# data[].attributes.body
Produced by Barnet Alliance.

Amazing video to watch.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
http://barnetalliance.org/ | Facebook: #OurBarnet | Twitter: @BarnetAlliance We are rallying to support local resident John Sullivan, who is seeking a Judicial Review of the One Barnet Programme on behalf of his daughter Susan. Please donate to the legal fund to support John and Susan save Barnet: http://barnetalliance.org/2012/11/23/help-john-save-barnet/ Please share this video and follow us on facebook and twitter.

# data[].attributes.body
Produced by Barnet Trades Council. Great video.

This is why we need to go out to vote on 3rd May 2018 to end all the madness from Barnet Tories & Capita.

We need to have a real change in Barnet before it's too late.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
london borough of barnet (london borough)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Barnet: The Disappearing Council - full version

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Barnet Trades Council commissioned Tim Sanders (cartoonist) & Hettie Griffiths (Film Editor) to produce this animation to show how Austerity is having an impact on our community in the London Borough of Barnet. Contact details for Tim Sanders Tims@commonknowledge.org.uk What is Barnet Trades Union Council (Barnet TUC)?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Here is some exciting news for you. The Barnet Eye has been working with the other Barnet bloggers and community campaigners on an exciting secret project. Unfortunately, I can't say too much more about it right now, but I can say this. We are looking for stories to tell in our community. We believe that our wonderful local community is being failed by our local council and by Capita, the contractors who they have sold the running of services to. On Monday night, many residents attended that Capita Service review at Hendon Town Hall. These were not what local Tories refer to as "The Usual Suspects". They were ordinary people, outraged at how local people are being ridden roughshod over by Capita's planning department. Local concerns are ignored in favour of rich developers and vested interest. Local democracy and accountability appear to be dead. We have identified various themes where there are recurring horror stories. These are

* The lack of democracy in Barnet as a result of Capita outsourcing. The removal of democratic control and the end of proper oversight of Council services. Local resident John Dix outlined the issues around this back in 2014. Everything he said inthis interview with The Barnet Eye has been proven to be correct

* Housing - Social cleansing of less well off tenants, towers clad in flamable panels and a chronic shortage of homes for families.

* Libaries - The Council has embarked on a massive program of cost cutting and closure by stealth. In Mill Hill, the Childrens Library has been cut and local people forced to step up and save the remaining bits, running the place in their precious spare time.
* Adult Social Care - We've have ten years of cuts, closure of services for disabled and vulnerable people, hiking of charges (even for things as trivial as coffee and biscuits at day centres), withdrawal of transport for the diabled and vulnerable, withdrawal of wardens from sheltered accomodation and a general decline in service standards. This video from 2012 shows a local resident discussing why he was forced to launch a legal challenge on behalf of his disabled daughter opposing changes to adult social care. Sadly the situation has not improved as a result of Capita.

* Cemeteries - Maintenance of Cemetaries has been outsourced to Capita and cemeteries that were previously kept in an immaculate state are now looking untidy and unkempt.

* High Streets - The council and its contractors declared war on our High Streets and retailers in 2011 by abolisshing Pay and Display parking. This lead to a slump in takings for many business, sadly most of which are no longer with us. This is well documented. More recently this has extended to aggressive use of bailiffs for minor delays in paying business rates and now we are seeing what appears to be aggressive tactics regarding waste removal. I spoke to a local trader who recieved a demand for £400 for fly tipping, which was apparently withdrawn by the council when the trader asked the council to provide evidence. This video from 2012 shows the anger of traders in North Finchley at the parking changes. Most of the traders seen in this video have since closed down
* Roads - Do you have a favourite pothole? Barnets roads, despite huge payments to contractors, are still riddled with Potholes. My road was resurfaced recently, however this is already crumbling. This is being reported all over Barnet.

These are just a few of the themes we've identified. Barnet is a big story. I went for lunch yesterday with a friend who is a Conservative Councillor in Wellingborough Town Council. They have recently been rated as excellent in an audit. I asked whether they were going down the Capita outsourcing route. He said that in the view of their council that would be bonkers. If anyone suggests it, he simply refers them to the Barnet blogs and points them at a few choice stories. This is not ideological. It is not anti Conservative. It is as simple as the fact that the Barnet Conservatives who brought this all in are simply not very good at running a council. We need a change. We either need the Conservatives to get real and dump these expensive contractors (did you know that if Capita identify a saving to the council, they are entitled to a cash payment of a percentage of the saving under the gainshare scheme). If the local Conservatives won't see sense (as Wellingborough have), then we need a new council after the elections next year. It is as simple as that.

To make this happen, we need to identify the whole Big Barnet Story. Do you have a chapter of this story? If so please get in touch.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Big Barnet Story! Do you have a chapter

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Here is some exciting news for you. The Barnet Eye has been working with the other Barnet bloggers and community campaigners on an exciting secret project. Unfortunately, I can't say too much more about it right now, but I can say this. We are looking for stories to tell in our community.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I was interviewed by a national paper five years ago, in regards to why I write the Barnet Eye blog. As often happens, the quotes they attributed to me were the ones I felt least important. One question they asked and did not publish was "what do you hope to achieve?". Well I've had four years to think about it. Here are the answers!

I have four political goals and one person goal for the blog. The four political goals are as follows.

1. To Persuade the councillors running Barnet Council that they can run a better organisation if they listen to local people.
2. To persuade the councillors running Barnet Council that they will be better able to do their job if they do their homework and read the background paperwork.
3. To persuade the people of Barnet that they need to make their voices heard.
4. To make sure the people of Barnet value the fantastic things our Borough has to offer, so we don't easily give them up, when vested interests wave cash or use influence to try and take them away.

The personal goal is as follows.
1. To write an entertaining and informative blog, that I personally can be proud of.

Now of course, a blogger cannot change anything, a blogger can only write a blog and hope that other people connect with it, enough to do something about the points raised. This blog has a track record of extraordinary success in doing this. One of the things which historically has been a strength is the guest blogs we publish. These always reach a wide audience. I have some excellent ones coming up, so watch this sI also produced two films ( A Tale of Two Barnets and Barnet - The Billion Pound Gamble) both of which gained national TV coverage and both packed the Phoenix cinema. I am starting work on a new project,to coincide with our tenth anniversary next year. This will catalog ten years of Barnet blogging. This film will be rather different to the last two. They were made for a specific goal, in a campaign. The new film will be a different beast, a far more thoughtful and less polemic film.

I really want to show more of what is good in Barnet. It would be great to get some proper interviews with the local politicians, but I really don't think most really 'get' what the blog is about. However most of it wont be about politics, most will simply be about what a great place we've got and the people who make it so good. That is the plan, it should be done by next May!

Here's a just few things I'd like to feature, although this will no doubt change as the project evolves.

Saracens, the best rugby club in Europe and a huge asset.
Mill Hill Music Complex, North West Londons leading music studios.
The University of London Observatory.
The Chandos Arms, Colindale, finalist for UK community pub of the year.
Thameslink and The Northern Line
Barnet museum and The RAF museum
The Arts Depot
The Bull Theatre
St Paul's Church and the Wilberforce legacy

I'd also like to look back on a few changes.
The closure of Church Farmhouse museum
Parking Issues
The Railway hotel in Edgware
Redevelopments in Colindale and Brent Cross
The Torrington

And finally, a look at various subcultures in our midst. Sound good?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I was interviewed by a national paper five years ago, in regards to why I write the Barnet Eye blog. As often happens, the quotes they attributed to me were the ones I felt least important. One question they asked and did not publish was "what do you hope to achieve?".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Something has been bothering me greatly of late. Next year we have council elections in for Barnet Council. The local opposition should be ramping up and making a push like never before to get rid of the tired and ineffective Conservative administration. Since I started blogging in 2008, I've seen three different Conservative group leaders. It started with Mike Freer from 2008-2009. Then we had Lynne Hillan who tragically passed away from lung cancer in 2012. She was followed by Richard Cornelius, who has presided over the Borough since then. I doubt many expected Richard to last this long. When he took over arch schemer Brian Coleman was the power behind the throne in the Barnet Tories and you were never more than five feet from a political scheme in the town. For all his many faults, Brian was an arch schemer. He delighted in taunting opponents and being as rude to them as possible. He often provided a smokescreen whilst his more cerebral colleagues pushed through all manner of hard right schemes that never got the scrutiny they deserved due to Coleman's public facing buffonery.

This worked pretty well until 2012, but by then, we'd got the measure of him and he was ejected from the GLA with a huge personal anti vote, following the disaster of his parking policies. Colemans star was already in decline when Richard took over. He was however still a councillor. His altercation with Helen Michael on the High St saw the end of that.

Labour believed the 2014 council elections were in the bag. Labour was riding high in London and with Colemans demise, many believed that there was no need to run a community wide campaign. Then Labour Leader Alison Moore, didn't bother trying to enlist bloggers and Labour made some serious mistakes, most notably not throwing the kitchen sink at Hale Ward, which was winnable, whilst chasing rainbows trying to unseat Lib Dem Jack Cohen and his Lib Dem running mates in Childs Hill. This was the height of folly, as Jack generally had been highly supportive of the Labour group. Labour and The Lib Dems had run a highly effective coalition in Barnet between 1994 and 2002. As a result, Labour cannibalised the Lib Dem vote, allowing the Tories to win two seats in Childs Hill and only taking one out of three seats in Hale.

Perhaps the biggest personal sign of this stupidity, was when bloggers had a meeting with local Labour and asked whether there was any assistance Barnet bloggers, with our huge local readership could do to help. The answer "deliver leaflets and act as tellers at polling stations". For me it was an extraordinary suggestion. My view was that there should have been a co-ordinated push across all opposition groups to achieve a change of administration. I am quite happy working with anyone. At the time, I was not a member of any political party (the Labour Party banned me from being a member in 2010, but that is another story). Groups such as the Barnet Alliance were excluded from strategy and planning, despite a strong record of organising of events.

To the surprise of many in Labour, but sadly not myself, the Tories retained Barnet Council by one seat as neighbouring Tory councils all around fell. In many ways it was a stunning victory for the pragmatism of Richard Cornelius. Realising that the Tories were in trouble, he did many sensible things. He ensured that all sitting councillors who wanted to stand were guaranteed a seat. This menat no fratcuous deselection battles. He ensured that campaign resources were wisely husbanded and that marginal seats were the priority. He was lucky in that Brian Coleman stood as an independent and started firing off leaflets and blogs denouncing his former colleagues. I often wondered if this was a Machiavellian masterstroke by Coleman and Cornelius. His toxic brand had infected the local Tory Brand and his "hissy fits" could only help in the Tory Detox. Whilst many believe the Barnet Tories to be bumbling incompetents, I believe that they are anything but. They simply find that to be a useful public persona, as if you can portray unpopular policies as simply the result of being bumbling buffoons, people don't turn against you. Boris is the master of this type of strategy.

If you doubt just how good at running the show Richard Cornelius is, consider how tightly he's managed to control his group, with only one councillor needing to vote with the opposition to lose any vote. I can't recall any major policy votes that the Tories have lost and they've even managed to pass completely childish pieces of grandstanding such as the motion to declare "Sadiq Khan an enemy of people", a measure at least three Tory councillors have privately confirmed to me they felt was a very silly motion and quite unhelpful.

But all of that is just the history. I am more concerned with the present day. What six years of Richard Cornelius has managed to do, quite incredibly given the national mood, is to completely grind down the opposition. Wheras at the 2014 Council elections, the Barnet Alliance was an active and vibrant organisation, it has ceased to exist. The local members who still have a stomach for a fight have jouned Barnet Momentum. This highly political group for left wing activists has currently got approx 1,200 followers. This compares favourably with The Barnet Tories who have less than 500. Barnet Labour have over 4,000, so I suppose that we can assume that around 25% of Barnet Labour supporters are Momentum followers. Now of course not all followers are supporters. People like me follow just about all parties & Councillors, but it is indicative.

Of course Twitter is far from the full picture. The tweets put out by most political groups are banal and I doubt many sane and rational swing voters would follow any of the party feeds for fun. The Barnet Opposition look just as intent on throwing this election away as they did the last. Perhaps the worst example of this is Childs Hill. Historically the anti Tory vote has gone to the Lib Dems with Labour (until 2014) standing aside. In 2014, they tried to run a strong campaign which simply meant two of three Lib Dems lost to Tories. This time, Labour have an absolutely excellent candidate in Anne Clarke. Anne is a fervant local campaigner and I would normally say that she should walk the vote. The trouble is that I don't believe that Labour has the numbers to take Childs Hill. I also think it would verging on criminal to see Jack Cohen, the stalwart Lib Dem lose his seat. The Lib Dems have put up two strong local campaigners. My great fear is that a great Lib Dem team and a strong Labour team will simply form a Guard of Honour and allow the Tories to walk in. My own view is that the opposition should be pragmatic and back the Lib Dems in Childs Hill and ensure a win, but I accept that would highly unfair to Anne Clarke who really does deserve a seat. I'd love to see Anne Clarke stand as a Labour PPC in Finchley and Golders Green against Mike Freer. I think Anne is of the calibre to do it. She is a worker and I suspect that if the Labour Party had the balls to do this, it she'd win. My perfect outcome would be to see Jack and his team retake the seat and Anne to become the local MP, in an election later next year.

Then we have Hale Ward. I spoke to local Momentum supporters who are also active in Labour. They feel that it is in the bag. Most of them were new to campaigning. I said that "This is what Labour said last time". The response I got was "this time it is different". I advised them to concentrate all of their efforts in marginal and winnable seats, however they told me they felt that they had a good chance of winning Mill Hill as well. If they split their resources and don't target marginal council seats, I suspect that they will end up crying in their beer for the fifth election in a row. I've canvassed and delivered leaflets in every council election since 1988. I was truly gobsmacked when Labour and Lib Dems took the council in 1994. An incredible amount of hard work won it. Labour came to agreements with Lib Dems in Mill Hill and Childs Hill and as a result a centre/left administration was returned. many good things were done in that period. The blueprint for success is there, but what is missing is a Labour team who are prepared to actually take the tough decisions needed to win elections. The leader of the group is almost silent. He should be busting a gut to win recognition and doing everything to push campaigning in marginal wards. Sadly a search of the Leader of The Labour Group's twitter feed shows that he's hell bent on making all the same mistakes. If I search for tweets he's made about Hale ward, which is winnable and Labour have 1/3 of councillors I find

Tweets by Labour Group Leader about Hale Ward

Then there is the wider opposition. Us bloggers, to start with. I think we are largely exhausted. in 2013, the year before the last Council election Mrs Angry posted 130 blogs, over ten a month. This year, the same point in the cycle, she's managed 30 so far. Mr Reasonable managed 99 in 2013 and a mere 21 so far this year. Mr Mustard managed 239 in 2013 and yet this year has only managed 118. As for me, I managed 487 in 2013 and a mere 367 this year. I think it is fair to say that we are all pretty exhausted by the process. That is not to say that there have not been excellent blogs with huge impact this year, in fact for the Barnet Eye, in the history of our blog, three of the ten most read blogs were posted this year. It simply demonstrates that there is a degree of fatigue. Then there are the trades unions. The Barnet Tories have been hell bent on emasculating them ever since they took power. Sadly this assault on the rights of workers has taken its toll. Long standing stalwart of the opposition and good friend of mine, John Burgess publicly admitted that the stress has caused him to suffer mental health issues. Although John struggles on, without his iconic presence in teh Borough full time, much of the vigour has gone from local campaigning.

In short, it seems to me as if the Barnet Opposition has run out of stream, just at the very point when finally there is an opportunity to actually achieve regime change in the Borough. There is six months until the next election. If you really want to see a change. If you want to see the end of a head of Education who seeks to cut after school care for disabled children, who won't lobby the education secretary for a better deal for Barnet Schools and who has reduced the Barnet Libraries footprint by 50%, you'd better realise that only hard work will do the trick. If you think that councillors who get paid £25,000 a year in allowances have nothing better to do than draft motions calling the Mayor of London an "enemy of the people" then fine, but if you want change and you want the council to fight for YOU, then you need to work harder.

I am prepared to make a commitment. I promise that in 2015, I will publish at least 500 blogs to effect change. I managed over 750 in 2012, so it is not a pipedream. I will be seeking guest blogs from you the community to help. The second most read blog on this site is a guest blog about council housing Guest Blog - Opposition to huge rent rise growing - posted in 2012.

Of course if no one is prepared to even bother, is there any point. Therefore, I ask you to come along to the Barnet Eye Community Awards Ceremony on Saturday 9th December at The Chandos Arms in Colindale. There will be members of all major campaigns and opposition groups, so it will be a great chance to meet like minded people, network and work out how to effect change in a relaxed environment. We need a full house to ensure that we can send a message that the Barnet Opposition has not given up. We will be giving an award to our "Community Campaugn of the Year". This is a campaign that shows local grass roots campaigns really do work. So if you need some inspiration, come along.

If you are a regular reader, it would be great to meet you. There will be live music (including a never seen before acoustic unplugged session from my Band, The False Dots), a DJ and the awards ceremony. If nothing else, come along to support our local champions.

The False Dots will also be performing a song we wrote in honour of the workers of Barnet who lost their jobs to The Capita Outsourcing of Barnet Council entitled "They cleared out your desk". This .was us performing it for the first time last year at The Chandos Arms. We will also be passing around the hat for our charity of the year, so bring some spare pennies.

We'll be presenting our awards to outstanding local people and organisations

Barnet Charity of the year

Barnet Band/Artist of the Year

Barnet Compaign of the year

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Has the Barnet Opposition given up at just the wrong time?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Something has been bothering me greatly of late. Next year we have council elections in for Barnet Council. The local opposition should be ramping up and making a push like never before to get rid of the tired and ineffective Conservative administration. Since I started blogging in 2008, I've seen three different Conservative group leaders.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In the last three and a half years have you been invited by the Leader of Barnet Council to question him? I can't remember the last time. But next year there is a Council election. With this in mind, all of a sudden, the local political classes are swinging into life and all of a sudden they are desperate to hear from you (unless like last night when you actually have genuine concerns with their policies). So quite unexpectedly (ho ho ho) the Council Leader has decided to hold a whole series of question times for the public. Here's what his press release has to say.

The Leader of Barnet Council, Councillor Richard Cornelius, will be hosting a series of 'Question Time' events across the borough to speak to residents and get their views on what matters in Barnet.

Barnet Council values residents' views and opinions about how it is performing and delivering. The 'Question Time' events are the latest opportunity for residents to hear about the work of the council and ask questions about things that are important to them.
These views help to inform how the council works and set it priorities Barnet Council already engages with the local community via its resident perception survey, as well as through service consultations and engagement with service users and residents.
These events will be hosted by the Leader of the Council, who will give a brief overview of what the council is working on and its current priorities. There will then an opportunity for people to engage and asking questions.
Leader of Barnet Council, Councillor Richard Cornelius said: "Meeting residents is one of the most rewarding parts of my role and I am excited to hold these events across the borough. They are an opportunity to hear from residents so that I can better understand their needs to help make Barnet the best possible place to live."
There is no set agenda and the atmosphere will be informal. Everyone is welcome and Barnet Council wants to see people from all backgrounds, ages and interests.
Taking place across the borough, the Engage Barnet: Question Time events will run from 7pm to 9pm to enable as many people as possible to attend.
Barnet Council will be holding events from 7pm to 9pm at the following venues:

Tuesday, 26th September- St Stephens House & Gardens N3 3QE

Wednesday, 11th October- New Barnet Community Centre EV4 9PF

Monday, 30th October- Greek Cypriot Community Trust N12 9RU

Tuesday, 14th November- Sangam Centre HA8 0AP

Tuesday, 28th November- Old Bull Theatre EN5 5SJ

Wednesday, 13th December, Hartley Hall Mill Hill NW7 2JA

Now as you can imagine, the Barnet Eye is only to keen to ensure that these events are a rip roaring success. We will be doing our best to suggest themes that residents may want to take up with Councillor Cornelius. Richard is an amiable chap and I thoroughly look forward to the opportunities. We applaud his Damascene conversion to public engagement. I genuinely hope that all events have a large audience with a good natured, proper discussion of issues in our local community. In advance of these events, we'll be featuring a "theme of the week" to try and get the juices flowing on a few issues. I genuinely hope no one turns up with the simple intention of shouting at Richard. He has serious questions to answer and ordinary voters are none to impressed when activists simply give opponents a hard time. So lets make sure that the events work. I am interested in the choice of venues which all seem to be well placed for important Tory marginals. If nothing else it shows that Richard is rather serious about trying to keep his job. It seems most of his colleagues have decided to follow the Brian Coleman method of campaigning

Hustings are a total waste of time especially for sitting MPs. No one who attends has an open mind

- Brian Coleman (@BrianColeman251) 29 August 2017

in favour of a nice spot of dinnner!

