So, local election results. Rant forthcoming.

My ward's still Labour, unsurprisingly. Labour 2369, Lib Dem 1639, PJP 510 and Conservative 500. What amused me, though, is that for the first time in 19 years, Labour have lost control of Birmingham City Council. They have a simple but not an absolute majority - if the other three parties get together to vote against them, they're fucked. Good. As well as the war thing, and the public services thing, there's the thing where their bid to be European Capital of Culture involves bulldozing any visible sign of Victorian or older buildings and marketplaces, and dumping yuppie flats in the gay and Irish quarters, and near pubs that (at least, until the yuppies start whining) play yer actual live music. Assholes.

Various other wards... Moseley's a sad example of how protest voting can go wrong. Left vote split three ways between Labour, Lib Dems and Greens, with the result that an illiterate (I kid ye not. He cannot punctuate. He has sentences without verbs) Conservative whom everyone hates got in. The British National Party (scum scum scum scum scum *spit*) came fourth in Longbridge, with the council's sole openly gay candidate winning the seat. Can we point and laugh triumphantly now please? Sadly, the BNP did win seats in Dudley, Sandwell and, of course, Burnley. National Front candidates (worse! *spit*) stood in Stockland Green and Kingstanding, but thankfully lost. They did not by any means come last, however.

Now, there is a viewpoint that says one can understand how people vote far-right, what with those nasty asylum seekers and underfunded council estates etc. No, one can't. Asylum seekers are a scapegoat, pure and simple: abandoning our humanitarian and international responsibilities will not make the public services magically work. Sorry. Nor will putting the sins of the tribe into a goat and driving it off a cliff. As for underfunded council estates - well, if someone's stupid enough to vote racist to solve a problem of funding and caring, I have a hard time believing that they are compos mentis enough to vote at all.

There is another viewpoint that says I shouldn't slag off these areas just because some extremist voted in them. Local elections have a turnout of about 30%. This favours extremist parties - if you care enough to turn out, chances are your politics border on the fanatical. So, if you know that the BNP or National Front (altogether now: *spit*) are standing in your area, and can't be bothered to turn out to vote for someone who might defeat them, then yes, it is your fucking fault.

*Sigh* Talking to Sarah about this earlier, she pointed out that when the BNP did vaguely well last year, everyone was horrified. Now, it's as though they accept it as some spontaneous and unstoppable force - they'll wring their hands, but they won't talk about how to stop it. Parties that run the spectrum from merely racist, sexist and homophobic to sheer neo-nazi should never be accepted. Time to get rid of the fuckers. And I'd like to start by banning the tabloids from making blatantly inflammatory comments about asylum seekers - is inciting racial hatred a crime or not? (For the uninitiated, it is.) 1 I rest my case. Can we not see a slippery slope when it's in front of us? You don't smack down an extremist party when they're in power - it's largely too late then. You smack down an extremist party when they're initially flexing their muscles, and have too little power to cause too much damage. You don't wait, wringing your hands and wailing about council estates and asylum seekers and maybe they have a point. They do not have a fucking point.

¹ Esther Addley interviewing Simon Darby, G2 (Guardian supplement), 30th April 2003, p. 7.