Labour gets trounced

3:35PM ON 05/02/2008
BY Dave Segal

Crazy. And nice to see the Lib Dems starting to get their act together, even if their website is still completely unmanageable.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s governing Labour Party was crushed in local elections and seemed set to lose the London mayoralty Friday in results dubbed a “bloodbath” by commentators. In a rout which augurs badly for general elections due within two years, Brown — facing the polls for the the first time since taking office last June — oversaw his party’s worst local election results since the 1960s….

Labour finished third behind the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, the BBC’s results showed, 11 years to the day since Brown’s predecessor Tony Blair swept into office on a landslide of popularity.

The Conservatives did indeed take the Mayor’s office in London. (A majoritarian decision, as London is one of the larger jurisdictions to use instant runoff voting.) Leftist Ken Livingstone was ousted. He’d initially won as an indy, taking on the Labour machine, which had used a superdelegate system to deny him their nomination for Mayor in 2000:

Labour chose its official candidate on February 20, 2000. Although Livingstone received a healthy majority of the total votes, he nevertheless lost the nomination to former Secretary of State for Health Frank Dobson, under a controversial system in which votes from sitting Labour MPs and MEPs were weighted more heavily than votes from rank-and-file members.^[13] On March 6, Livingstone announced that he would run against Dobson as an independent, confirming speculation that he would renege on his earlier pledge. He was suspended from the Labour Party the same day and expelled on April 4. Tony Blair said that Livingstone as mayor would be a “disaster” for London; he later said he was wrong in that prediction.^[14]