- Barnet YCs (@BarnetYCs) August 6, 2017

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Barnet Tory election machine swings into life for the council elections in 2018

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the last three and a half years have you been invited by the Leader of Barnet Council to question him? I can't remember the last time. But next year there is a Council election.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I was interviewed by a national paper five years ago, in regards to why I write the Barnet Eye blog. As often happens, the quotes they attributed to me were the ones I felt least important. One question they asked and did not publish was "what do you hope to achieve?". Well I've had four years to think about it. Here are the answers!

I have four political goals and one person goal for the blog. The four political goals are as follows.

1. To Persuade the councillors running Barnet Council that they can run a better organisation if they listen to local people.
2. To persuade the councillors running Barnet Council that they will be better able to do their job if they do their homework and read the background paperwork.
3. To persuade the people of Barnet that they need to make their voices heard.
4. To make sure the people of Barnet value the fantastic things our Borough has to offer, so we don't easily give them up, when vested interests wave cash or use influence to try and take them away.

The personal goal is as follows.
1. To write an entertaining and informative blog, that I personally can be proud of.

Now of course, a blogger cannot change anything, a blogger can only write a blog and hope that other people connect with it, enough to do something about the points raised. This blog has a track record of extraordinary success in doing this. One of the things which historically has been a strength is the guest blogs we publish. These always reach a wide audience. I have some excellent ones coming up, so watch this sI also produced two films ( A Tale of Two Barnets and Barnet - The Billion Pound Gamble) both of which gained national TV coverage and both packed the Phoenix cinema. I am starting work on a new project,to coincide with our tenth anniversary next year. This will catalog ten years of Barnet blogging. This film will be rather different to the last two. They were made for a specific goal, in a campaign. The new film will be a different beast, a far more thoughtful and less polemic film.

I really want to show more of what is good in Barnet. It would be great to get some proper interviews with the local politicians, but I really don't think most really 'get' what the blog is about. However most of it wont be about politics, most will simply be about what a great place we've got and the people who make it so good. That is the plan, it should be done by next May!

Here's a just few things I'd like to feature, although this will no doubt change as the project evolves.

Saracens, the best rugby club in Europe and a huge asset.
Mill Hill Music Complex, North West Londons leading music studios.
The University of London Observatory.
The Chandos Arms, Colindale, finalist for UK community pub of the year.
Thameslink and The Northern Line
Barnet museum and The RAF museum
The Arts Depot
The Bull Theatre
St Paul's Church and the Wilberforce legacy

I'd also like to look back on a few changes.
The closure of Church Farmhouse museum
Parking Issues
The Railway hotel in Edgware
Redevelopments in Colindale and Brent Cross
The Torrington

And finally, a look at various subcultures in our midst. Sound good?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I was interviewed by a national paper five years ago, in regards to why I write the Barnet Eye blog. As often happens, the quotes they attributed to me were the ones I felt least important. One question they asked and did not publish was "what do you hope to achieve?".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Next May, all 63 Councillors in the 21 wards of Barnet Council will stand for re-election. The council has been run by the Local Conservatives since 2002. Prior to that it was run by a Labour/Lib Dem coalition. If you think things have been just fine and then the local Tories have done a marvellous job, then clearly you should vote for them. Regular readers of this blog, which started in 2008, will perhaps take a different view. The scandals and cockups have been numerous. Locl democracy has been all but destroyed by the One Barnet outsourcing, giving Capita control of planning. We are now even seeing local developers paying the wages of planners to work on pet projects. Yesterday we described a mega redevelopment of North Finchley by the developers of Brent Cross. After writing the blog, local blogger Mr Reasonable pointed out to us that the developer was paying the people who are meant to be impartial in the planning office.

Rog you missed a critical point. This is being driven & funded by the Brent Cross developer. They've paid Re officers to prepare this report

- Mr Reasonable (@ReasonableNB) October 3, 2017

We think that this is completely unacceptable. Planners are meant to be completely impartial. In recent months we've seen officers (who work for Capita) recommending all manner of completely unacceptable schemes. As there is an election next year, Tory councillors who normally adopt a very bovine stance on such matters, have realised their cushy £10,000 allowance and free parking permits are on the line and voted to reject them.

Anyone who knows Barnet Council, will know that once they have secured another term, business as usual will resume. Barnet is a Mecca for developers, there are more flats going up here, than anywhere else in Western Europe. Virtually all our out of the price range of local first time buyers. That is why they are being marketed in Hong Kong.

The green belt is under threat like never before. Barnets solution to the backlog of people requiring social housing is to ship people up to Peterborough. This is ripping apart communities. We need a change. We need councillors who don't only care six months before an election. We need local people to be involved. In Mill Hill, I have made a commitment to support the local Lib Dems. I know many are still upset about the coalition, but in the local ward they offer the only realistic chance for a change. Anyone who reads this blog knows I care and I will work hard, 365 days a year. I will take the sticks and stones I will inevitably get. I don't hate the local Conservative councillors, I actually quite like all of them, but they have let us down and are ineffective. We will not be personally rude, we will concentrate on policies. Whether you agree or disagree with me, please get involved. It is too important not to.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Barnet Council Election 2018 - You can make a difference

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Next May, all 63 Councillors in the 21 wards of Barnet Council will stand for re-election. The council has been run by the Local Conservatives since 2002. Prior to that it was run by a Labour/Lib Dem coalition.

# data[].attributes.body
Here are blog posts by the Barnet Eye blogger in relations to Barnet 2018 election. Well written Roger. :-)

# data[].attributes.body
No wonder Barnet is Conservative Hold.  Did you know that Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990) was MP for Finchley parliament constituency from 8 October 1959 to 9 April 1992? Thatcher might did lived in Barnet or not.

# data[].attributes.body
Since 1964, Barnet has always been ruled by the Conservative Party except 1994 to 2002 which there were no overall party control in both Barnet local elections in 1994 & 1998.

The Conservatives won 2002 Barnet election and have been ruling Barnet since then. So technically, no other single party have ruled Barnet council other than the Tories (which I think it is a fair & unfortunate). By 2018, I hope that Barnet will no longer be blue for the Tory Party. It will be red for Labour. It's time that the Labour Party has a chance to win the majority seats of 32.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Barnet London Borough Council election, 2014 - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Before the election the Conservatives ran the council with 38 seats, compared to 22 for Labour and 3 for the Liberal Democrats. A total of 247 candidates stood in the election including a full slate of 63 each from the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties.

# data[].attributes.body
Barnet is one of 32 London boroughs in London. Barnet has 3 elected MPs & One AM (which Barnet shares with Camden).

You can found out more by clicking this link?

# data[].attributes.body
Click the link to found out.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Barnet London Borough Council - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The council was created by the London Government Act 1963 and replaced five local authorities: Barnet Urban District Council, East Barnet Urban District Council, Friern Barnet Urban District Council, Finchley Borough Council and Hendon Borough Council. The next election to the authority will be in 2018.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Barnet London Borough Council elections - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Barnet London Borough Council in London, England is elected every four years. Since the last boundary changes in 2002, 63 councillors have been elected from 21 wards.

# data[].attributes.body
Political control in Barnet from 1964 to present (now - today)

# data[].attributes.body
There are 21 wards in Barnet. If you live in Barnet & you don't know which ward do you live in? That is okay because I got the picture here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
12.00am BST

Some figures (unofficial) on the first preferences won by the two front running candidates battling to take power Tower Hamlets (via Robin de Peyer of the Evening Standard):

Robin de Peyer (@robindepeyer)
Biggs 27k and Rahman 36k. Too close to call in second preference round, I think

No one has won on first preferences in Tower Hamlets, according to Aisha Gani, who is at the count centre.

They're going to start counting the second preferences, which makes the situation potentially even more predictable after earlier expectations that Lutfur Rahman had won.

Aisha S Gani (@aishagani)
Conservative, Green, UKIP, Lib Dem voters 2nd preference will make the difference. Don't know king-maker yet #TowerHamlets #Elections2014

After the final results came down to the wire, the Conservatives have held on to Barnet.

Labour had been tipped by many to make history and control Barnet for the first time.

Despite gaining nine seats from the Tories, the party fell just short of the 32 seats needed for a majority in the key target council.

The party finished the night on 27 seats but with the postponed Colindale ward vote in June expected to return three Labour councillors, it has fallen just short of a majority.

The party finished the night on 27 seats but with the postponed Colindale ward vote in June expected to return three Labour councillors, it has fallen just short of a majority.

Early indications form the elections suggest "an unsettling result" for the Conservatives, according to Adam Afriyie, the Tory MP who has been touted in the past as a possible leadership challenger.

Writing on Conservative Home, he claims:

Many people voted Conservative because they wanted smaller government, but these people now feel that they've been duped.

The Coalition Government is spending more and more money on industrial projects and overseas aid without first trying to find a private sector alternative, and they're digging their claws deeper and deeper into people's personal lives and faith.

In Tower Hamlets, Rajeev Syal adds that more than 150 police officers have been counted outside the building by political activists, along side more than 300 young, mainly Bangladeshi men.

Some Labour activists were warned that they should not leave the building because their safety could not be guaranteed.

The Labour MP Sadiq Khan was among those refused exit because of security concerns, according to Ted Jeory of the Sunday and Daily Express.

Rob Marchant (@rob_marchant)
The #TowerHamlets count is starting to resemble England-Germany going to penalties. In a blackout. With the doors locked.

"Is London another country?" asks Jonathan Freedland, writing in the Guardian, prompted by its rather different pattern of election results.

Even to ask the question prompts embarrassment. It plays to the very case Ukip has long been making, that the media is part of an out-of-touch metropolitan elite concerned chiefly with itself. But the figures speak for themselves.

The UK Independence party surged across England, grabbing 23% of the vote - a figure that may well rise with Sunday's European results. Only in one part of England did Ukip tank, shrugged off like a no-hoper fringe party rather than the coming force in British politics. And that place was London.

London, he goes on to suggest, " is the place that Ukip warns about, the realisation of its worst nightmares". Read the piece in full here.

And here's another view, courtesy of UKIP Director of Communications, Patrick O'Flynn:

Patrick O'Flynn (@oflynndirector)
This "London too cool for UKIP provincialists" thing on Twitter is clearly going to be v popular in rest of country. We're in big trouble ;)

The European election..er.. juggernaut rolls on tomorrow

electionista (@electionista)
#EP2014 - voting tomorrow: Latvia Malta Slovakia Czech Rep. pic.twitter.com/Qg53yH2sQA

It's neck and neck in Barnet with Labour and the Tories on 27 seats each with two wards to return tonight and 32 seats needed for a majority.

The Press Association reports that the election for Collindale has been postponed until June 26 due to a candidate's death but council sources describe the three seats in that ward as "safe Labour seats".

A controversial former Tory councillor who calls himself "the King of Bling" has lost his council seat.

Brian Coleman, who once served as chairman of the London Assembly and was a Conservative councillor in Barnet before being suspended after assaulting a woman who filmed him breaking parking rules, lost his bid to be re-elected, getting just 265 votes.

Coleman kept his seat on the council as an independent after the incident and was tonight referred to as "the candidate with no description" to laughs from the audience at the Barnet count.

Taking a cue from a Nigel Farage quote from earlier in the day, the Financial Times leads on "Ukip 'fox' stirs trouble for main parties"

Nick Sutton (@suttonnick)
Saturday's FT front page - "Ukip 'fox' stirs trouble for main parties" #tomorrowspaperstoday #bbcpapers #vote2014 pic.twitter.com/zzq3BPHqia

While the Telegraph goes with "Surge by Ukip throws Labour into poll crisis"

Nick Sutton (@suttonnick)
Saturday's Telegraph front page - "Surge by Ukip throws Labour into poll crisis" #tomorrowspaperstoday #bbcpapers pic.twitter.com/bKKT6YC2gh

The Mirror, Express and Mirror reference the elections on their front pages but don't splash with a story about the results ( in their first editions at least).

The Mail leads with 'The savaging of Red Ed'

Nick Sutton (@suttonnick)
Saturday's Daily Mail front page - "The Savaging of Red Ed" #tomorrowspaperstoday #bbcpapers #Vote2014 pic.twitter.com/en70WR0bjn

Front pages are coming through now. The Independent splashes with 'Farage crashes the parties', below a familiar scene.

Nick Sutton (@suttonnick)
Saturday's Independent front page - "Farage crashes the parties" #tomorrowspaperstoday #bbcpapers #Vote2014 pic.twitter.com/zmRltkQGtA

Still no official result from Tower Hamlets, though plenty of tension, as well as widespread suggestions on social media that Lutfur Rahman has held on to power.

City of London Councillor Tom Sleigh tweets:

Tom Sleigh (@tomsleigh)
This is the view from inside the Tower Hamlets count. We can't leave. Police can't guarantee our safety apparently pic.twitter.com/CILXENvl4c

The Guardian's Rajeev Syal adds

Reports from count say that there are more than 2,000 potentially spoilt ballot papers, which are still being examined. But Rahman is expected to win by several thousand votes on first preference.

Outside the Troxy, where the count is taking place, hundreds of young, mainly Bangladeshi men have gathered, which has prompted a confrontation with police officers.

According to Tory councillor Peter Golds, the shadow justice secretary Sadiq Khan was one of dozens of people who were told by police that they could not leave the building because of the possibility of as public order incident.

No surprises that Labour's Jules Pipe has been re-elected as mayor of Hackney (with 40,858 first preference votes) but the Green Party's Mischa Borris may well be happy with a second place finish (11,849 first preferences).

The full results are here.

Back to the bigger picture now though, and the Guardian's political team reports that Ed Miliband has been put on notice that Labour faces a major battle if it is to secure an overall parliamentary majority next year after the local election showed that the party is struggling to achieve the sort of breakthrough that would signal a Westminster victory.

Labour took heart after it topped the local polls in England with 31% of the vote - up two points on last year - as the Tories came second and Ukip failed to translate an expected victory in the European elections into a breakthrough in council seats.

But Miliband faced murmurings of discontent at all levels of the party, up to the shadow cabinet, amid signs that Labour is struggling to look like an opposition party on the eve of a general election victory.

Its share of the vote was seven points below its score a year before Neil Kinnock lost the 1992 election, though that was in the era of three-party politics before the rise of Ukip.

Read that story in full here.

Labour sources are growing increasingly concerned at the Tower Hamlets' count for mayor where they are trying to unseat the independent incumbent, Lutfur Rahman.

The Guardian's Rajeev Syal tells me that they believe that Rahman, whose administration is at the centre of an official government inquiry, may well win the election on first preferences.

The count continues, with hundreds of Rahman's supporters gathering outside a music hall in Limehouse. Victory for Rahman, in the face of Labour improvements across London, would result in some difficult questions for the campaign team.

In the north of England, Ukip's deputy leader Paul Nuttall is looking forward to Sunday:

Paul Nuttall (@paulnuttallukip)
2 new #UKIP councillors elected in both Oldham and Hyndburn councils today. Positive signs for the European election count on Sunday.

A notable Ukip result beyond England. The party topped the poll in one of the most picturesque parts of Northern Ireland, where Henry Reilly was elected to Newry, Mourne and Down council.

Two other UKIP candidates were elected elsewhere in Northern Ireland, adds Henry McDonal.

One of the most keenly anticipated results this evening in London in Tower Hamlets, where it was expected to be a closely fought battle between sides loyal to Labour's John Biggs and the current mayor, former Labour figure Lutfur Rahman.

Aisha Gani, who is there for the Guardian, says that counting finally got underway a few hours ago, with 86,542 ballots to get through

A "bloodbath" at Camden Council, tweets the Ham and High newspaper, with the blood taking on a particularly yellow hue.

Ham and High (@HamandHigh)
Results over at Camden Council: Labour = 40, Cons = 12, and both Lib Dems and Greens have one cllr.

Ham and High (@HamandHigh)
Dramatic changes at Camden Council. Lib Dem bloodbath, party almost wiped out, dropping from 13 to 1 councillor.

Conservative backbencher Peter Bone has reiterated his call for an an electoral pact between his party and Ukip, telling the BBC :

It cannot be beyond the wit of man for the Conservative Party and Ukip to work together in some way that ensure that there a right of centre majority government after the next general election, with David Cameron as Prime Minister

In results from Milton Keynes, there have been three clear Conservative wins in Newport Pagnell North and Hanslope. Elsewhere in the authority's area, there were two Labour wins for husband and wife Liz and Rob Gifford.

Labour have made a breakthrough in target council Barnet, taking three seats from the Tories in the East Barnet ward.

While the votes in Northern Ireland's local government election contest are still being counted the big picture to emerge so far is that the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein remain the two biggest parties in the region.

Henry McDonald, Ireland correspondent for the Guardian and Observer, writes:

The DUP are in the lead with 34 seats tonight while Sinn Fein are just behind them on 28 seats.
The UUP have 27 seats while the nationalist SDLP have elected 11 councillors. The latter party has fared surprisingly badly in Derry city where it was once the dominant political force and the home of Nobel peace prize winner John Hume.

Sinn Fein will now eclipse the SDLP in the new joint Derry-Strabane council. The SDLP shipped votes to independent candidates in Derry city including losing out to the dissident republican candidate Gary Donnelly. Barry Monteith, an independent republican candidate, was elected in Dungannon.

There a few independents and left wing candidates who are going to get elected including the People Before Profit candidate Gerry Carroll for the Balmarol ward in south Belfast.
Overall in Belfast it is expected the centrist Alliance Party will continue to hold the balance of power between the nationalist and unionist parties on the city council.

A winner of the Military Cross in Afghanistan was elected for the Ulster Unionists in the Portadown council area.

Captain Doug Beattie won the seat for the UUP tonight in the Loughgall and Annamore ward in north Armagh. Beattie, a Royal Irish Regiment officer, awarded the medal for fighting in the Gamsir region of Afghanistan.

Labour have, so far, held three seats in a key target council, Barnet, while the Tories have held six with three results announced.

One for the diary:

Lord Ashcroft (@LordAshcroft)
My lab/con battleground GE marginal seats poll will be at http://t.co/27XLUQ3kvm at130pm tomorrow. Pls register for this and all my research

Ukip is as much of a problem for Miliband as for the Tories, but there are some signs to comfort the left, according to Patrick Wintour, the Guardian's political editor.

Labour with growing credibility insisted it was winning in the marginals where it mattered and pointed to victories outside London, in Cambridge, Lincoln, Amber Valley, Ipswich, Peterborough and Carlisle.

But there is also an acknowledgement that it did not do as well as it hoped, with disappointment in Trafford.

By the time of the general election next year, senior Labour strategists accept the Ukip vote will not shrink back to the 3% it polled in the 2010 general election, but still believe the bulk of the Ukip damage then will be inflicted on the Conservatives.

Still, there will be an inquest into the Labour campaign, and why it has been as much the victim of the anti-politics mood as the governing parties

Read that piece in full here.

More now on that earlier news ( see 7.15pm) that an investigation has been launched after a councillor in Manchester allegedly complained that a voter with learning difficulties "shouldn't be voting".

Ciara Lawrence, campaigns assistant at Mencap, said:

People who have ignorant, uninformed views about disabled people should not be in positions of power. Councillors should act as role models for their community, not needlessly insult the people that look up to them.

Discriminating against disabled people is just as bad as racism and homophobia. There is no difference. Yet some people think it is okay to treat people with a disability as second class citizens.

The allegation is the latest involving councillors making disparaging remarks against disabled people. Last month, a Conservative mayor who caused controversy by making derogatory remarks about disabled people quit.

Nick Martin, mayor of Swindon in Wiltshire, handed in his resignation after being ordered to apologise by a standards watchdog. The 63-year-old was overheard to say at a meeting last year: "Are we still letting those Mongols have sex with each other?"

The local election results are a consequence of the Government's disregard for the mounting pressure faced by councils "and the pain it is causing their residents", according to Steve Houghton, a Labour councillor and chair of SIGOMA, the collective voice of urban areas representing many of the large towns and cities in the Northern, Midland and South Coast regions of England.

As services are cut and welfare reforms start to bite, local residents have used their votes to express their discontent with the National Government parties.

The Government must make fair funding a key priority to allow councils to provide essential services and avoid the threat of service failure.

