16 June (Part 3) - Didn’t he do well?
Immediately after last week’s election I listened to the local Labour people
bandying around so many impressive statistics that one might have thought they had won.
Their skill with the mental arithmetic was far and away in advance of their
Shadow Home Secretary’s and I asked if they could shoot the basics across to me
for a weekend feature - last weekend that is.
Maybe they were in no hurry to cease the celebrations because the numbers did
not immediately materialise but it was clear from the overall result that theirs was a very good one.
As you can see, in all three Bexley seats the Labour candidate increased their share of
the vote more than the Conservative candidate. UKIP beat the Lib Dems in all three too.
Councillor
Danny Hackett (with his agent Councillor Daniel Francis) did particularly well
in Old Bexley & Sidcup and kindly supplied some historical data.
His 14,079 votes exceeds anything Labour achieved there since the Blair landslide in 1997.
The prospect of what I had seen as a probable wipe out of Labour at the Bexley Council
elections in May 2018 now seems to be a distant memory.
I have no time whatever for the Labour party nationally. Their leadership
organising a protest tomorrow to try to reverse last week’s
result represents everything I dislike about the Labour party but I do not know
of any Bexley Labour politician who thinks that is a good idea, least of all
strongly Blairite Danny Hackett.
Recent conversations with him and some of his colleagues reveal that they have
no wish to whack up Council Tax as they did in 2006 and given the dishonest
shower that currently runs this borough I would not be averse to seeing big changes in 2018.
I’m still hoping that a five year old police investigation into corruption in
Bexley will result in some embarrassing submissions to the Crown Prosecution
Service in the weeks leading up to the next election. It’s definitely not beyond
the bounds of possibiity.