC still as Jane Garvey put it "was in love with Labour" as are much of the newspapers, especially the Daily Mail who seem to love Gordon Brown with an almost indecent passion.