SIGOMA's membership compromises of 33 metropolitan districts and 12 major unitary councils with similar characteristics.

Channel 4 News has calculated Ukip's control of councils where it has seats, as a percentage, and put together this rather nifty heatmap graphic, which is not unlike a weather map. Purple reign? (sorry)

Another Labour MP - this time Sarah Champion - has been suggesting that all was not quite right with her party's electoral campaign.

Asked on Channel 4 News whether her leader, Ed Miliband, had been an asset, she replied that he was certainly an asset "when it comes to writing policies" but was reluctant to say that he was an asset on the doorsteps.

While she felt that he was leading the party in the right direction, she added:

Ed Miliband does come up on the doors steps and people feel a slight disconnect to him....I think that we need to get out the real man. He is a visionary

Ken Livingstone has meanwhile popped up on Sky News as a staunch defender of Miliband, who he says he trusts implicitly. He added:

Absolute integrity. He doesn't give a damn what he looks like, what he's wearing. He doesn't give a damn what the Daily Mail thinks. His focus is on what Britain should be like 10 years down the road when we rebuild our manufacturing and our economy.

If Ed Miliband can get that across we won't be talking about being a few seats short of a majority. We will be talking about a party with an absolute majority.

In Northern Ireland the centre-ground Alliance Party is holding its own in terms of votes, according to my colleague Henry McDonald.

The party, which was subjected to violent loyalist protests over the removal of the union flag from Belfast City Hall, party topped the poll in one ward in mainly unionist East Belfast.

On the other hand, the Ulster Volunteer Force/loyalist terror group linked Progressive Unionist Party have topped the poll in a working class Belfast ward. Ex-UVF life sentence prisoner Billy Hutchinson came top in the Court Ward of the city.

An investigation has been launched after a councillor in Manchester allegedly complained that a voter with learning difficulties "shouldn't be voting".

Officials at Trafford Council told the Press Association that say they have been made aware of the incident, which allegedly involved an unnamed councillor at a polling station yesterday.

The accusation was made by Kate Green, Labour MP for Stretford and Urmston and shadow spokesman for disabled people.

A council spokesman said:

Trafford Council can confirm it is aware of the situation and that its returning officer, Theresa Grant, was notified last night. She immediately launched a full investigation.

Trafford Council endeavours to make sure all residents who are eligible to vote have the opportunity to do so.

Disabilities charity Mencap said the allegations were concerning.

A brief flurry of excitement (and confusion) following this tweet by the Labour MP Graham Jones:

Graham Jones MP (@GrahamJones_MP)
First UKIP defector? Clr Malcolm Pritchard just announced on BBC Radio Lancs he has resigned and gone independent after 50mins as UKIP clr.

However, Ribble Valley reporter John Robinson has been on the case and says that Pritchard has informed him that he is still very much in the purple fold.

Jon Robinson (@JonRobinsonLT)
Contrary to reports, Cllr Malcolm Pritchard has not resigned as a UKIP councillor and become and independent on Hyndburn Council. Still UKIP

Writing on the Conservative Home website about Labour's performance, Mark Wallace uses the Ed Miliband's recent bacon sandwich meal as a metaphor, saying: "while most people would have relished it, he's made an almighty mess"

He adds:

It's true that they have made a net gain of five councils, including some that really sting like Hammersmith and Fulham and others, like Merton, which they ran already as minority administrations. But in their real targets, the places they claim they intend to win parliamentary seats, they simply haven't performed.

Stoke is a good example - Miliband himself visited, and also did that car crash radio interview, but the Tory position ended up stronger after voters had their say. Marginal councils like Trafford, where Labour needed four seats to take control, they fell short.

In London, Labour has retained control of Greenwich Council and of the south east borough council of Southwark.

At this point, the Liberal Democrats have 11 seats in Southwark while the Conservatives have two. Peter John, Labour's current leader of the Council , described it as "a rejection absolutely of the coalition parties in this borough" and of negative campaigning.

Good evening. This is Ben Quinn picking up the baton from Andy.

I'm handing over to my colleague Ben Quinn in a moment.

First, though, here are eight things we've learnt from the election results.

1. Parties can win an election without winning. On paper, Labour clearly won. They have gained more than 250 seats (the BBC figures have been ahead of the ones on our result chart, but that's because our figures only get updated when full council results come in), and they are easily ahead on projected national share. If Britons voted like this in a general election, Ed Miliband would be prime minister. But it hasn't felt like a victory for them. If you want to know who feels as if they've won an election, ignore what politicians say, turn the volume down and look at their faces on TV. Who's happiest? It's definitely Ukip first, then probably the Conservatives, then Labour, then Ukip. That's because, given the likelihood of the gap between Labour and the Conservatives closing between now and 2015, Labour know this isn't good enough to offer a strong chance of victory.

2. Ukip's chances of winning the European elections don't look as good as they did this time yesterday. Their national vote share is down six points compared to last year, and, although there must be some people who voted Ukip in the Euros and for another party in the locals, there must be a chance that the polls saying Ukip would win have got it wrong.

3. Labour now fully realise that Ukip presents them with a serious electoral threat. This shouldn't be a surprise. Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin have written a very good book (which I keep plugging) making this very case. But it has taken a while for the message to get through.

4. Labour's post-election inquest will probably be more serious than the Conservatives'. Journalists expected these elections to trigger a mini crisis in the Conservative party. But there has been no evidence of that at all. A few Eurosceptics have renewed their call for a pact with Ukip, but this is an absolute non-starter, and they know it. Generally, the Eurosceptics have decided not to cause trouble. But the public comments from Labour figures suggest the party is going to conduct a proper post-mortem, not into Ed Miliband's leadership (they are stuck with him, for better or worse), but into whether their Ukip strategy is correct. And that's because ...

5. None of the parties have a clue what to do about Ukip. Politicians from all the main parties have been saying much the same thing: that voters have sent them a message, and that they must listen. But there is no real agreement what the message is, or what they should do about it.

6. A second hung parliament looks increasingly inevitable. Four-party politics is increasingly entrenched in English politics (as in Scottish and Welsh politics, only they have a different four parties), and that makes it harder for any of them to win outright.

7. The Lib Dems are vulnerable even in their strongholds. Last year they thought they had hit rock bottom in the local elections. They hadn't. Although they are holding on in some Lib Dem areas, in others they are losing seats. The BBC say even Vince Cable would lose his seat on the basis of today's results.

8. London really is a different from the rest of the country electorally. It seems to be the only place in England impervious to Ukip's charms. Like Scotland. (Perhaps if Scotland goes independent we Londoners could join up with them, share the pound, and leave the rest of England with something Ukip-ish, like the groat?)

That's all from me. Ben Quinn is now taking the controls.

The Lib Dems could be on course for a wipeout in Islington, according to the Mirror's James Lyons.

MirrorJames (@MirrorJames)
Lib Dems heading for wipeout in Islington? Lab have 45 out of 48 seats. Recount underway in Highbury East for the last three.

MirrorJames (@MirrorJames)
Libs ran Islington four years ago...

My rant about about Labour's press operation (see 4.43pm) has hit a nerve. They have sent me a selection of quotes from Tory MPs unhappy today (or yesterday, in the case of Douglas Carswell) about the party's leadership. Mostly they are unhappy because they want a Conservative/Ukip pact, which David Cameron

From Jackie Doyle-Price

We're doing well with the economy we've got a good set of messages but they're all about your head and what people are worried about here [in Thurrock, where Doyle-Price is MP], you'll hear people talking about immigration, they say to us we've not done enough about immigration, we've not done enough about welfare, actually we've done a lot, but what we need to do is talk in a narrative that people understand and can engage with because too often our political debate looks managerial and bland and that's why people here don't think that politicians speak for them.

From Douglas Carswell

Two years ago, Mr Cameron talked about serious changes to our relation with Europe, including changes to social and employment regulation. Even last year he was suggesting treaty changes and an intergovernmental conference. His latest foray in a piece for the Sunday Times seemed a little bit less ambitious.

Our Bloomberg proposition might seem a little more persuasive if we did not water it down. And having one or two officials in Number 10 considering renegotiation who actually believe in the need for substantial change might help, too ...

If David Cameron is as serious about an In/Out vote in 2017 as he says he is, and if Nigel Farage is as serious about Brexit as he claims, the two of them need to do a deal. The law already allows joint candidates. We have a list of MPs on both sides of the House who in October 2011 showed that they are serious about securing an EU referendum ...

The Sunday papers will be thick with column inches from pundits, many of whom will now be overnight experts on why people vote Ukip. "Carry on" many will say. "Let's just carry on like before". Those in charge of sales at HMV music probably once felt the same way when they heard that some folk had started to buy music online. Some things we have to carry on. But some things we need to change.

From Jacob Rees-Mogg

With the promise of the referendum the Conservative Party and Ukip are moving in exactly the same direction that is offering the British people a final decision on whether we have continued membership of the European Union and that surely pushes towards a coupon of some kind.

From Peter Bone

What we mustn't do [is] have the right-of-centre vote poll more than fifty per cent at the general election and and let Miliband and Co in - that would be a disaster. So somehow the Conservatives and Ukip have got to work together and have some sort of pact or accord.

There are some significant results in Northern Ireland. This is from Henry McDonald.

Dissident republicans opposed to the peace process have made an electoral breakthrough in Northern Ireland.

Ex-Real IRA prisoner Gary Donnelly is on course to take a council set in Derry city after polling more than 1,100 first preference votes in local government elections today. Donnelly is an unapologetic supporter of the anti-ceasefire armed campaigns.

A second dissident republican candidate in the city has gained 800 first preference votes and may also be elected to the council.

The result is arguably one of the key stories of the local elections in Northern Ireland and an indication that in some of the poorest republican/nationalist wards in the region there is support for the hardline dissident republican message.

The West Bank of Derry contains areas which are strongholds of the new IRA and other groups opposed to Sinn Fein's peace strategy.

Labour have now gained more than 250 seats. Party sources think they could gain more than 300 by the time all results are in.
Asa Bennett at Huffington Post has a fun, BuzzFeed-style 11-things we've learnt from the local election results in pictures. Isabel Hardman at Coffee House says Tory candidates are angry about being summoned by Grant Shapps to a meeting in Newark on Sunday.
Here is some more Twitter comment on the results.

Matthew Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ)
Idea that Ukip not a threat to Labour is political fantasy. In Rotherham they fought 21 seats: 1st in 10, 2nd in 11 (often by handful votes)

James Forsyth (@JGForsyth)
Ukip didn't do well in London. But suspect that self-congratulation of London-based pundits about this will fuel alienation Ukip thrive on

Lewis Baston (@lewis_baston)
There's an invisible dividing line between London and UKIP's South Essex heartland. Sorry, but it really is about two stops past Barking.

Matthew Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ)
Ukip not a threat to Labour? Wake up. #UKIP 2014 average shares: 19% in Lib Dem held wards, 20% in Con, 25% in Labour. From @RobFordMancs

anne mcelvoy (@annemcelvoy)
Whatever the impact of these elex in 2015, Lab advance in London makes it unlikely the capital will have a post-Boris Tory mayor.

Michael Clarke (@mclarke2410)
@AndrewSparrow Independents seem to have lost more than anyone else to UKIP's rise, swapping one type of personality politics for another?

Matthew d'Ancona (@MatthewdAncona)
Ukip's success is often attributed to anger at expenses and sleaze. Amazing, then, to watch Neil Hamilton surfing this wave on @bbcelection

Philip Cowley (@philipjcowley)
UKIP aside, the PNS shows a) neither Lab or Con doing well enough to win outright, and b) Lab and Con *together* are just 60%.

Matthew Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ)
Ukip in 2015 - anything over 7%ish will cause problems for Cons. Projected national share today puts #UKIP on 17% http://t.co/qPndP7Ccdg

Labour is on course to become the largest party in the Local Government Association for the first time since 2004. An LGA spokesman has put out this.

Provisional analysis of local election results declared so far suggests the Labour party will become the largest group within the LGA - the organisation that represents authorities in England and Wales.

This would mean the next chairman of the LGA would be nominated by the Labour group. A new chairman will be confirmed by the General Assembly at the LGA's Annual Conference in Bournemouth on 8 July.

Confirmation of the analysis will be made next Wednesday, once all declarations have been received and analysis completed.

Local election results will also inform the political make-up of LGA boards and chairs for the next political year, starting in September. Figures will be presented to the Leadership Board on 11 June, along with details of what new proportionality figures mean for the LGA's governance arrangements.

My colleague Helen Pidd has sent me this from Bradford.

Labour has gained full control of Bradford council after winning seats from the Tories and Lib Dems and fighting off attacks from Ukip, which took just one spot in the West Yorkshire administration.

George Galloway's Respect party made no gains in the city, despite Galloway touring the city in an open top bus in support of his eight candidates. Respect has no representatives in Bradford's town hall since its five sitting councillors - elected in the euphoric aftermath of Galloway's byelection win in 2012 - quit the party last year. They now sit as an Independent grouping.

The biggest majority in Bradford was won by Labour's Imran Hussain in the Toller ward, who lost to Galloway in the Bradford West byelection. But on Friday, after polling 4,850 votes to Respect's 660, Hussain vowed to fight Galloway again in next year's general election, if selected as Labour's parliamentary candidate.

He said: "The Respect party in Bradford West is finished. George Galloway came to town two years ago and made a load of false promises. He hasn't delivered and he's never here. People have realised they want local representation. On the doorstep people have been asking me to stand in 2015 and I think I can be a strong voice for the city."

Dave Green, the Labour leader of the council, said: "I think this election shows that the people of Bradford have rejected Respect. George Galloway and his cronies are a busted flush. Politics in Bradford will be better without them."

Sajid Javid, the Conservative culture secretary, has told the BBC that all three main parties must learn lessons from the results.

This is not a good result for any of the three mainstream parties because of the performance of Ukip. We all have to draw lessons from that.

These people are angry about politics, about issues in our country. There is a lot of frustration there and the way we have to respond to that is turn that anger into answers and look at the issues that are causing most concern.

I think those are around the economy. It is recovering but is fragile still, people are naturally concerned about that. It is about Europe, it is about immigration and it is probably about welfare reform as well.

We have a plan as a government on all these issues. I think this shows we need to redouble our efforts further, see what else we can do. We have to do a better job of communicating that as well.

On the basis of today's results, Ukip would have won Great Grimsby, John Curtice tells the BBC. They might have won Castle Point in Essex too, he says.

The Conservatives have held Trafford.

My colleague Steven Morris has sent me this from Cheltenham.

The Lib Dems may have had a miserable time of it in many places but their result in Cheltenham demonstrated they can still win well in parliamentary heartlands.

Party activists woke up worried that they could lose seats to the Tories and felt that some of their supporters may have drifted to Ukip.

But they comfortably retained control of the council, ending up with one extra member. From a standing start, Ukip made progress, not winning any seats but pushing the Tories into third place in four of the 19 wards up for grabs. To complete an unsatisfactory day for the Tories, the party's leader, Rob Garnham, was ousted after 18 years as a councillor.

Cheltenham Liberal Democrat MP Martin Horwood expressed delight at the result. "I think it shows we're in the right place for next year's general election," he said.

Horwood said he believed the general election here will still be a two horse race between the Tories and Lib Dems and partly blames the media's "obsession" with Farage for Ukip's success. "Anyone who gets that sort of coverage is going to have a surge." he said. "But I think this will be their high water mark."

Steve Jordan, the leader of the council, said the borough election campaign had been a "dry-run" for next year's general election battle. "We have a hard-working MP and a council that people think is doing the right thing most of the time. What's happening nationally doesn't help but this result shows we can still do well in places where we work hard."

The BBC has now produced figures for what it thinks the House of Commons would look like of today's results were replicated at a general election.

Labour: 322 seats

Conservatives: 255

Lib Dems: 45

They are very similar to the Sky figures. (See 4.21pm.)

Henry McDonald has sent me an update on the results from Northern Ireland.

The largest political party, the Democratic Unionists, are leading the pack in the early charge for seats to Northern Ireland's new slimmed eleven district councils.

So far the DUP have five seats and a 33.64 per cent of the vote share with the Ulster Unionist Party getting 3 so far and Sinn Fein doing the same. Among the DUP candidates to grab seats was Luke Poots, the son of Northern Ireland's Health Minister Edwin Poots.

The centrist Alliance Party has one seat so far in the early stages of the count.

And the hardline anti-power sharing Traditional Unionist Voice is polling well in Protestant rural areas. Two TUV candidates are performing strongly in the Cookstown and Magheragelt areas of Co.Tyrone. The TUV's performance will be closely monitored by rival unionist parties especially the result of its leader Jim Allister in the European election. If Allister was to unseat either of the two main unionist candidates it would be the Ulster equivalent of the UKIP political earthquake across the Irish Sea.

Here's the Guardian's Politics Weekly podcast.
It features Michael White, James Ball, Stephen Tall and Tom Clark talking about the election results.

The Tories have helpfully sent me a list of Labour figures criticising the leadership today.

Most of them have featured in the blog already, but here are a few I've missed.

From John Mann

[Labour's results are] the fault of Ed Miliband and all the people at the top of the Labour party ...

We need to address issues, people want action and clear policies. On agency workers, immigration, zero hours, there should be clear policies on what we're going to do, not just a nod and a wink ...

Our viewpoint is not being heard within the Labour party, the coalition of the Labour party is not broad enough and if we're not, we're not going to win the next election.

From Graham Stringer

Ed is behind in the personality stakes. We can sharpen up his presentation but we're also behind on economic policy. No party in opposition has ever won when they are behind in the opinion polls on both personality of the leader and economic policy

The centrepiece of our campaign has been the cost of living, and yet Ed did not know his own cost of living when he went into it, he didn't know how much he was spending on shopping ...we should know the price of milk and bread. That sort of thing is unforgivably unprofessional.

From John Healey

If you don't equip people with good analysis and strong messages, things that are tested that they can use when they confront a challenge, then they do their own thing or indeed they do nothing.

If Labour want to sent me quotes from Conservative MPs criticising David Cameron, or CCHQ, I would be more than happy to post those too. But they haven't. In fact, I've had one email from them all day. Frankly, their press operation has been rather useless.

More from the north west.

Arif Ansari (@ArifBBC)
Lib Dems hold South Lakeland, their only NW council with the loss of one seat.

Labour have gained Harrow.

Or held Harrow, depending on how you look at it.

Paul Osborn (@paulosborn)
. @LGiU techincally Harrow is Lab Hold. They won in 2010 then fell apart.

Labour has taken control of Bradford.

And Labour have gained West Lancashire.

Arif Ansari (@ArifBBC)
The Tories have lost West Lancashire council to Labour.

Lambeth is now a Lib Dem zone, according to the Labour leader there.

Lib Peck (@cllrpeck)
#Lambeth is a Lib Dem free zone. Brilliant results coming out of #Lambeth

Sky (which uses different figures from the BBC for the national vote) says these results would produce a hung parliament if replicated in a general election.

Robin Brant (@robindbrant)
@SkyNews predicts hugn parliament if local elex results mirrored at gen elex next year; lab 322, tories 261, libs 37, others 30 incl. ukip 1

They have increased their figures for Labour since this morning. (See 9.33am.)

The BNP has held a seat

Arif Ansari (@ArifBBC)
The BNP has held its only council seat in the NW in Pendle.

For those interested in numbers, here are some figures that put those national share figures that I quoted earlier (see 3.42pm) in context.

They show that:
* Labour are ahead of their performance last year, and in 2010, but they have not done as well as they are doing in national polls.* The Tories are doing worse than in 2010, and worse than their poll ratings, but better than they were doing last year.* The Lib Dems are doing worse than in 2010, worse than they are doing in the polls, but better than last year.* Ukip are doing significantly worse than last year, but better than in the polls.
Labour

Today's figure: 31%

And how it compares to -

Locals in 2010: +4

Locals last year: +2

Opinion polls: -4

Conservatives

Today's figure: 29%

And how it compares to -

Locals in 2010: -6

Locals last year: +4

Opinion polls: -3

Lib Dems

Today's figure: 13%

And how it compares to -

Locals in 2010: -13

Locals last year: -1

Opinion polls: +4

Ukip

Today's figure: 17%

And how it compares to -

Locals in 2010: n/a

Locals last year: -6

Opinion polls: +3

Today's figure is the BBC's projected national share figure.

I've compared it to the PNS figures for 2010 and 2013, and to how the parties are doing in UK Polling Report's current polling average.
According to Electoral Calculus, those figures would produce a majority of 10 for Labour if they were replicated at a general election.
(But, of course, they would not be, because people do not vote the same way in local elections and in general elections.)

