Here comes the flood. posted by Richard Seymour

It's all going downhill for the government. Amid the highest levels of discontent with the government since 1997, Labour expects to lose 400 councillors. A total of 4,361 seats are up for grabs, so this would represent a substantial haemhorrage. Apparently, a recent spate of issues, from cash-for-peerages to Prescott's affair has consolidated a major decline in the support for the government from Labour supporters (don't ask me why), which is why much of the shift is predicted to be to parties actually or perceived as to the left of the government. The Tories are said to be gaining little, but smaller parties are eroding the Labour vote - inevitably the biggest beneficiary of this process will be the Lib Dems, with their terrible, crooked, privatising record.

The Greens look like they're picking up in a few Labour areas too, such as in Norwich (for some reason, that makes perfect sense). Obviously, Labour are talking up the threat from the fascist filth. As noted here before, they are more likely to eat into the Tory vote, but a number of issues and events have come along to assist them. There is no telling what effect this silly 'scandal' over the failure to deport some migrants who had allegedly been criminals will have, but one suspects the BNP have been milking it, juxtaposing it with their fabrications about an 'Africans for Essex' scheme and so on. Labour's bigging up of the BNP will certainly have given the scum a propaganda boost. The press also have a habit of backing up the BNP's central propaganda claims while formally disavowing their racism by denouncing the beneficiaries of their lies, and this has well-documented effects. At the moment, the BNP have 24 councillors, and all of them are brain-dead, feckless incompetents. I wouldn't be surprised to see a substantial increase in the number of Nazi doorknobs in local government.

Respect has a challenge going on in London, the West Midlands, Preston and a few other areas besides, but Labour doesn't like to talk about us. We'll see how the East End looks by the end of the night. At least 9 councillors in Tower Hamlets, the Telegraph predicted. I'd expect more across the East End as a whole, a few in Preston and certainly some in Birmingham after Salma Yaqoob's performance last year. If I'm right about that, it will be a huge breakthrough.

Weird thing: a number of media outlets are describing the apparently high turnout as being due to the sunshine. As if the first thing you think when the temperature hits 26 degrees is: "I must take this opportunity to ensure that the Liberal Democrats are rewarded for their sound fiscal policies!"