The white smoke has now emerged from the BBC. John Curtice and his team have produced their figure for the projected national share (PNS) of the vote.

Labour: 31%

Conservatives: 29%

Ukip: 17%

Lib Dems: 13%

PNS is what would have happened if the results in these elections had been replicated in local elections taking place in every ward in the country.

(It is not simply the share of the vote in these elections. The psephologists have made allowance for the fact that the wards where elections took place yesterday were not representative of the country as a whole.)

Arif Ansari, the BBC's north west politcal editor, says the Lib Dems have lost all the seats they were defending in Liverpool.

Arif Ansari (@ArifBBC)
The Lib Dems have lost all 6 seats they were defending in Liverpool. And have conceded all 9 in Manchester.

Matthew Ellery, a Ukip candidate who was reportedly suspended during the election campaign, after describing local women as"pug ugly" on Facebook, has been elected to Basingstoke and Deane Council in Hampshire.

Neil Hamilton, Ukip's deputy chairman, was asked about this on BBC Berkshire earlier. "It just goes to show that perhaps some women like people talking dirty to them," he said. When challenged, he said he was joking.

Ukip won 10 of the 13 seats up for election on Great Yarmouth, which has gone from Labour to no overall control. Ukip have 10 of the 39 seats on the full council, with Labour holding 15 and the Conservatives 14.

But Labour are set to win in Bradford, where they have gained three seats and lost one to Ukip putting them on course to take control from NOC with six wards still to declare, the Press Association reports.

And the Press Association says Labour has lost control of North East Lincolnshire, after Ukip won five seats.

With Labour losing four seats and the Conservatives one, the council is left under no overall control. The new line up is Labour 21, Conservative 10, Ukip 8 and Liberal Democrats 3.

Labour is close to losing control of Plymouth, according to the Press Association. It has snapped this.

Ukip has gained three seats from Labour in Plymouth.

If Labour loses one more seat there will be no overall control of the council.

The BBC has just shown figures for what would happen in four Lib Dem seats if the results of these elections were to be replicated in those constituencies in 2015.

The Lib Dems would lose all four.

Here are the figures.
Twickenham (Vince Cable)
Conservatives: 35%

Lib Dems: 30%
Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone)
Labour: 36%

Lib Dems: 25%

Greens: 23%

Conservatives: 9%

Ukip: 3%
Solihull (Lorely Burt)
Conservatives: 38%

Lib Dems: 23%

Greens: 14%

Labour: 12%

Ukip: 10%
Cambridge (Julian Huppert)
Labour: 39%

Lib Dems: 28%

Greens: 15%

Conservatives: 14%

Ukip: 1%

Back to the BBC, where David Dimbleby has just asked John Mann if he wanted Douglas Alexander to be replaced as Labour's general election strategy chair.

Mann said Alexander should get on a train tomorrow and head for Scotland, where he should ensure Better Scotland win the referendum. Does that mean he should be replaced? Mann dodged the question, but the implication of what he says was that he thinks the answer is - yes.

Labour has won Crawley.

Labour South East (@SELabour)
@andrewsparrow Labour has taken control of Crawley - 4 gains make it Lab 20, Con 16, UKIP 1

Crawley was Conservative held, and only a third of the seats were up for election.

Crawley is 93rd on Labour's list of target seats.

The Labour MP John Mann is on the BBC's election programme saying Labour should attacked Ukip more vigorously.
Mann is quoted in our latest election lead story making exactly the same point.
On the BBC, David Dimbleby asks Mann what Labour should have done. Mann says the party could have used posters in the north showing Nigel Farage with his Margaret Thatcher mug, and pointing out that Farage supported Thatcher's policies.

Mann also attacks people in Labour who, he says, thought the party would benefit from a Ukip surge. He may be thinking of Douglas Alexander who suggested exactly this on the Today programme this morning. (See 8.33am.)

Mann says people in the party thought they were playing a "clever game". They deliberately decided not to issue leaflets attacking Ukip, he says.

The Lib Dems have held a council.

Lib Dem Press Office (@LibDemPress)
Liberal Democrats have kept control of Three Rivers Council. 23 Lib Dems, 13 Tories and 3 Labour.

And the Lib Dems say they have increased their share of the vote in Sheffield Hallam, where Nick Clegg is the MP.

This is from the BBC's north west political editor, Arif Ansari.

Arif Ansari (@ArifBBC)
Labour confident of taking all the Lib Dems' 9 seats on Manchester City Council.

It looks as if Lutfur Rahman might lose the mayoral election in Tower Hamlets.

LGiU (@LGiU)
Reports that its looking good for @johnbiggs4mayor in Tower Hamlets-Lab doing well in Bow East & Bow West, poorly in Mile End @AndrewSparrow

On the BBC election programme Jeremy Vine has just presented some regional share of the vote figures.

In the north of England Labour is well ahead.

Labour: 39%

Conservatives: 19%

Ukip: 18%

Lib Dems: 13%

But in the south of England the Conservatives are in front.

Conservatives: 32%

Labour: 25%

Ukip: 17%

Lib Dems: 17%

The Lib Dems tell me they've got 37% of the vote in Southport, where John Pugh is their MP. They have held six out of seven seats in his constituency.

You don't have to wait until tomorrow to read letters to the Guardian about the elections. My letters page colleagues are running a live letters slot, and you can read it here.

It includes this gem from Danny Dorling.

* Now that England has its own popular far-right party, has it become truly European?
Danny Dorling

According to Sky, Ukip have just reached 100 net gains.

This is from Scott Redding, a Green party press officer.

Scott Redding (@Scott_Redding)
@AndrewSparrow Greens now 2nd largest party on Solihull Council, 10 seats, after 1 hold and 3 gains today.

The BBC has not yet released its projected national share of the vote figures. John Curtice and his team compile the figures as the results come in, and many results are still being counted.

But Curtice has been dropping hints, based on how the parties are doing compared to previous years. By digging out the figures for previous years, it is possible to provide an early, provisional estimate for what the figures will show.

Here they are.

Labour: 30% or 31%

Conservatives: 28%

Ukip: 22%? (This morning Curtice was saying just under 25%. At lunchtime he was saying probably not quite as good as last year, and last year's figure was 23%.)

Lib Dems: 13%

I stress, these are not the BBC's figures. Psephologists tend to be quite scrupulous about their numbers, and Curtice will announce his when he's ready. I'm inferring from what he's saying. But I'm posting the figures because I thought you would be interested.

Here's an overview of where we stand.

* Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader, has said that his party will try to use its success in the local elections as a springboard for gaining seats at Westminster next year. On a visit to Essex, where Ukip success contributed to Labour losing control of the Thurrock, and the Tories losing control of four councils, he said:

What we have to do is get areas where we have clusters of councillors, clusters at either district level or county level, or ideally both. And they will become our target seats in 2015 for the general election and I should have thought this particular seat would be quite high on the list.

Ukip have gained almost 100 seats so far - already exceeding one prediction made by election experts - and they seem to have gained almost a quarter of the projected national share of the vote. On TV Ukip figures are the only ones who seem genuinely pleased with their performance. But it is not clear that they will beat the 139 net gains they made in local elections last year, when only 2,363 seats were up for election (this year it's 4,216) and their share of the vote seems to be about the same, even though having local elections coincide with European elections this year should have provided them with a boost. John Curtice, the BBC's psephologist, told the World at One just now: "It's probably the case that actually the performance is not quite as good as in last year's stupendous performance."

* Politicians from the three main parties have all accepted that Ukip's success shows that politicians need to listen more to the concerns of the electorate. But, beyond that, there seems to be little agreement as to what lessons they should be learning.

* Labour has won control of six councils so far, and gained more than 150 seats. But it's also been losing seats to Ukip, and it is not clear that the result would deliver Labour a majority at the general election. Some figures have already started to publicly criticise the quality of the party's campaign. There have been some barbed remarks about Ed Miliband's leadership, but the more important debate seems to be about how the party tackles Ukip. Douglas Alexander has suggested that Ukip's rise could help the party beat the Tories, but some in the party think this approach is complacent. John Curtice said the results "do not provide Labour with much comfort". He said Labour's share of the vote (the projected national share, or PNS) was only three or four points up on 2010, which suggests they are on 30% or 31%.

* The Lib Dems have already lost more than 130 seats and, according to the John Curtice, they may be heading for "their worst set of results yet this parliament". He told the World at One just now that they were 13 points below their vote in the 2010 local elections, which suggests that they are heading for a projected national share of 13%.

* David Cameron has again ruled out a pact with Ukip following the Conservatives' disappointing performance. They have lost more than 130 seats, and some Eurosceptics have been renewing their call for an electoral pact with Ukip. Cameron said that was unacceptable (although he did not rule out the Tories working with Ukip at local council level). However, the only MPs speaking out are relatively marginal figures, and no one is publicly attacking Cameron's leadership. John Curtice said they were three points below their performance in 2012, suggesting they are on course for a PNS of 28%.
* The Greens are on course for getting 10% of the vote, according to Curtice.
Nigel Farage has been visiting Thurrock, where Ukip gained five seats.

But he ruled out standing as a candidate in Essex himself at the general election.

No, that's not for me to do. The point about Essex is, yes, the public are receptive to us but we have got good, local voluntary structures here and that was what the Lib Dems built up during the 1990s.

I would have thought that if I put myself up in Essex to stand the local Ukip branches would reject me on the basis that I wasn't one of them.

Ken Livingstone, the former Labour mayor of London, has told the BBC that the legacy of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown is holding Ed Miliband back.

I think the problem is people still remember the disappointment of the New Labour government under Blair and Brown. Ed Miliband is genuinely Labour. He will govern for everybody. The old New Labour lot were a bit too obsessed with the hedge fund managers and the big cats in the city. That was a mistake.

He also said he thought that Ukip would struggle to do as well in the general election.

We have had this new big factor, Nigel Farage and Ukip, everyone is in love with him. But this time next year people will be saying 'who do I want in Downing Street' - and they will not be able to put Nigel in - 'Cameron or Miliband?'

In Watford Dorothy Thornhill, a Liberal Democrat, has been re-elected for the fourth time as mayor.

Labour's Sir Robin Wales has been re-elected as mayor of Newham, with 61% of the vote on the first count.

This is from the Press Association.

Labour looks set to take overall control of Crawley borough council from the Conservatives, with results due to be announced shortly.

This is from my colleague Tom Clark.

Tom Clark (@guardian_clark)
Greens getting 10% where they are standing

Peter Henley (@BBCPeterH)
Winchester neck & neck between Lib Dems & Conservative. High turnout - many past 50% but UKIP not happy at no wins pic.twitter.com/YLsbGPOr54

Labour have taken control of Amber Valley.

Paul Waugh (@paulwaugh)
Lab have taken control of Amber Valley for first time 14 years, BBC reports. Could be key for East Mids marginals in Gen Elxn

Amber Valley was Conservative held, and only a third of seats were up for election. It is 11th on Labour's list of target seats.

David Cameron is telling Sky News that the message from the results is that people want the government to deliver.
Q: Would you consider a pact with Ukip?
No, says Cameron. We don't do pacts. We are going all out for a Conservative victory.

He says the Tories held councils like Swindon and Tamworth, that were Labour for years.
Q: What about pacts with Ukip at a local level?
That is for councillors to decide, he says.

* Cameron accepts the Tories could work with Ukip locally on some councils. He ruled out a pact at national level. But, when asked about coalitions at local level, he did not rule them out. He replied:

Obviously our local councils will make their own decisions about how best to deliver local services at low cost for local people. And that's the right way forward.

My colleague Steven Morris has sent me this from Cheltenham, where the Lib Dems seem confident of holding on to their control of the council.

Nick Clegg's party may be suffering in some parts of the country but the Lib Dems in Cheltenham are confident that they will maintain firm control of the council here.

In 2010 the Lib Dems won an overall majority on the borough council and this was one of the few places in the country where the orange vote held up strong at the 2012 local elections when the national party's dalliance with power was alienating supporters almost everywhere else.

At that point it was in firm control of the 40-strong council with 25 members. Since then, however, the grip has loosened a little, with one member becoming independent after falling out with the party over plans to build on green spaces and the Tories pinching a seat in a by-election.

This time round, half the seats are up for grabs with the Lib Dems defending 12 of them. And the Ukip factor will play a bigger part than ever before. Nigel Farage's party won three Gloucestershire county council seats last year and is fielding 11 candidates in these local elections - more than Labour.

But the Lib Dems in regency Cheltenham are experienced, clever campaigners. They have worked very hard here not just to make sure they hang on to control of the council but so they will be battle-ready for next year's general election when it will probably be a straight fight between the Lib Dems and the Tories.

From a standing start it looks as if Ukip has done well. They may not win any seats but they reckon they are creating a solid base from which they will build.

Christina Simmonds, the Ukip branch chairman, said the party had focused on local issues - complaints over changes to the road system in the centre of town, car parking, leisure facilities. But she said the party's core messages on Europe and immigration were chiming with voters.

"I think people are also realising that we are not the idiots the other parties and the media want to make us out to be," she said. "They patronise us and try to make out we don't know what we're talking out just because they don't agree with us. But what we're saying is making sense to good, ordinary people."

The Labour MP John Mann has been telling my colleague Nicholas Watt that Labour should have attacked Ukip more aggressively.

Nicholas Watt (@nicholaswatt)
And they're off. @JohnMannMP tells me: Labour had a tremendously ill-judged campaign, in particular the delib dec not to attack @UKIP

Nicholas Watt (@nicholaswatt)
More @JohnMannMP: Some of so called strategists at top of Lab think @UKIP doing well = good cos damage PM. Need to get out of ivory towers

Simon Danczuk, the Labour MP, told LBC that Ed Miliband's leadership was a factor with voters. (And he didn't mean a postive factor.)

I'm not going to pretend that Ed Miliband himself doesn't come up as an issue on the doorstep - of course it does.

He also said Labour need to learn from Ukip's authenticity.

Ukip have had a campaign that has been more about passionate conversation with the electorate. You might even describe it as a rant but what it hasn't been is a lot of sloganeering. I can't think of a Ukip slogan actually so they have been having a passionate conversation. They have communicated their message in a passionate sort of way. I think we as politicians, and our leader, can learn from that. Less on sloganeering, more about having a passionate conversation with the electorate and in terms of policy.

Here are some of the most interesting blogs I've read about the results.

If you only have time for one, read Anthony Wells'. It gives a very balanced and insightful overview.
* Anthony Well at UK Polling Report says Ukip's performance is good, but not astounding.

At the most basic level UKIP have obviously done very well. As I write the BBC suggest they are getting about 25% of the vote in wards they contest (though much worse in London) and have gained about 100 councillors. Two things to put this in context though - the first is that this is roughly the same level of support as they got at the local elections last year. I don't really know if that's good or bad for them. At one level they've sustained last year's advance, it's not a flash in the pan and they are more firmly establishing themselves as a major force. On the other hand, these are local elections on the same day as the European election ... shouldn't they be improving on last year? Second caveat, their vote is still very evenly spread. They are getting many more votes than the Lib Dems, but far fewer councillors. As was the case last year, UKIP are doing fantastically well at coming second in many places and that doesn't build the council base they need to build support in target seats for the general election.

* John Harris at Comment is free says we should stop sneering at Ukip.

As the local election results come in and Ukip's numbers continue to look remarkable, the rest of us should maybe pause for thought and realise that something rather sobering is afoot, as happened in the 2012 county council elections, only more so. If a party is averaging 47% of the vote in a Labour stronghold such as Rotherham, toppling Tories from their perches in crucial Conservative territory and apparently heading towards first place in the European contest, something important is obviously afoot. Moreover, if people are supporting Ukip in such large numbers - even after the media's massed guns have been rattling at it for weeks - it is probably time to drop all the sneering and think about why.

* James Kirkup at the Telegraph lists six lessons from the elections.* Jeremy Cliffe at the Economist says David Cameron will be "quietly pleased" with the result.
* Hopi Sen on his blog says you should listen to what the parties have not been saying about their results, not what they have been saying.* Atul Hatwal at Labour Uncut says Labour faces a fundmental crisis.

Labour did well to take Cambridge, Croydon, Redbridge and, in particular, Hammersmith and Fulham (where the socio-economic and demographic tide has been working against the party over past years). Still, it is hard to avoid the impression that the party's success was limited to metropolitan pockets, while it did much worse in more blue-collar areas. Its loss of control in Thurrock, a typical example of these, will particularly smart as the seat holds second place on the party's ranking of its 106 general election targets.

The best that can be said about the Lib Dems' dismal performance is that it was largely expected. At the time of writing the party had lost 64 seats. More damaging to the party's morale, however, will be its results in leafy areas like Cambridge (where it was previously the largest party), Kingston and across south-west London in general. Lib Dems are resigned to losing parliamentary seats in less prosperous parts of the country, where the spending cuts of the past years have hit hardest, but had hoped to hold the line in wealthier places where their coalition with the Conservatives is less controversial. Not so, it seems.

* Robin Lustig at Huffington Post says he thinks the Ukip vote is a one-night stand.

Yes, Labour got its vote out, but the story from too many wards across London is not of wholesale switching from the Tories to Labour but of Ukip cutting into the Tories' vote and allowing Labour through.

Politics can be a strangely delusional business. If a Labour party supporter with a passing knowledge of past elections had been transported to another dimension immediately after the result in 2010, and then returned to these shores today, there would be no doubt in their assessment: Labour is not doing well enough to win next year.

With the polls already virtually tied, Ukip set to beat Labour into second in the European vote and Labour lagging the Tories by double digits on the economy and leadership, it is almost beyond obvious that the party faces a fundamental crisis.

* Caron Lindsay at Lib Dem Voice looks at the Lib Dem results.
* Peter Oborne at the Telegraph lists three books that journalists should read to understand Ukip.

My prediction? After next year's general election, Ukip will end up with not a single parliamentary seat at Westminster and a share of the vote much reduced from their share this week. On local councils where they have won seats this time round, the - how shall I put this? - somewhat variable quality of their candidates will soon become even more embarrassingly evident.

That's the thing about small parties led by a single dominant, charismatic figure. The internal tensions quickly lead to fatal fractures, and that's as true on the right as on the left of the political spectrum. I reckon there'll be Ukip councillors quitting within six months at most.

UKIP's gain of over 80 seats at the time of writing is bound to make any liberal wince. This is what happens in election when 2 out of 3 people don't vote, though. Under no circumstances must we pander to them and, actually, there's a strong reason for Labour to lose their ambivalence and get out there and fight them properly.

It's a very mixed bag of results for the Liberal Democrats in seats we hold. Good news in Eastleigh, Birmingham and Colchester but worrying in Cambridge and Portsmouth. Oh, and we really need to look at how they did it in Eastleigh.

This is never a set of elections that we do particularly well in. Four years ago we lost over 100 seats while Labour gained 500 on the day they took a drubbing in the General Election. Eight years ago, when we were doing pretty well post Iraq and 3 months after we won an historic by-election in Gordon Brown's back yard, we had a whopping gain of.....2 seats across the country. We have to see the overall picture in that context.

Strangely, he misses out possibly the best, Revolt on the Right, by Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin. I summarised it here.

This morning, while the nation's political journalists were either asleep, dead tired, or preoccupied with the elections, the government published a report from the Major Projects Authority (MPA) assessing nearly 200 major infrastructure politics.

As Patrick Wintour reports, it reveals that universal credit has had to be categorised as an entirely new project because the problems with the original design were so fundamental.

Graeme Demianyk (@GraemeDemianyk)
Results from @ExeterCouncil emerging: Labour expected to hold, and told party could be 50-50 male-female. A first? http://t.co/7sIw8xn91Z

And, according to the Press Association, Ukip have won their first seat on Weymouth and Portland council when local party chairman Francis Drake beat the current mayor, Ray Banham, a Lib Dem.

Conservatives have lost four seats on Nuneaton and Bedworth borough council - three to Labour and one to the Greens.

Nick Clegg has told BBC News that he will not be resigning following today's results.

The Liberal Democrats, all of us under my leadership, realised that it was going to be tough, going to be difficult. Joining the coalition was controversial in the first place. Having to take these really painstaking decision to get the economy right - of course that's not going to be universally popular.

And there is a very strong mood of restlessness and dissatisfaction with mainstream politics. And that's reflected in the results for all the mainstream parties, including the Liberal Democrats.

Here's the quote from Ed Miliband's interview earlier. (See 10.29am.)

I think in some parts of the country we've had discontent building up for decades about the way the country has been run and about the way our economy works and people feeling that the country just doesn't work for them. And so what you are seeing in some parts of the country is people turning to Ukip as an expression of that discontent and that desire for change.

He also said he thought he could "persuade" Ukip supporters to back Labour at the general election.

Apparently the Tories had a "margarine strategy" in Croydon. This is from Steve Reed, the Labour MP for Croydon North.

Steve Reed MP (@SteveReedMP)
Mutterings from Tories at Croydon count about @GavinBarwellMP's 'margarine strategy' spreading them too thin and losing every key ward

The Bow Group, a Conservative pressure group (which historically used to be quite leftish, in Tory terms, but which is now under new management) wants David Cameron to replace Grant Shapps with a directly-elected chairman. It has put out a press release saying this. This is from the Bow Group's chairman, Ben Harris-Quinney.

The Conservative party has ignored the rise of Ukip and is haemorrhaging voters as a result, but the fundamental problem is that it has ignored conservative principles, its members and voters for too long.

The carry on regardless, business as usual approach still being advocated by the leadership isn't going to work, we need urgent reforms to be enacted now, not after 2015.

This needs to start immediately with the election of a new party chairman within 6 months, to begin the process of reform the party needs to win back members and explore an accommodation with Ukip, not by insulting Ukip voters but by finding a way to work with Ukip to unite the right in Britain.

The Green party has sent out a press release celebrating its gains in Bristol.

Bristol Green party now has three new councillors, Tim Malnick (Bishopston), Martin Fodor (Redland) and Charlie Bolton (Southville).

Tim won in Bishopston with an amazing 47% of votes and over a 1000 more than second place Labour, both Bishopston councillors are now Green.

In Redland, Martin became our first councillor there with over double the amount of votes of the second place LibDems.

Charlie held the seat in Southville vacated by Tess Green with 42% of the vote.

In Windmill Hill, Pip Sheard only lost out by 187 votes in a three way split between us, LibDems and Labour - a great result.

The Conservative MP John Baron says that Ukip's performance shows that the political establishment - including his party - have been too complacent.

Whilst accepting that Ukip is in part a protest vote, the political establishment has been too complacent over the EU. It must now heed the message from these elections.

No 10 must learn from past mistakes. First it tried to ignore, and then insult, Ukip. It then took our backbench campaigns to get a referendum, and then support for legislation.

But even now mistakes are being made. We have immigration targets, yet cannot control the major EU component. We also need to make clearer that there will be no deal with Ukip.

Labour and the Liberals need to wake up and support our commitment to an EU referendum. They have failed to deliver on past promises. Voters want their say, regardless of their views on EU membership.

Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, has told Sky these are good results for Labour.

These were a good set of results for Labour. The big headline for me is Labour gaining ground in the south in the seats where we need to gain ground and that will give the party great heart.

Of course, it was a good night for Ukip too. There's absolutely no getting away from that. The talk on the doorstep was about immigration. There is some thinking for all of the parties to be done there, ourselves included.

But as I see it, as things stand, these are a good set of results for Labour.

Almost 500 council seats are up for grabs in Northern Ireland. My colleague Henry McDonald, the Guardian's Ireland correspondent, has sent me this quick note.

The first council seats will only be declared by mid afternoon with 900 candidates sweating it out for 462 seats.

The winners will elected to the newly reformed 11 district councils in the region - far less than the 26 previous councils in Northern Ireland.

But overall picture as to who will control the new 11 councils won't be apparent until mid afternoon Saturday.

The Euro election results for the three seats in Northern Ireland may not be clear untl Monday morning.

Meanwhile Northern Ireland's newest political party, NI21, is imploding this morning even before a vote was counted.

The party's leader and deputy leader have clashed over the airwaves today with the latter, John McCallister, saying Basil McCrea has been accused of "inappropriate sexual activity". McCrea has reacted furiously to the claims, denying all the allegations levelled at him within the party.

And Tina McKenzie, the party's candidate in the European elections, resigned last night from the NI21 executive stating on Twitter that she would not work with "people who play dirty tricks and dirty politics".

Q: Graham Stringer says your campaign was unforgivably unprofessional.
Ed Miliband is on Sky News now.

Asked why Ukip has done well, he says discontent has been building up in some parts of the country for years. Labour needs to show those people it has the answers, he says.

Miliband says Labour ran a good campaign. But to understand what happened tonight, you need to look at concerns that have built up over years.

I'll post the full quotes from the interview when I get them.

According to the Press Association, in Solihull - which covers a marginal Lib Dem parliamentary consituency - the Green party is saying that "the Liberal Democrats and Labour have struggled"and that Ukip could get its first foothold on the council.

On the Today programme this morning Suzanne Evans, Ukip's communities spokeswoman, seemed to concede that Ukip finds it harder to win support amongst the well-educated. She was talking about why Ukip had difficulties in London.

We do have a more media-savvy, well-educated population in London and they are more likely, I think, to have read some of the negative press that's been about us, and I think they'd be more likely to believe it, whereas people outside of London have, I think, been fairly cynical about the media campaign and the campaign that the other parties have waged against us.

I've taken the quote from PoliticsHome.

UPDATE AT 10.59AM: Here's the AudioBoo.

Graham Allen, the Labour MP who chairs the Commons political and constitutional reform committee, has put out a press release saying he is surprised the main parties have not done worse.

I am surprised not by the beating given to conventional politics by the British people but by their continued tolerance of the complacent, fearful, depoliticised main parties. It is a slap on the wrists not a kicking. We have all been given another year to re-create our mission, our belief, purpose and relevance to the public. It may be our last chance.

And this is from Patrick O'Flynn, Ukip's director of communications.

Patrick O'Flynn (@oflynndirector)
Collapse in Tory vote share in Eastleigh is very significant for us - it's us versus the Libs for the parliamentary seat. Perfick :-)

Here's Natalie Bennett, the Green party leader, on the Green results so far.

Natalie Bennett (@natalieben)
Congratulations to Bristol Green Party & 3 new councillors there! (2 gains of seats.) http://t.co/E02frY2Nzs @bristolgreens #VoteGreen2014

Here's the Labour spin on the results so far. This is a summary of the briefing I've had from the party.

* Gaining control of Hammersmith & Fulham from the Conservatives was a "spectacular win" because it was not a target.

* The wins in Croydon, Redbridge, Merton and Cambridge were also welcome.

* Labour has been doing well in target seats, like Cambridge, Hastings, Carlisle, Stevenage (where the Tories hold the Westminster seat, but now just have two councillors), Cannock Chase, Dudley, Ipswich, Lincoln, Peterborough and Hastings (where the Labour group is the biggest ever.)

* Although Ukip has hit the Labour vote, it has damaged the Tories and the Lib Dems more.

* The Tories are now fighting themselves, with MPs like Peter Bone, Douglas Carswell and Jacob Rees-Mogg calling for a pact with Ukip.

Sky News been doing its own share of the vote number crunching. (It does not use the same projected national share [PNS] figures as the BBC - see 6.58am. It uses a slightly different figure, national equivalent vote [NEV], compiled by Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher.)

According to Sky, today's results, if replicated at the general election, would produce these results.

Labour: 308 seats (up 50)

Conservatives: 272 seats (down 34)

Lib Dems: 40 (down 17)

In other words, Labour would be the largest party, but well short of a majority. A result like this would probably produce a Labour/Lib Dem coalition.

My Times colleague Sam Coates has this to say about Douglas Alexander's point about Ukip's rise potentially helping Labour. (See 8.33am.)

Sam Coates Times (@SamCoatesTimes)
@AndrewSparrow Several Labour folk think that exactly that view led to Labour's dangerous complacency about UKIP in this elections

Here is a quick summary of the state of play so far.

* Ukip have had a good night, doing well in all parts of England (apart from London) and causing serious harm to the electoral performance of both the Conservatives and Labour. Although experts expected them to gain fewer than 100 seats (see 6.01am), they have already almost reached this target, with around half the results yet to come in. However, in terms of overall number of councillors, they still remain a fairly minuscule force in English local government.
* The Lib Dems have lost control of Kingston council, and are losing dozens of seats, but have increased their majority on their London flagship, Sutton.
* Labour have made modest gains, but their overall share of the vote seems to be disappointing. They have gained control of five councils - Redbridge, Hammersmith & Fulham, Cambridge, Merton and Croydon - but they have lost control of Thurrock (because of Ukip) and John Curtice, the BBC's psephologist, has said that their national share of the vote is well down on what it was two years ago. (See 6.39am.) At least one MP, Graham Stringer, has publicly criticised Ed Miliband's leadership.

* The Conservatives have lost control of eight councils, and almost 100 seats. But they have taken comfort from the fact that Labour's progress has been limited. The result seems likely to renew the debate about how the party tackles Ukip, although the party had (again) dismissed calls for a pact.

Here is more from Nigel Farage. He says Westminster journalists do not realise how much damage Ukip is doing to Labour.

There were two conversations going on last night. One was in Westminster amongst commentariat and MPs... The other conversation was going on in Swindon where the Labour leader said we've been hurt by Ukip. Another conversation was going in Rotherham where Ukip won 10 seats and Labour won 11 seats. In the West Midlands Labour were saying Ukip were splitting our vote and letting the Tories in. This idea that the Labour vote just hursts the Tories is going to be blown away.

The Tories have gained Kingston from the Lib Dems.

CCHQ Press Office (@CCHQPress)
Conservatives GAIN Kingston. Lib Dem appetite for high council tax takes a hammering at the ballot box

My colleague Rob Booth has sent me this from Croydon, where Labour have taken the the council from the Conservatives.

Labour are heading to a nine or ten seat majority on Croydon council, overturning a four seat deficit at the 2010 election. The latest ward to come back, Waddon, saw Labour take three Tory seats and another marginal looks set to deliver two or three more seats to Labour. It is a crushing victory in a tight parliamentary marginal.

Out-going Conservative leader, Mike Fisher who was forced out after eight years as leader said Labour had not won the vote but Ukip had lost it for the Conservatives, a claim denied by Labour. The Conservative campaigners warned "Vote Ukip, get Labour" and it had come true, he said.

When we were canvassing nobody was saying they were for Ukip because its still perhaps a little embarrassing," he said. "But the level of support has come out today. Voters are using this as an opportunity to rebel and I hope that when it comes to the general election people will look at the policies of the main parties. The annoying thing here is that UKIP have lots of votes but no seats and many of theose Ukip voters are Conservatives and they will be horrified to wake up this morning to a Labour council.

Here is some more Twitter comment on the results.

Tim Montgomerie (@TimMontgomerie)
The place where nearly all commentators live - London - has rejected Ukip but it's doing well in rest of England. Mind the political gap.

Will Jennings (@drjennings)
Predictable soul searching among parties: Conservatives talking about pacts with UKIP (no go) and Labour about Miliband (won't change now)

Nick Golding (@NickGolding)
Ukip not winning councils but being v successful at depriving other pties of majs. Seems like a recipe for turbulance on many authorities

Steven Fielding (@PolProfSteve)
Despite UKIP froth it's Labour's failure to move ahead of Conservatives that has concrete consequences for 2015.

John McTernan (@johnmcternan)
Labour gains Croydon. With Enfield and Merton results and gains already in Redbridge looks like suburban London is going Labour.

Ian Birrell (@ianbirrell)
Labour success in London underlines long-term problem with Tory tacking to the right & hostility to immigration in response to UKIP rise

Labour have now won in Redbridge.

Mike Gapes MP (@MikeGapes)
Tory Lib Dem coalition lose Redbridge. Labour has a majority on the council for the first time ever in 50 yr history of the Borough

Here's a picture of chez Farage.

Here's an interesting point from Mike Smithson.

Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB)
Since the 2013 locals Ukip has lost every council by-election it has defended

Labour's David Prescott is putting the Ukip results in perspective.

David Prescott (@DavidPrescott)
That "political earthquake" captured in a handy graph for Ukippers pic.twitter.com/qONa9lkTLj via @DailyMirror

Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary and Labour's general election strategy chair, has been responding to the results for his party on the airwaves this morning.

On the Today programme he said the rise in the Ukip vote could help Labour win the general election (by taking votes from the Tories, he implied.)

I don't for a second dispute the scale of the support and the headlines that Ukip will command in the coming days, but on the other hand I think, beneath those headlines, there is another story that is emerging. Nobody really disputes that there is either going to be a Conservative or a Labour government, or a Conservative or Labour-led government, in 2015 and if you look at the key battleground seats that are going to decide the outcome of that election, the dynamic of Ukip is playing itself out in a way that suggests actually Labour is well placed to win a whole number of those key seats: Lincoln, Peterborough, Hastings, Stevenage, Cannock Chase, Redbridge we're hearing is coming to Labour this morning. In that sense, I'm far from complacent, because there's a challenge for all political parties here. But I do believe, as I did yesterday morning, that Labour can win the general election if we take the right steps between now and a year's time.

Alexander said Labour knocked on seven million doors during the campaign. And he said the party had more activists on the street than the Conservatives, the Lib Dems and Ukip combined. "That is going to be one of our secret weapons," he said.

John Humphrys then asked him about a report in today's Times (paywall) saying Ed Miliband's leadership is coming under attack from his own party. Humphrys quoted the "leading Labour figure" quoted in the report.

One leading Labour figure told The Times: "The narrative around Ed Miliband, because it's the truth, is that he looks weird, sounds weird, is weird."

Alexander said Miliband had brought the party together. "Normally when we lose as badly as we did in 2010 we form a circular firing squad and about 15 years later we get our act together. That has not happened." Miliband had also made the party "genuinely competitive", Alexander said.

Here is a live map of the election results.

Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader, is claiming that today's results show that Ukip can win under first past the post.

The Ukip fox is in the Westminster hen house. There are areas of the country where now we have got an imprint in local government. Under the first-past-the-post system we are serious players.

Here are the councils that have changed hands so far.
Losses (all to no overal control - NOC)
You can read the results as they come in on our results page.

Conservatives

Castle Point

Peterborough
Gains
Southend-on- Sea

Labour

Cambridge (from NOC)

Losses
Merton (from NOC)

Hammersmith & Fulham (from Consevatives)

Losses
Thurrock (to NOC)

Lib Dems

Portsmouth (to NOC)

The Lib Dems say they are increasing their majority in Sutton, their flagship London council.

This is from Paul Burstow, the local MP.

Paul Burstow MP (@PaulBurstow)
@LibDems retain control of @SuttonCouncil taking seats from both Conservatives and Labour to increase majority.

Redbridge is looking good for Labour, apparently.

Tarah Welsh (@Tarahwelsh)
Labour now has 20 seats in #redbridge, Tories have 16. 8 more declarations to go but looking good for Labour. #Vote2014

Redbridge, in east London, is led by a Conservative/Lib Dem coalition. It's a key Labour target, and the place where Ed Miliband launched Labour's local election campaign.

Michael Gove, the education secretary, has doing the morning broadcast interviews on behalf of the Conservatives. He said the results were better than expected for his party.

You would ordinarily have expected the party to benefit [from discontent with government] not to be Ukip, but to be Labour, who are the principle opposition, who are bidding to be the government next time round. And if you look across the country, they just haven't made the progress that you'd expect a party to make if they were going on to become the next government. In places from Peterborough to Worcester, they simply haven't done as well as you would have thought that they should ...

It is striking that in a seat like Thurrock, which is the number one Labour target, they've gone backwards. It is striking that in Wigan and in Birmingham the Conservatives have won seats from Labour. So, if the Conservatives are winning in Wigan a year out from the general election, that should make Ed Miliband and his inner circle wonder where have we gone wrong.

The Labour victory in Croydon has been confirmed.

Croydon Advertiser (@CroydonAd)
BREAKING: Tony Newman has declared a Labour victory in Croydon, with seven wards declared #croydon2014

The Tories previously held Croydon with a slim majority (37 seats, over Labour's 30). It was one of the seats Labour visited during the campaign.

Croydon Central is 46th on Labour's list of target seats for the general election.

Here is some comment on the results from journalists and commentators on Twitter.

Philip Cowley (@philipjcowley)
If the London seats had counted quicker, suspect the narrative of this election might have been rather different.

Lewis Baston (@lewis_baston)
@philipjcowley Lab needs a Ken Baker 1990 who can do a reverse-spin on the basis of party having done well in a few councils in West London.

Paul Waugh (@paulwaugh)
The Curse of Swindon still affecting Ed Miliband tho. Tories increased their hold on the council, days after Lab leader's visit

Nick Robinson (@bbcnickrobinson)
Nigel Farage predicted an earthquake. The first tremors were felt last night. My blog http://t.co/UnCiGUQ0gu

(What about last year's local elections, Nick?)

Anthony Painter (@anthonypainter)
Wake up to my Twitter feed and it sounds like 1997 again. Switch on Sky News and it sounds like 1992....we'll see as more emerges.

Mark Stuart (@MarkieStuartie)
Demographics are the key to understanding local results. Lab does OK in ethnically diverse London; UKIP triumphs in white w/c Essex.

James Forsyth (@JGForsyth)
My first cup of coffee take on the results so far, Ukip surge and Labour make only sluggish progress http://t.co/jHUradCLNm

James Forsyth (@JGForsyth)
Hammersmith's electoral demographics are clearly going against the Tories. First, Shaun Bailey does worse than expected now council lost

Joey Jones (@joeyjonessky)
With Ukip appeal so strong outside London, accusation levelled at party leaders of being "metropolitan" becomes more resonant.

James Forsyth (@JGForsyth)
These London results make Boris's win, and Ken's failure, in 2012 all the more remarkable

George Eaton (@georgeeaton)
Strong Labour performance in London is big boost for Sadiq Khan - in good position to win mayoral nomination.

George Eaton (@georgeeaton)
London results show dramatic need for Tories to improve their performance among ethnic minorities if they are to win future elections.

John McTernan (@johnmcternan)
If 'long term economic plan' was in a drinking game no-one watching the local election coverage would be sober after 9am.

keith flett (@kmflett)
BBC local election narrative: UKIP-soaraway; Labour-finished; Tories/LibDems-nothing to see here,move along

keith flett (@kmflett)
Local Election latest. UKIP have won Nick Robinson from the Tories

Rafael Behr (@rafaelbehr)
Hmm. Big slice of vote against govt parties not going to main opposition a year before gen election. Not good results for Labour.

Patrick Wintour (@patrickwintour)
"The Ukip fox is in the Westminster hen house", claims Nigel Farage.

The Tories are claiming Ed Miliband has pulled out of a visit to Tamworth.

Paul Waugh (@paulwaugh)
Tory MP for Tamworth @ChrisPincher says plans for Ed Miliband to visit tday hv been cancelled. Lab failed to win 4 seats needed #targetseat

This is interesting, if true.

Sam Freedman (@Samfr)
Very strong correlation between strength of UKIP vote in an area and underperformance of schools.

Freedman used to be an adviser to Michael Gove.

This is from Paul Nuttall, Ukip's deputy leader.

Paul Nuttall (@paulnuttallukip)
UKIP have taken its first seats in Greater Manchester after winning a seat from both Labour and Conservatives in Bolton. Good job! #UKIP

The Lib Dems have held Eastleigh. This is from Mike Thornton, the Lib Dem MP.

Mike Thornton MP (@Mike4Eastleigh)
@SophyRidgeSky @ReneKinzett No UKIP success here in Eastleigh. We've held every seat.

The Conservatives have held Daventry.

The Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg has been renewing his call for some kind of Conservative/Ukip pact. Grant Shapps, the party chairman, has ruled that out.

We're not going to have a pact or joint candidates, or whatever. It can't happen on a technical basis because we do not allow joint candidates to stand ... It's not going to happen because we're the Conservative party; we are the best chance to offer an in/out referendum, the only chance.

Here's Steve Crowther, the Ukip chairman, on the results.

They are saying [Ukip is just a protest vote] but there is an air of desperation about it to be perfectly honest because this has now been going on for sometime and it's a consistent thing.

Ukip have been building for 20 years consistently and we have now reached a point where we have broken into the old party system. It is now four party politics and this is not a flash in the pan.

The other parties are looking a little bit panic stricken.

He said he was particularly pleased the party had won 10 seats in Rotherham.

There is some good news for the Lib Dems.

LGiU (@LGiU)
Looking like Lib Dems will hold Sutton

John Curtice's comments on the BBC earlier (see 6.39am) suggest he thinks Labour is on course for a projected national share (PNS) of 30%.

PNS is a figure that psephologists produce that tries to show what the national result would have been if the votes in local elections had been replicated in an election covering every ward in the country. It adjusts the actual results to take into account the fact that annual local elections feature a disproportionate number of elections in either Tory or Labour areas.

In 2010 Labour's PNS in the local elections was 27%. In 2012 it was 38%.

My colleague Rob Booth has sent me this from Croydon.

UKIP's vote is showing strongly even if they've not won seats yet in Croydon. They just came second to the Conservatives in the safe ward of Kenley, an affluent leafy suburb and their candidate came third behind the two Labour winners in Fieldway ward.

For more on Croydon, try the Croydon Citizen's live blog.

Here's Greg Hands, the Conservative deputy chief whip and MP for Chelsea and Fulham, on the Hammersmith and Fulham result.

Greg Hands (@GregHands)
Disappointing results in some wards in Hammersmith & Fulham. Overall, increase in Labour vote almost identical to fall in the LibDem vote.

The Tories used to run the council, but 11 of their wards went to Labour, leaving the council with 26 Labour seats and 20 Conservative.
* Curtice said that Labour were doing worse than they were two years ago. * He said Ukip were doing much better than expected.
On the Today programme John Curtice, the psephologist, delivered his preliminary verdict on the results. Here are the key points.

When it comes to local elections, we have quite high expectations of what oppositions should achieve because we basically say, if a party looks as though it is potentially regarded as an alternative government, it should be doing very well in local elections, even better than you would expect to do in a general election in 12 months' time. The truth is, by that test at least, Labour have not done well enough.

Most of the seats that were being up for grabs yesterday were last fought over on the same day as the 2010 general election. And if you compare Labour's performance vote for vote with 2010, the advance is just 3% point - 3% on what was the day in which Labour recorded its second worst result. And if you actually compare these results with the position two years ago, which we can also compare most of these places with, Labour's vote is clearly well down, something like nine points.

So the truth is, modest progress, Labour not even doing as well as they were able to do earlier in this parliament, and thereby again reinforcing the doubts that have always been there that at the end of the day it is not entirely clear that the British electorate regard Labour as a clear alternative.

Certainly what these local elections demonstrate is that anybody who thought that the Ukip bubble was going to be easily deflated should now be disabused of that notion. They have managed to maintain most of the support they have had over the last 12 months and repeated it at these local elections. To that extent at least they have done remarkably well.

We have already found Ukip gaining over 80 seats. That was as much as anybody expected them to make [see 6.01am], even if they did well, and we've only had a third or so of the results actually in yet. So we are probably going to see far more Ukip councils by the time all the ballots are counted this afternoon than we've ever previously seen.

* He said on average Ukip were getting just under 25% of the vote. In London they were only getting around 7% of the vote, he said. But outside London they were getting more than 25%.

Here's more on the Cambridge, where Labour took control of a council that was previously under no overall control. It's from the Press Association.

Ten of the seats on offer went to Labour, while the Lib Dems won four and an independent one.

The new council line-up has Labour on 25, the Lib Dems on 14, independents on two and Conservatives on one.

According to this list compiled by Lewis Baston for Progress (pdf), Cambridge (a Lib Dem seat) is 103rd on Labour's list of general election targets.

Lynne Featherstone, the Lib Dem international development minister, has said that Ukip are doing well because they "sound like human beings".

The reason have had such amazing success, such a rapid rise ... I think they've also managed to sound like human beings, and I think that's Nigel Farage's big win. All of us have gotten to the point where we are so guarded, we are so on message, that we seem to have lost some of our humanity.

As James Forsyth reports in this Spectator article, Nigel Farage thinks much the same.

Farage thinks the secret of his success is simple. 'It's about language, isn't it? I'm fairly direct and I think that makes a big difference.'

Graham Stringer, the Labour MP for Blackley and Broughton, has been speaking to broadcasters. He criticised the Labour campaign, saying that although the party was campaigning on the cost of living, Ed Miliband did not even know his own cost of living. That was "unforgivably unprofessional", he said.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Conservative MP, has renewed his call for some kind of Conservative/Ukip pact in the light of these results.

Labour has taken control of Cambridge.

LGiU (@LGiU)
Labour take control of Cambridge City Council #Vote2014

Ukip have been celebrating in Portsmouth, where the Lib Dems have lost control because of Ukip gains. Only a third of seats were up for election.

Peter Henley (@BBCPeterH)
Lib Dems lose control of Portsmouth Council as UKIP take 6 seats. They say working class Labour switched to Farage pic.twitter.com/6KDsFuf081

Labour has held Carlisle city council (where only a third of wards were up for election).

BBC Cumbria (@BBC_Cumbria)
ELECTION Labour has kept control of @CarlisleCC. @UKLabour and @Conservatives gained 1 seat. @LibDems and an independent lost 1 seat each

Directly elected mayors have gone out of favour, but in Copeland they have voted for one.

BBC Cumbria (@BBC_Cumbria)
ELECTION Overwhelming support for a directly elected mayor in Copeland. 12, 671 in favour to 5,489 against. Turnout was 33%

It is already clear that Ukip have outperformed expectations.

Official predictions from the political parties tend to be fairly unhelpful, because they are mainly designed to manage expectations. The Conservatives and the Lib Dems were saying earlier this week that they expected to lose seats, and Labour claimed they were only expecting to gain around 150 seats. But polling experts do produce more objective figures, based on how well the parties are doing in the polls, and I'm aware of two different "forecasts".

Rallings/Thrasher

Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher are professors of politics at University of Plymouth who specialise in studying local elections. In a briefing for the Political Studies Association last month, they produced some figures for the number of seats they expect the main parties to win in these local elections based on how well they have been performing over the last three months in local council byelections.

According to Rawlings and Thrasher, those byelections suggest produce following national equivalent vote (NEV). NEV is what the national vote share would be if the results in places that did vote were replicated in wards all over the country.

Conservatives: 30%

According to Rallings and Thrasher, a strict application of this NEV would see Labour gain 500 seats, the Lib Dems lose 340, and the Conservatives lose 160. And Ukip would not win a single seat. But they recognise that it is hard to assess Ukip, because they are a relatively new party that has only started winning council seats, and so they revised their figures to take into account the likelihood they would win some seats. Here are the figures they presented to the PSA.

Labour: +490 seats

Conservatives: -220

Lib Dems: -350

As I write, Ukip has already hit 80 seats - and around half the results are yet to come in.

Fisher

Steve Fisher is an associate politics professor at Oxford. He has got his own forecasting model, based on the link between performance in local elections and performance in national opinion polls. He explains it here on his blog. And here are his figures.

Labour: +130 (in a range between +30 and +220)

Conservatives: -130 (in a range between -30 and -235)

Lib Dems: -400 (in a range between -230 and -570)

He does not have a figure for Ukip because his model does not cover it yet.

Before my colleague Claire Phipps handed over the live blog baton, she posted a final round up on her overnight results blog. Here it is.

Things are still very fluid, with 49 councils declared so far, but there are some trends and highlights to flag:
* Labour has won Hammersmith and Fulham, a flagship Tory council. The Conservatives also lost Brentwood, home of Eric Pickles.
* Ukip's share of the vote has surged, affecting the results in a number of councils. The Conservatives lost control of several authorities after Ukip swiped high numbers of seats. Ukip has become the official opposition in Rotherham, where it took 10 seats. In Basildon, it took 11.

* The Lib Dems lost Portsmouth council to no overall control. Ukip took six seats there. MP and former Lib Dem Mike Hancock also lost his council seat in Fratton.

My colleague Claire Phipps has just finished the overnight results blog which you can read here.
Welcome to our second local election results live blog.

We've had more than a third of the results in so far, and it is already clear that Ukip is doing very well. The Conservatives have lost control of several councils as a result of the Ukip advance. And the Ukip surge has also hit Labour, which has been picking up seats, but perhaps fewer than expected, and which has lost control of Thurrock following Ukip gains there. The Lib Dems are doing particularly badly.

Here are some of the results in detail. I've taken the information from the Press Association.

* Ukip have gained 11 seats in Basildon, Essex, meaning the Conservatives lost control of the council.

* Ukip gained five seats in Thurrock, Essex, meaning that Labour lost control of the council.

* The Conservatives lost control in Southend-on-Sea after a Ukip surge saw them gain five seats.

* The Tories lost control of Tamworth in Staffordshire, where no party now has overall control.

* The Lib Dems have lost control of Portsmouth.

* Ukip won four seats in Maidstone in Kent, costing the Conservatives control of the council.

* Labour has claimed it has seized control of "David Cameron's favourite council" - Tory-run Hammersmith and Fulham.

* The Conservatives lost four seats in Peterborough, which meant they lost overall control of the council.

* The Conservatives have lost control of Brentwood in Essex.

* The Conservatives have lost control of Castle Point, which covers Canvey Island in Essex, following Ukip gains.

* Mike Hancock, the MP elected as a Lib Dem who now sits as an independent, has lost his council seat in Portsmouth.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Local election results 2014 - Friday 23 May

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
12.00am BST Some figures (unofficial) on the first preferences won by the two front running candidates battling to take power Tower Hamlets (via Robin de Peyer of the Evening Standard): No one has won on first preferences in Tower Hamlets, according to Aisha Gani, who is at the count centre.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Barnet Labour leader and East Finchley councillor Alison Moore is determined to wrest control of the council from the Conservatives in this week's election.

The Labour Party has never had overall control of Barnet Council - forced to serve under Tory administrations for much of the council's history - but Cllr Moore, 55, believes the introduction of the controversial One Barnet outsourcing scheme could spell the end of Tory rule.

She said: "The overriding message is that we believe there are significant numbers of people who have lost faith in this administration. For a litany of mismanagement, for the inability to listen and respond and for just being out of touch with residents. Therefore we do think it's time for a change in Barnet."

Cllr Moore pointed to "judicial review after judicial review" as an indiciation of the electorate's discontent, referring to High Court cases brought against the council by residents in relation to parking charges and One Barnet.

Like the Tories, Cllr Moore believes there are seats up for grabs in Childs Hill.

"It's been Liberal Democrat for several decades but I think the demography has changed," she said. "I think we might take one or two seats.

"We are campaigning to make a majority Labour council. I think there are many people across the borough who feel let down by this council."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Barnet Council election 2014: Labour aiming to take control from Conservatives

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Barnet Labour leader and East Finchley councillor Alison Moore is determined to wrest control of the council from the Conservatives in this week's election. The Labour Party has never had overall control of Barnet Council - forced to serve under Tory administrations for much of the council's history - but Cllr Moore, 55, believes the introduction of the controversial One Barnet outsourcing scheme could spell the end of Tory rule.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"Barnet Council election, 2014" on Revolvy.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The 2014 Barnet Council election took place on 22 May 2014 to elect members of Barnet Council in England. It took place on the same day as other local elections and it resulted in the Conservative party holding on to overall control of the council.

# data[].attributes.body
They made live coverage of 2014 London elections including Barnet.

# data[].attributes.body
Last time London held the elections in all 32 boroughs (which includes Barnet) was in 2014. Labour made gains in London although they were so close of winning Barnet election as the Conservatives lost overall majority in the council

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Labour has made a number of gains in London including taking the Tory-led councils of Hammersmith and Fulham, and Croydon.

The party took 11 seats from the Conservatives to control Hammersmith for the first time since 2006.

Labour also gained Merton and Redbridge Councils.

The Tories have won Kingston Council from the Liberal Democrats, while holding Hillingdon, Wandsworth, Bexley, Westminster, Bromley and Richmond.

They have also held Kensington and Chelsea.

'Entirely dishonest'

Redbridge, which was controlled by a Tory and Lib Dem coalition, is now under Labour control for the first time.

In Harrow, Labour have regained control of the council but have returned to the same level of support they had in 2010 before an internal row split the local group.

Labour has also held Barking and Dagenham, Brent, Camden, Ealing, Enfield, Greenwich, Hackney, Haringey, Hounslow, Islington, Lambeth, Newham, Southwark and Waltham Forest, while in Merton it gained control where previously no party was in overall control.

The party fell agonisingly short of taking majority control of Barnet Council for the first time. Despite gaining nine seats from the Tories, it fell just short of the 32 seats needed for a majority.

The party finished the night on 27 seats but with the postponed Colindale ward vote in June expected to return three Labour councillors, it has fallen just short of a majority.

The Tories will regain control of the council but with their number of seats slashed from 38 to 32, the minimum needed for a majority.

A controversial former Tory councillor who claimed to have slept with an Arsenal striker and alleged that Ted Heath was gay and went "cottaging" before becoming prime minister lost his seat on Barnet Council, winning just 265 votes.

Self-styled "King of Bling" Brian Coleman once served as chairman of the London Assembly and was a Conservative councillor in the borough before being suspended after assaulting a woman who filmed him breaking parking rules.

He had kept his seat as an independent after the incident.

The Liberal Democrats held Sutton. The Lib Dems lost 15 seats in Brent and are now left with just one councillor.

In Havering, there is still no party with overall control.

In the elections for a directly-elected mayor, Labour has won three with Sir Robin Wales being re-elected for Newham, Jules Pipe for Hackney and Sir Steve Bullock for Lewisham.

In Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman of TH First was re-elected mayor on a second count.

In March the BBC's Panorama found that Mr Rahman had more than doubled funding recommended by officers for Bengali-run charities.

Opposition councillors said they believed the grants were made in return for electoral support, claims categorically denied by Mr Rahman.

Following the broadcast, the Metropolitan Police was handed three files of material but said they contained "no new credible evidence of criminality".

BBC London's political editor Tim Donovan said: "This is the best performance that Labour have had in London since 1998."

Greg Hands, Conservative MP for Chelsea and Fulham and former Hammersmith and Fulham councillor, said Labour's campaigning had been "entirely dishonest" about the future of Charing Cross Hospital.

He said: "There are a lot of Labour lies about Charing Cross Hospital. The old building was going to be demolished but replaced with a new build hospital and A&E."

'Cameron's favourite council'

Labour's Stephen Cowan, the new leader of Hammersmith and Fulham, described Mr Hands's response to his party's defeat "as sour grapes" and denied lies had been told.

He said people had "voted Labour in David Cameron's favourite council", sending a clear message.

Andy Slaughter, Labour MP for Hammersmith, said the victory was "the most fantastic result we've had in London for years".

I believe many UKIP voters were Conservatives who were making a protest and I think they will now be horrified at what they have done
Mike Fisher, Croydon Tory leader

In Croydon, Labour leader Tony Newman said: "This is a real victory for positive change.

"We are ambitious for Croydon and will be cleaning up the borough and be providing jobs and homes."

Tory leader Mike Fisher blamed UKIP for the defeat, telling the Croydon Advertiser: "I believe many UKIP voters were Conservatives who were making a protest and I think they will now be horrified at what they have done."

UKIP leader Nigel Farage said the party had not had a "strong" performance in the capital and it needed to perform better next year.

He said: "Certainly London is a younger demographic but the real reason we are not as strong in London as we are just over the side of the M25, is political parties rely very heavily on voluntary structure and our structure in London is behind the rest of the country."

Results for the European elections will be announced late on Sunday.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Labour has made a number of gains in London including taking the Tory-led councils of Hammersmith and Fulham, and Croydon. The party took 11 seats from the Conservatives to control Hammersmith for the first time since 2006. Labour also gained Merton and Redbridge Councils.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Election results for the 2014 Barnet Council elections.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Local election results in Barnet - barnet.gov.uk

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Local election results 22 May 2014- Brunswick Park

# data[].attributes.body
There are 63 Councillors in Barnet Council & 32 seats is the majority seat to win. Whoever wins is the largest party to form the administration and running Barnet for next 4 years.

# data[].attributes.body
The last time Barnet hold the council was in 2014.

Conservative: 32 Councillors
Labour: 30 Councillors
Liberal Democrat: 1 Councillor

# data[].attributes.body
@ReasonableNB

@Barneteye

@_MrMustard

@BrokenBarnet

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Every year at this time, we announce the annual Barnet Eye awards. We ask for citations from blog readers and we choose a few of our own! Last night we held our annual party and blog awards at the Midland Hotel in Hendon. Here are the winners. This is a very good list this year.

1. Barnet Lifetime community campaigner award
Winner - John Burgess - Barnet Unison Branch secretary
Nominated by Tirza Waisel (Barnet Alliance for Public Services)
Citation - John has worked tirelessly for decades to ensure that his members and the general public of Barnet get a fair deal and the highest quality of pulic service. John is respected by all. He is a fearless campaigner and has fought, at great cost to his own health, to ensure that public services are protected from the ravages of austerity.
The Barnet Eye adds - John is currently involved in a battle with his own union and was on BBC Radio 4 this morning taalking about the Unisongate scandal, which has seen alleged malpractice in a union election exposed by a tape of paid union officials allegedly discussing how to assist the incumbent leader in the election.

2. Barnet Eye Pub of the Year
Winner - The Midland Hotel
Nominated by Mr Graham Ramsey
Citation - "John the guvnor has made the Midland the pub for live music in Hendon. It is a proper community pub and the beer is good."
The Barnet Eye adds - John has supported us ever since he took over in helping keep a thriving music scene in the Borough of Barnet.

3. Barnet Person of the Year.
Winner - Calvin Casino.
Nominated by Julia Hines/Theresa Musgrove
Citation - "Calvin was the young autistic man who was refused access to the tube network when Barnet Council illegally cancelled his Freedom pass. He told his story to the local blogs and it was soon revealed that hundreds of disabled people were affected. As a result of his actions, this scndal was exposed and the freedom passes were reinstated"
Barnet Eye adds "Calvins action in alerting us to the scandal was perhaps the single most important event in Barnet this year. Our campaign, and the work done by Theresa at the Broken Barnet blog to expose the full depths of the scandal meant that we were able to undo the damage inflicted by thoughtless officials. I was going to originally nominate Theresa for her work, but she insisted Calvin get the awards and Julia backed this up. Well done to all, you are all community champions to me.

4. Barnet Charity of the Year
Winner - Homeless action Barnet (HAB).
Nominated by The Barnet Eye
Citation - "Who would ever thought a rich Borough like Barnet would even need a homeless day centre? The work of HAB with the local churches to run night shelters for homeless people is something that on these cold winter nights is invaluable for the weakest members of our society. This is charity we should all support and we should all be working to ensure it isn't needed in future".

5. Barnet Campaign of the year.
Winner - Barnet Housing Action
Nominated by The Barnet Eye
Citation - This campaign is perhaps the biggest issue in Barnet right now. Their twitter feed says "Fighting social cleansing, gentrification,rent hikes & evictions https:// barnethousingactiongroup.wordpress.com / Petitions: see & " the West Hendon petition got 150,000 signatures and the council still ignored it. As they said last night accepting the award "Barretts could make £3billion out of West Hendon and yet there are children who have never lived in a secure household being evicted". Who else could we possibly award this to?

6. Barnet Musician of the Year
Winner - Alan Warner
Nominated by The Barnet Eye
Citation - "Alan is an icon to people in Barnet. He was the lead guitarist in the Foundations, writing some of their greatest hits. He was in supergroup Pluto. He ran "Lane Studios", where Top Ten band recorded their first single (as did my band The False Dots). He has been a stalwart of the Mill Hill Music Festival for many years and despite health issues this year has still played all around London, the South East and even in Spain. A true legend. We hope to have him at the Mill Hill Music Festival this year".

7. Barnet Event of the Year.
Winner - The Finchley Literary Festival
Nominated by Allen Ashley
Citation - "It just gets better and betetr every year. A festival for grown ups and a key part of Barnets cultural calendar"

8. Barnet Teacher of the Year.
Winner - Allen Ashley
Nominated by Rosie Canning
Citation - "Allen runs writing classes all around Barnet and his work at festivals, editing and writing marks him out as an exceptional charicter who we are lucky to have"
The Barnet Eye adds "I've known Allen since 1985. We've written songs together and of course I know that he's a teacher, but to me that was 'just his job'. To get such an endorsement from Rosie, who I respect and admire, makes me realise just how lucky I've been to work with Allen. Check out his work".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Saturday List #109 - The Barnet Eye Annual Community Award winners 2016

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Every year at this time, we announce the annual Barnet Eye awards. We ask for citations from blog readers and we choose a few of our own! Last night we held our annual party and blog awards at the Midland Hotel in Hendon. Here are the winners.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Hi Roger, How are you? How's the Save London music campaign, your blog & the Mill Hill Music Complex?

Since you are a blogger, I want to tell you Roger. Something both personal & politically. You are not going to believe it.

On Wednesday 16th March when there was staff development day (staff training) at the college, I was making my way to pick my brothers at the school. I went on the bus, I swiped my freedom pass on the reader & it said "Card not accepted" I thought I didn't swipe properly but then on the next day (Thursday 17th March) I was making my way to the college for the level 1 maths exam on the Tube. I swiped my freedom pass on the reader. It said "Seek Assistance" so I kept swiping it & it reads the same thing. I stopped at Finchley Central station.

I asked the ticket inspector what is wrong with my faulty freedom pass card, he said to me, "Have you received the letter from the council?" I replied "Yes". He said to me the freedom pass is stopped, cancelled & it will no be longer used in the Tube lines, buses, Tram, overground & national rail trains so I told him the reason I hold the freedom pass because I have learning difficulties/disabilities. He understood & he said there is nothing he can do because of the stupid selfish Tory government treating the disabled people like garbage by implementing ridiculous policies that affects them like bedroom tax & ruining the welfare system.

Since then, I told my mum about it & she called London councils who issued freedom pass cards for disabled & older people, she told them that why my freedom pass is deactivated & blocked. They said to her on the phone it wasn't them (London Councils) who blocked me from using my freedom pass. It was the Barnet council who did it. the expiry of my freedom pass is 31st March 2020.

When mum called the council on the phone, it was the female staff, mum wanted to call the manager of the council, female staff said "no, there is no manager, only me" my mum said to her, I want to appeal against the deactivation of my son's freedom pass card. The staff said no.

The staff was being disrespectful to my mum for wanting to appeal against the blocking my freedom pass. Before my freedom pass card was stopped working, I received the letter from Barnet council, what it said on the letter is that I need to have photo taken which I did recently. On the letter, it said "Are you diagnosed with learning disabilities & SEN (which includes autism which I am high functioning). I ticked "yes" so I posted the letter in the postbox & I received no response from the Barnet council at all. It did not say on the letter that my freedom pass will be stopped working or will soon to expire, it did say not on the letter. 😞

What it said on the letter with a simple question. " Do I have learning difficulties" I ticked "yes" so that I received no letters from the council with responses (it also said that I have to be photo taken for freedom pass). That's how my freedom pass was deactivated because of the selfishness of the Barnet council & The Conservative government.

They blocked my freedom pass without me knowing that my freedom pass card will be no longer work at the tube stations & buses. This is a complete obscene & disgraceful. I have been holding the freedom pass from very long time since I lived in Barnet 18 years ago. The Tories & the Barnet council have treated me unfair although i am normal despite I went to Oak Lodge School (secondary special school) but yet, this is a new low for David Cameron's government or so I say David Cameron's regime.

How dare them for stopping my freedom pass, what I do to deserve this? This country is really behaving like a strict authoritarian country like China & Russia. For 6 years the Tory government have been treating disabled people including people with special needs (SEN stands for special educational needs) crap, with austerity measures, cutting the independent living fund for severely disabled people including those who are non-verbal, they cut DLA (Disability Living Allowance) & replaced with PIP (Personal Independent Payment) & they cut ESA 30% by voting in favour of getting rid of Employment Support Allowance.

That's how we despise (another word for hate) them for their rubbish politics. David Cameron, Geroge Osborne & the rest of the Conservative MPs should be ashamed of themselves including voting in favour of disability cuts. At least there were 7 Tory MPs who did not voted in favour of it. The rest should be ashamed. I don't understand why we are living in the country which is a democratic but doesn't have a true democracy at all.

That's why the public voted for the Tories last year at General election to continue the austerity programme by implementing cuts & dismantling us & the disabled with the politics of misery. Unbelievable!! 😡 The Tories are corrupt & opposers, they don't care about us the British people, neither Is the workers, the migrants, the Scottish, European nationals (like poles, Romanians & Bulgarians, non-European workers, the youth, the elderly & the disabled. That's how my freedom pass is blocked because of them.

Now I have Oyster card & discount Bus & Tram photocard which I get 15%. Mum & myself had been working on the letters as I went to GP with her to confirm that I do have learning difficulties (& autism even I don't really want to admit it). She had sent the letters to the Tory Barnet council 4 days ago.

I assume they received the letters by now (3 days ago) so they can reconsider & restoring my freedom pass card so I can get it back & get it to work again.

So that's how I want to tell you about it as I know you are dyslexic blogger & that we dislike the Tory party & their ridiculous politics towards everybody & the disabled.

--------------------------

This is an unedited message received from a young man with Autism living in Barnet. I have withheld his name to safeguard his privacy. Is this right? Is this fair? Can you imagine how humiliating this is for him?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Barnet Council treat disabled people part 1 - is this fair?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hi Roger, How are you? How's the Save London music campaign, your blog & the Mill Hill Music Complex? Since you are a blogger, I want to tell you Roger. Something both personal & politically. You are not going to believe it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Wow I cannot believe it. I am the Barnet person of the year 2016.

Thank you Roger, the False Dots & the Barnet Eye. Ladies & Gentlemen. I accept the award "Barnet person of the person". I wanted to go to the Midlands Hotel Pub in Hendon but I didn't have the chance because I had to stayed at home to be there for my mum as she is not feeling well. Maybe next time I'll come to the pub in Hendon. Anyway I am very grateful that I am the winner of the Barnet annual awards 2016. Barnet person of the year.

Originally I wanted Roger & Theresa to win the award but they nominated me as they insisted. That was kind of them. Without help from Theresa & Roger, I wouldn't had my freedom pass back. God bless them for their incredible work of digging the true information of how disabled freedom passes was stopped by Barnet council & their bureaucrat partner Capita. I guess you know who am I now. I cannot give my actual name (because of safety reasons) but you can now know my other name. My name is Calvin Casino (it's my nickname & I only use when I write & perform music). I am the one who wrote to Roger back in March this year when my freedom pass was stopped unexpectedly. Go read the article if you don't know my story. http:// barneteye.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/how-ba rnet-council-treat-disabled.html?m=1 ...

I you know the whole story. I am behind of this. I am the reason why freedom pass fiasco was started with me. Followed by Jenny & the others. You see, we live in the world when things happened unexpectedly. For instance, the UK voted to leave the European Union & Donald Trump winning the US presidential election. We live in this ever-changing world. When it comes to the rejected freedom pass scandal in Barnet. It was not reported nationally & internationally. It was reported locally & London-wide. Since I got my freedom pass restored back in May. I still hear nothing from the council even I told Sam & Christine back in October at Burnt Oak who works in Barnet council that I would like compensation & perhaps apology. But that's okay because I had already the refund from TFL as I spent 8 weeks of traveling on the bus & train & I had to top up the Oyster card every-time when the balance runs out & adding the money into Oyster card. My refund from TFL was £34.10. I remembered using discount bus & tram pass photo card. At the time without using my freedom pass between March & May, I didn't want to go public (I did not want to speak any press) because I don't want to be subject to abuses even if I am speaking the truth. It's not like I made it up.

Since I got my freedom pass back from Barnet council & Capita, I started to write to the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan back in September as I wrote at my college. I had finally made him aware (as I know Mr Khan was not aware that Barnet were rejecting disabled freedom pass with no reason whatsoever) even he didn't write back to me (someone reply to me in his behalf). After-all I voted for him because he did included the protection of freedom passes (even he forgot to include disabled person freedom pass as he wants older freedom pass to be protected). None of other London mayoral candidates got my vote. Not even Zac Goldsmith. I glad the freedom pass fiasco is over so I am going to make sure it doesn't ever happen again. Especially when freedom pass ends in 2020 with expiry date 31st March.

I thank my mum, Roger & Mrs Angry for helping me to get my free travel pass reinstated once & for all. Once again I thank Roger & Theresa (Mrs A) for the digging the truth that Barnet & Capita were purposefully & wrongly rejecting everyone's freedom passes. The number was 230. That includes me & Jenny. That information was released by London Councils (who issued the freedom pass cards). I am grateful that I am the Barnet person of the year 2016. Thank you so much. God bless. Merry Christmas & Happy New Year.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Calvin Casino is a Barnet resident. As a person with special needs he is legally entitled to a freedom pass. This was illegally withdrawn without notice earlier this year. He found out when the pass did not work at Finchley Central Tune station. Due to his condition this was an extremely stressful experience for him. Calvin contacted the Barnet Eye for help. We published the story. Immediately we were attacked by a right wing blog close to the Conservative administration in Barnet, who accused us of making the story up and claiming we were an unreliable source of information. To my amazement, it turned out that Calvin was not alone, hundreds of other people had the same experience. Fellow Barnet Blogger Mrs Angry had even seen a young disabled person have the same problem on a bus, but hadn't realised what was happening until she saw my blog. Mrs Angry did a huge amount of digging and uncovered the whole story, with some legal input from Julia Hines from Age UK Barnet.

We chose Calvin as person of the year because without his input, Barnet Council would have got away with an action that was shown to be illegal. The only way to combat tyranny is for good people to speak up. In Barnet, we have active bloggers and campaigners who know how to ensure that the council is held to account. Calvin is an example to us all. If we just sit back and hope someone else pipes up, then bad things come to pass.That is why Calvin is such a great choice.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A few words from Calvin Casino - Barnet Eye Barnet Person of the year!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Wow I cannot believe it. I am the Barnet person of the year 2016. Thank you Roger, the False Dots & the Barnet Eye. Ladies & Gentlemen. I accept the award "Barnet person of the person".

# data[].attributes.body
http://wwwbrokenbarnet.blogspot.co.uk/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Former Barnet Mayor Councillor David Longstaff, who accuses the Mayor of London of being 'An Enemy of the People' ...

Mrs Angry tries her best to avoid Full Council meetings of the London Borough of Broken Barnet, for very good reason: an aversion to pantomime, long standing, which dates back, well ... to childhood days, long ago, and unhappy memories of Christmas outings to the Golders Green Hippodrome.

This annual visit involved a range of unforgettable theatrical moments, such as the deranged antics of an aged Arthur Askey, incongruously dressed as Buttons, leaping about the stage like a performing chimpanzee escaped from a tea party at London Zoo, menacing the boys and girls in the stalls with his manic grin, and air of desperation. And then there was the fear induced by the compulsory session of audience participation, in which hapless small children, still quaking with fear, would be hauled up from the stalls on to the stage to take part in the show. Horrible.

The combination of knockabout farce, grotesque plots, and wizened, grimacing old men frightening the audience means, therefore, that Full Council meetings that involve the grandstanding theatrical performance of Barnet Tory councillors hold little attraction: but Tuesday's agenda, and in particular some of the idiotic written questions put by administration members, proved more tempting than usual.

The Hippodrome, of course, has been much in the news, recently, for all the wrong reasons. After many years as a traditional theatre, and then as a venue for the BBC, the listed building was taken over by a Christian church, but it has now changed hands once again, to a body that wishes to use the former theatre for a Muslim centre. Unfortunately, this proposal has met with a reaction of hostility from some local residents, and led to a barrage of offensive, racist comments left on the council's planning portal, which had to be removed. Worse still, the situation has been inflamed by other parties, such as those who organised a meeting at which further extreme views were expressed: a meeting attended by self styled 'Mosque buster' Gavin Boby.

This meeting failed to ignite the level of outrage that its mysterious organisers (who didn't want to be identified) clearly wanted - and thankfully community leaders, and representatives, were outspoken in their support for the new owners, and condemned the racist comments expressed by a small minority of objectors.

By coincidence, the Golders Green Hippodrome, in the sixties, was owned by the family of another Barnet blogger, the father of all Barnet bloggers, formerly known as 'Don't Call me Dave': David Miller, son of Lady Doreen Miller, the Tory peer. He told Mrs Angry that his family were very sad to see the Hippodrome fall into such a state of disrepair, and they are pleased that the building is now going to be put to good use.

But then of course, as one might expect, came the uninvited intervention of pantomime villain Katie Hopkins.

'Hatey Katey' was thrilled to find what she clearly thought would be a situation she could exploit for her own purposes: and she issued a series of tweets, some of them aimed at local Labour councillors Adam Langleben, and Arjun Mittra.

Well, then. Adam and Arjun are two of Barnet's brightest, and most hardworking younger Labour members. Adam is a leading member of the Jewish Labour Movement, and has put an enormous amount of effort into addressing the issue of anti-semitism; Arjun is Hindu, and an experienced councillor involved in all forms of community related ventures. They represent and reflect the true face of what is one of the most ethnically diverse local authorities in the UK: a place where residents from a huge range of cultures and religions live in harmony: Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Catholics, evangelical Christians: eastern Europeans, Japanese, Italians, Cypriots - and many other communities - the range is too diverse to list.

If there is division, in Broken Barnet, in fact, it is one of class, not ethnicity: between those who have, and those who have not - the ever widening gulf between the affluent areas of the borough, and the less advantaged, mostly western side, whose problems are addressed seemingly only by the Tory policy of faux regeneration, and decantation of the poor.

This is not what Hopkins wanted to find, of course: clearly astonished by the fact that the Jewish community has so emphatically rejected the politics of hate, and condemned the racist targeting of the Hippodrome proposals, she is wrong footed, and at a loss as how to continue with her agenda of bigotry.

Back to the pantomime, in Hendon Town Hall: a little premature, perhaps: being the eve of Halloween, where our Tory members gamely played along, in the night of the living dead, acting out the usual Zombie politics: party loyalty and blind obedience before truth, justice, and decency, as we shall see.

Before the proceedings began, a woman representing the Hindu community gave a short talk about her faith, the rule of karma, the eternity of the soul - and offered a prayer for peace.

Shantih, shantih, shantih.

The Tory members looked on, and smiled politely.

Peace does not come dropping slow, in the council chamber of Broken Barnet, however.

Next up was the usual preposterous question time, and hostilities resumed, even as the prayers for conciliation still echoed in the ears of onlookers, as Tory councillors acted out the usual farce of non questions designed to a. boast how wonderful they are and b. claim how terrible is the opposition.

The issue of the Hippodrome arose during these questions: the contentious petition launched by some objectors would not be heard at council, said Cornelius, due to lack of numbers, and the matter would be considered purely on planning grounds (shortage of parking is a potential problem) - and local Tory councillor Peter Zinkin went on angrily to denounce the Islamophobic comments of some of those who are so virulently opposing the plans. Labour leader Barry Rawlings agreed and stated that we will not be 'letting hate crime rule' in this borough.

So far so good: a moment of consensus. If only peace, love and understanding had prevailed for the rest of the evening.

Mrs Angry had already decided not to stay for the whole meeting, dismayed by the intensely stupid contents of much of the second half of the agenda: not by the sensible motions from Labour, and one from Tory Rohit Grover in regard to road safety in his ward - but by the ludicrous decision, blithely ignoring all the really serious issues facing residents in the borough, to use the time to 'debate' two other motions from the Tories. One of these was from Alison Cornelius, wife of the Tory leader, on the subject of ... 'controlling' dog walkers, and the other ... from the ineffable David Longstaff:

Is Mayor Khan an enemy of the people of Barnet?

What was the point of such a motion? Why such hostility levelled at the Mayor of London? Apparently for daring to intervene in a couple of planning applications*, the Uber issue, etc (*nothing and no one must be allowed a moderating role in the arcane mysteries of Barnet planning, of course).

There are so many perjorative allusions here. And the Tories must have been well aware of this, when they decided to submit this motion.

Such a phrase is the mark of the new idiocy in right wing politics that has taken hold in the lunatic fringe of the media, here and in the US.

As you will read in this article from the Washington Post, it is a term that has the most dark and shameful historic associations: from the designation of 'ennemi du peuple' at the time of the French revolution's Reign of Terror, its adoption by Goebbels as part of his demonisation and persecution of the Jewish people, and its usage by Stalin, signalling a death sentence for intellectuals, artists - or any other citizen who displeased him.

What on earth possessed the Conservative group in Barnet to allow a motion with such deeply offensive undertones to be put to debate? And let us remember that they all voted to support it.

Ignorance of the historical context is hard to believe - and no excuse. In these dangerous times, great care and sensitivity should be employed when elected representatives raise issues for debate - this motion, using these words, with clearly despotic connotations, as well as the nod towards contemporary alt-right lunacy, should never, never have been used.

Why employ such a phrase, even disregarding the historical context, in regard to a democratically elected politician, on such a feeble pretext as minor decisions on planning applications, and transport policy?

Frankly it is absolutely clear, as the Labour group pointed out, that the deliberate use of such a repellent term is from the same bottom of the barrel scraping tactics as Zac Goldsmith's widely reviled election campaign. Not so much Lynton Crosby's dog whistle, as a total immersion in gutter politics.

Labour submitted an amendment which stated:

Council believes its elected members should be careful not to use coded language that portrays people of different backgrounds as "enemies" so that they are perceived as 'other' to everyone else.

And Cllr Arjun Mittra stood up to speak against the motion.

You can hear what happened next by listening to an audio recording here. Scroll down to Item 14.3.

From the very beginning, Cllr Longstaff launches into a frankly absurd and personally directed diatribe: he starts with a jibe at Cllr Mittra: '
If he understood English, that would really help'.

That was an utterly indefensible remark to make to anyone who happens to be of Asian heritage, but also ridiculous - Arjun Mittra is a highly intelligent, well educated, thoughtful and well spoken young man. David Longstaff, on the other hand, as you will hear, is unable even to pronounce the word 'redolent'.

Labour councillor for East Finchley, Arjun Mittra

Longstaff says that the form of criticism of his motion was disgusting and despicable. The phrase 'Enemy of the People', he claimed, was a play on the title of the work by Ibsen. Really? Then he should know that Ibsen's play is about the struggle to hold a morally bankrupt local authority to account (- over contaminated water in the municipal baths - something which could never happen in Broken Barnet, of course).

Longstaff continued: he denied any 'coded language' in regard to Sadiq Khan. He trotted out an arch routine claiming there were no differences between the two of them, both South London boys, working class fathers, both went to university. Of course the obvious difference of race and religion, an issue exploited by the vile Goldsmith campaign, was entirely omitted.

Cllr Mittra's turn. He made a passing, less than complimentary reference to his Tory opponent's former acting career, which infuriated Longstaff - but swiftly moved on to a rather more important point: in the aftermath of the murder of Jo Cox, and the alleged plot regarding another MP, we should be more conscious of the impact of inflammatory political speech.

The noise in the chamber tells you how divisive and inflammatory this motion was, and is. The outrage, however, on the Tory side, is audibly from Cllr Longstaff, driven into a fury by the disparaging comments about his professional record as an actor.

Well. What can you say? Arjun Mittra's comments were arguably a little unfair.

Councillor David Longstaff's calling as An Actor, stand up comedian, and model, has, in fact, been an honourable one: extensive, and ... varied in scope.

We know this because when he first emerged from the wings, so to speak, on the stage at Hendon Town Hall, Mrs Angry came across his CV on the website of his casting agency, and was enormously thrilled to find the details of his illustrious career.

Sadly, this website disappeared. Or so it seemed. But no! Good news: the agency has a new name and there, still, for all of us to enjoy, is the record of a life in the business that is show. There is a wonderful compilation of footage of some of the best performances. Do take a look.

You know, Mrs Angry, in her time, has been fortunate to see many theatrical legends in action.

Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Gambon; yes, Arthur Askey, and Danny La Rue.

But nothing they gave in their interpretations of Pinter, Chekov, Shakespeare - or Mother Goose, could measure up against say, Cllr Longstaff as 'Beige Man in Ikea', (ad) or Drunken Elf, in Holby City.

Who could forget witnessing his small part in 'Mary Whitehouse', a stirring performance as Mr Smallwood? Not me.

Cllr Longstaff has also given a marvellous rendition of local Finchley benefactor Inky Stephens, as you can see in the listing's footage (scroll down to the bottom ... then fast forward to The Bottom). Yes, Inky Stephens, who gave us Victoria Park, part of which the Tories sold off, and which came perilously close to being developed, earlier this year:

"Come: I'll show you my tree ..." (Not Mr Smallwood, again: Inky Stephens. One of the more memorable lines in this epic production).

And yes: lest we forget, perhaps his most memorable and long term role, (other than his role play contract as Mayor of Broken Barnet, once upon a time): as an Oscar statuette, naked, and covered in gold body paint, like that poor dear girl in 'Goldfinger'.

But Longstaff has given up the stage - or the stage has given him up - and he now wants to be taken seriously in his role as an elected representative - and, oh dear, as Chair of the Community Leadership Committee ...

Fair enough: if you want to be taken seriously, Councillor Longstaff, probably don't put forward puerile motions insulting the most important politician in London, who has been placed in that position with the most resounding endorsement of the residents of our city.

Something we most certainly should take seriously is the role played in this tawdry drama by the Tory leader, Richard Cornelius, and the chorus of disapproval extras sitting in the Conservative side of the chamber. They really should know better than to allow such a motion to go to debate. Why did they - especially at a time when at least some of them had shown such courage in speaking out in favour of the Muslim community centre?

Here is the reason. Because this council is run, as in Ibsen's play, by the masters of a morally bankrupt authority: Barnet Tories are desperate to avoid the looming defeat at next year's local elections, and to fend off the very real chance of losing three newly marginal Tory constituencies at the next General Election. Desperate because everything they have promoted, over the last few years, is falling apart, and being exposed as a total con - a betrayal of their electorate. This summer's external Audit report confirmed, in no uncertain terms, the perilous state of the authority's financial position, heading towards disaster, ransacking the reserves as the Capita contracts, rather than saving us bucketloads of money, and delivering better services, is proving nothing less than a cash cow for the contractors, while functions such as planning and enforcement are now so bad, even the most docile of conservative minded residents are questioning the wisdom of returning the current administration to power.

Barnet Tories are now launched on a Trump style mission to distract, therefore. It is no coincidence that at the same time they were cutting public services, they spent nearly £1 million on new PR posts, to carry on up until the elections next May. These new PR lackeys are part of a propaganda machine that relentlessly churns out the most deathly council spin, and publishes (at our expense) the overtly party political council news 'Barnet First'. The same machine tries to convince residents that the hugely unpopular library cuts are not cuts, or even a'configuration', or a 'refurbishment', but an 'investment'; the same machine manufactures outrage over the closure of a police station in a Tory ward, and a perceived lack of policing, when they refused to tackle Boris Johnson's police cuts for Barnet, when he was Mayor. (In fact they blamed the police, not Boris, see
Yep, they invented the term 'fake news', by the way. No one knows more about it than they do.
here).

Last week some of us went to the latest in a series of 'question times' with the Tory leader, Richard Cornelius. Ill advertised, so as to minimise attendance, of course - but every resident present made it clear, to an increasingly flustered Cornelius, that there is no longer any chance of fooling the voters of this borough.

They are now seeing the outcome of so many years' ideological obsession with privatisation, council tax freezes, faux regeneration, and the widening of the gap between those who have, and those who have not.

They have lost patience with the trio of Tory MPs in Broken Barnet who support a merciless government, sit back, and do nothing to help those in their constituencies with desperate needs; and they have lost all faith in is the heartless, gutless, shameless Tory councillors who run this borough.

They know who the enemy is, in short.

And they know it is not the Mayor of London.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
An Enemy of the People: or - Barnet's Tory councillors finally lose the plot

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Former Barnet Mayor Councillor David Longstaff, who accuses the Mayor of London of being 'An Enemy of the People' ... Mrs Angry tries her best to avoid Full Council meetings of the London Borough of Broken Barnet, for very good reason: an aversion to pantomime, long standing, which dates back, well ...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Tories have tried to change people's view of what is normal and acceptable in our society. They want us to accept that in the fifth richest country in the world it's normal and acceptable for people to be saddled with debt; for people to have to work long, often insecure, hours, stressed out, struggling to find time with their family; for people not to have a pay rise for years no matter how dedicated you are or how hard you work; for young people to have no prospect of owning their own home; for disabled people to be pushed to the edge by the benefits system; or for carers to be struggling without support or recognition.

Arguing about the finer points of Brexit and nothing else is a middle class luxury: an indulgence. Someone in a shop doorway in Brighton, or a single mum in a hostel in Margate: they aren't worrying about their right to go and live in Berlin, or Barcelona, or anything much more than how they can afford the bus fare to the GP, or feed themselves, and keep some sort of life going in the next few days and weeks. While we allow ourselves to become fixated on one issue, and a problem which is never going to be resolved while the current government is in place, people are taking their own lives, driven to despair by the loss of benefits; our NHS is being torn up and thrown to the dogs of privatisation; thousands of people are being forced to depend on the handouts from their local foodbank. Only a change of government can help them - and only a change of government can do anything to reclaim anything positive from the consequences of Brexit.

Labour has to address the urgent needs of ordinary people, and our most vulnerable citizens, and offer the hope of a society where they will be safe, supported, respected and empowered.

We've seen that trickle down economics don't work - now we have to work from the other end of the social scale.

In or out of the EU, we have to have a change of government to protect the most vulnerable of our citizens.

A fringe meeting on Tuesday night posed an interesting question: was Labour still the party of workers?

The panel, hosted by the Resolution Foundation, a think-tank that works to improve the living standards of those in Britain on low to middle incomes, was going to include Frances O'Grady, Kevin Maguire, and was chaired by Torsten Bell.

It was held in the Hilton Metropole: an ageing venue of unique ugliness - aptly referred to in Eliot's Wasteland, in one of many literary allusions that associate Brighton with the reputation of a place of unsavoury assignations. Once a grand Victorian hotel, now in a state of barely controlled decline, with many of the Conference events, such as this one, taking place in a massive room, emptied of all human context: a vast space, windowless, grey: oppressive - deeply depressing. Unreal city.

Deborah Mattinson from 'Britain Thinks' gave a statistical analysis of voters in the last election. How many workers had actually voted for Labour? She gave a breakdown of statistics, and indicated a problem with engaging working class voters.

Now it was time for Lucy Powell, MP, to speak.

She was well aware of the need to listen to the working classes, she said, smiling. In her constituency she had run a series of meetings with them, to encourage them to express their concerns. The older white working classes, she said, once they got over being -ha ha -#angryaboutbins (copyright Mrs Angry, 2016) revealed that they no longer felt they had 'purchase' over their communities. Oh. Did they use that term, wondered Mrs Angry, or are you putting words in their older white working class mouths?

It was good that Jeremy Corbyn seemed to give hope to some of these people, she admitted - but then contradicted herself somewhat by claiming many voters on the doorstep had been 'angry' - not about bins, but about him. Clearly not to the extent of failing to vote for a Labour MP, thought Mrs Angry, who was beginning to feel rather irritated by her (not helped by the fact that Powell was wearing the same green Boden dress Mrs Angry had worn the day before, unintentionally appropriate for two Irish events: a fact which obliged her to wonder, rather abashed, as to why she was choosing the same clothes as a shadow cabinet mutineer).

Kevin Maguire struck a somewhat different tone: rather less condescending, and more pragmatic - from a north eastern mining background, clearly he felt he might have a rather more informed view of what the working class, in 2017, was, and what they wanted to see from Labour. No sentimentality: listen, but challenge racism, promote Labour values.

Time for questions. Up shot Mrs Angry's hand. A BBC cameraman, who had been filming the discussion, appeared suddenly, too late to have any moderating effect on what now came out.

Did Lucy Powell not think she ought to reconsider the vocabulary she was using? Talking about the 'working classes' as 'they' and 'them': rather patronising, as if they were some sort of rare species, that needs protecting, when in fact the Labour movement is rooted in working class history ... People in the audience mumbled agreement: a few applauded.

By this time, Powell had realised her gaffe, and was flustered, muttering of course, of cours e ... Mrs Angry pointed out that like Maguire, she had family background in the former mining areas of the north east, (ironically we were sitting in the Durham room) and she knew that a whole generation of Labour voters had been lost (over the Blair, Brown & Miliband years), that Corbyn couldn't win them back overnight, it was going to take time - but clearly it was happening.

Of course, of course, she hadn't meant to be patronising. Her credentials: well, said the ex Somerville College, Oxford graduate, who comes from a family of teachers: she was a Mancunian. (Yes, thought Mrs Angry, not necessarily a term that is exclusively interchangeable with working class). She could remember visiting her grandparents, in their home, you know, and the pride they felt in their community - their privet hedge - Eh?

Privet hedge? asked Mrs Angry, thinking of the squalid slum terrace where her own grandparents had lived in Durham, and as Frances O'Grady and Deborah Mattinson tried to hide their laughter. Luxury!

The mood of the meeting changed then: Powell's anodyne politics were clearly not delivering the message most people wanted to hear. Before the end, one woman explained this was her first conference. The thing that had struck her, she said, was that the party seemed to consist of too many over educated young men in suits. Ha! I hear you, sister - Y es, said Mrs Angry, as the other women on the panel nodded: but this is better than it was, believe me. Although, she almost added, looking guiltily at herself, and Lucy Powell, the place is now full of middle class women dressed in Boden.

A brief escape from the vast, airless, gloomy rooms of the Metropole, but then back again, to a slightly less awful venue in the same hotel for the annual Labour Friends of Israel reception. Outside the entrance there was a noisy demonstration with people relentlessly chanting 'Israel is a terrorist state'. Mrs Angry's heart sank. Once inside, the reception was packed, and speeches were made by a young female MP from the Knesset, the Israeli ambassador, and Emily Thornberry, shadow Foreign Secretary, in place of Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn had come last year, courageously, although visibly nervous, and used his speech to condemn antisemitism - almost exclusively unreported by the mainstream media. This year, after so much controversy over this issue, it was clearly decided the better course of action was not to go at all.

Emily Thornberry and Ian McNichol listen to the Israeli ambassador

Waking up the next morning to another beautiful day in Brighton, Mrs Angry stumbled out of bed to peer out of the window at a stunning view of the sea, and the old pier, from the viewpoint of her hotel in the perfectly preserved Regency Square: a vista spoiled only by being bisected by the sky high column of the new observation tower.

Up then and off to the centre, even though this year, thanks to the mess up over her pass, she had no ticket for the Leader's speech: in the end it didn't matter, as, thanks to a kind steward, she found herself somehow sitting in the front section, in a better seat than ever.

And of all the speeches seen at the last few Conferences, this was one to be at: the hall was galvanised with a massive wave of energy, excitement, and enthusiasm. The contrast with the Miliband years, when he lumbered around the stage like a puppet, and the speech seemed to go on forever without making any point, or offering any hope, and the best reception he could expect was some dutiful applause, was striking.

This year Ed was spotted by a friend in the cheap seats, way behind Mrs Angry, looking on thoughtfully.

Down in the mosh pit, surrounded by a group of very excited Glaswegians, and a few seats along from a curiously subdued Owen Jones, the crowd's mood was exultant. The event was brilliantly presented: the right choice of music, timing, footage, graphics: very effective, and the perfect backdrop to the simplistic style of the leader himself.

No need to repeat the speech. There was not a single policy in it which you could not applaud: a range of courageous, practical ideas that meet the needs of all those who have been waiting for a fundamental change in the party, and in the political system. The part which was the most resonant for me was this:

The Tory approach to the economy isn't entrepreneurial. It's extractive. They're not focused on long-term investment and wealth creation. When you look at what they do rather than what they say it's all about driving down wages, services and standards ... to make as much money as quickly as possible with government not as the servant of the people but of global corporations.

And their disregard for rampant inequality, the hollowing out of our public services, the disdain for the powerless and the poor have made our society more brutal and less caring.

Now that degraded regime has a tragic monument the chilling wreckage of Grenfell Tower. A horrifying fire in which dozens perished an entirely avoidable human disaster. One which is an indictment not just of decades of failed housing policies and privatisation and the yawning inequality in one of the wealthiest boroughs and cities in the world, it is also a damning indictment of a whole outlook which values council tax refunds for the wealthy above decent provision for all and which has contempt for working class communities.

Before the fire, a tenants' group of Grenfell residents had warned ... and I quote words that should haunt all politicians "the Grenfell Action Group firmly believes that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord". Grenfell is not just the result of bad political decisions It stands for a failed and broken system which Labour must and will replace.

A broken system: nationally, and here, in easycouncil Barnet, freefalling into the abyss created by the hollowing out of every local service; a place where avarice and a merciless ideology drives an agenda of privatisation beyond the point of any effective restraint - or justification.

The tragedy of Grenfell has come to signify so much more than the terror and loss of that terrible night: it marks a moment in history from which we can never return, or look back, but only resolve to make the most radical changes to a society that can allow such a thing to happen. There is an appetite, a hunger for change now, that I don't remember seeing before, in my lifetime.

To see such widespread support expressed for example, for the re-nationalisation of our utilities, is quite something. The centre has shifted: years of Tory government and a lukewarm Labour opposition has created a more radical, reformist minded electorate, waiting for the opportunity offered by Corbyn to re-write the rule book, and make the impossible possible. As the Tories tear themselves apart, and face an existential crisis within their own party, the nation is looking elsewhere for leadership, new ideas - and hope.

Wandering back to the hotel, along the pebble beach, and then circling round the base of the new tower, Mrs Angry looked about, at the sea, and the old town.

Our Victorian forebears, terrified by Darwin, and the idea of a world without God, used to build piers, to annex the waves, if not Arnold's sea of faith, in the spirit of imperialism: now we construct towers to give us ascendance into heaven, and enable us to look down from a clearer perspective, one previously the privilege of that Victorian God: with a cool eye, and the authority of our own grasp on power.

Standing in the present, looking back to the historic square, or the old pier, still defying the motion of time and waves, maybe isn't such a bad thing, after all.

Change is difficult, for some more than others, within the party and without; but an acceptance that things cannot continue the way they are, and a willingness to consider more radical and challenging approaches to the issues that face us, is what we need. The message is clear for all of us - adapt, or die: embrace the cold reality of the new, or lose the achievements of the past, as well as the possibilities of the future.

That and nothing else should be our priority. No one has a coherent strategy for Brexit, nor for preventing it: there is no way of preventing it as things stand - and the nation the Tories want to build in its place is a terrifying prospect. Only a Labour government can create something that protects most, if not all, of the benefits we now have as part of the EU: but maybe, just maybe - if we are stuck with Brexit - it would be possible to create something even better.

Let's make it clear - we will never accept that this is normal or acceptable.

Yes, we will increase GDP, close the current account deficit and increase productivity. But life is not just about statistics. As Bobby Kennedy said almost 50 years ago:

"The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry." (18 March 1968)

The performance of our Government will be measured by the care we show to all our people and the richness of their lives.

We proved in the election, and we will now go on to prove in Government, our belief that:

Hope will always overcome fear.

Kindness and generosity will always overcome greedy self-interest.

And that the flame of solidarity in our society will never be extinguished.

For years we have proclaimed that "Another World is Possible."

I tell you now, that world is not just possible, it is in sight.

Let's create it together.

This is what people want to hear: not the politics of division and despair, of self interest and self satisfaction.

Interesting, and pleasing, that the Shadow Chancellor, and then on the last day, the Leader, both referred to poetry in their speeches: not Dover Beach, but Ben Okri, on Grenfell, by Corbyn.

Leave a post Brexit Tory to a choice of verse & they resort to Kipling, of course - as we saw this week.

Satisfaction of another kind was on offer later that day, at the Labour Party Irish Society do. From the moment of arrival, the reception was warm, welcoming, and for perhaps the first time at any Conference event, it was a feeling of being at home: the craic, the laughter, a roomful of other people carrying a burden of inherited Catholic guilt; the good humour of the hosts, and guests. Well: perhaps all but one of the guests. Read on.

The leader of the Irish Labour party addressed the gathering, suggesting that the speeches should not get in the way of our drinking, which was clearly good advice, faithfully adhered to by all, including Himself.

As to Brexit: the prospect of a hard border was simply unthinkable, he said. It would not happen. Could not happen.

Standing next to me was a familiar figure. Ah yes, to be sure: it was Your Man - (not mine) - Owen Smith, who in June was appointed by Corbyn as shadow Northern Ireland secretary. He stood there with a glass of beer in his hand, as if he did not quite know what to do with it (everyone else was drinking Guinness from a bottle) and listened more carefully than needed to the speeches. At one point he said to the speaker (who ignored him): you said that last year. I turned to him and suggested, perhaps unwisely, that if he could remember what was said last year, he clearly had not had enough to drink, either then, or now. Nothing. Nope. Not the slightest hint of amusement. He pursed his lips, like a Sunday school teacher.

Off then to another Irish event: 'Labour for a United Ireland - in a small room over a gentrified pub called the Pump House. A modest gathering, fewer than thirty, but the place was packed - and Ken Loach was due to come.

In fact this was the sort of meeting that makes Conference so worthwhile: real debate, thought provoking - provocative, even, as we shall see. The panel consisted of people like the Sinn Féin MP for West Belfast, Paul Maskey, and writer Geoff Bell.

Interesting to be reminded by Maskey of the previous times in history that English MPs have played 'the Orange card' to get what they want: Theresa May is following in a time honoured tradition by retaining power only by bartering with the DUP. And yet again, the fate of the Irish people is left in the balance while British interests come first: the continuation of an imperialist policy. Here is the island of Ireland, he said, administered by two states, and three governments: time it was understood you cannot tell the Irish people what to do anymore, and let them decide their own future, in or out of Europe.

Loach arrived, and sat down. He apologised for being late, having been at a discussion about Israel and Palestine. He then said, in passing, that he had never heard a word of antisemitism in the Labour movement.

Who could have anything but but admiration for Ken Loach as an artist, and film maker? I'm proud to have been in a short film made in Barnet for which he recorded an introduction; 'I Daniel Blake', is an outstandingly moving and important work, and The Wind that Shakes the Barley, about the fight for Irish independence, is a masterpiece. However ... he was incredibly naive to make such a statement. He does not see the contradiction in telling us, as he did at this meeting, that he remembers the overt racism expressed towards Irish people,"no Irish, no blacks, no dogs", and the injustice of telling the Irish how to run their own country, while at the same time claiming the right to tell Jewish people that they are wrong to feel they are the target of racism too, or denying the experiences they have.

On the other hand, the thought occurred more than once during Conference, that the absence of a safe forum in which constructive political criticism of Israeli government policy towards the Palestinian people can be raised, respectfully, and without causing offence, has a dangerous consequence: a small minority of those who become interested in these issues, purely from a political perspective, sometimes end up adopting, intentionally or not, language and attitudes that are antisemitic, often from ignorance, and lack of challenge at an early point.

It is unfair to portray Labour members as a whole as holding or tolerating such views, however, as some political enemies like to do: almost all of the offensive material is from people who are mindless, anonymous trolls, or attach themselves to the fringes of extremist groups, not party members. Anyone within the party who resorts to such vile behaviour, should be dealt with as a matter of urgency, and kicked out - and hopefully will be, from now on.

Next morning I wandered into the hall just as a member of the 'Jewish Voice for Labour' movement was launching into a speech accusing the party of creating an amendment (supported by Barnet councillor Phil Cohen) targeting 'thought crime' - in a way that could only offend those who within the Jewish Labour Movement - such as former Labour candidate for Finchley and Golders Green, Jeremy Newmark - have worked to create the new party rule change that will deal with antisemitism - a change backed by Jeremy Corbyn. It was an ugly moment, and I left again, as soon as possible.

Later that day, I was chatting outside the Grand Hotel with one of the Labour councillors from Barnet, when another member of 'Jewish Voice for Labour', who knew the member, although this councillor strongly disagreed with her views, engaged us in an unsolicited argument. She felt aggrieved, stating that the Jewish Labour Movement should not, could not, represent her or the community. JLM, in fact, has a long and distinguished history of representation, founded as 'Poale Zion', at the beginning of the 20th century, and affiliated to the Labour party in 1920. Who or what are JVL? Not sure.

The amendment is passed, anyway - and now the party can move on: we hope. Yes: Mrs Angry, eternal optimist, again.

One of the most noticeable changes in Brighton, to me, since the last Conference here, is the increase in the number of homeless people on the streets: not just at night time, in shop doorways, but in the day, lying on mattresses and makeshift beds in the shopping areas and elsewhere. Not an unusual sight anywhere, sadly, now: but within the Conference zone, it was a timely reminder of the real extent of social deprivation happening now, worsening now.

Back at home, some people not at Conference, not party members, or activists, were busy tweeting their disapproval that Labour were apparently not debating Brexit. How dare the party to which they do not belong allow the Leader of the Labour party to cunningly manipulate them into a democratic vote choosing the issues to be debated?

Well, this was nonsense: members were balloted, and gave priority to other issues for those selected items. Elsewhere, everywhere, the subject of Brexit was very definitely given plenty of discussion.

Momentum's 'The World Transformed' - next to a bar named 'Revolution' ... and on the site of a house where Dr Johnson and Fanny Burney used to visit their friend, the writer and diarist Hester Thrale ...

But standing in the street one day, observing a homeless man huddled in a corner of a doorway, wrapped in a blanket, looking across the road in detached curiosity at the passing delegates and members and the queues of people waiting to enter Momentum's 'World Transformed, suddenly things seemed to fall into place: a moment of epiphany.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Tories have tried to change people's view of what is normal and acceptable in our society.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Council PCNs, democracy & profligacy.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Tories have tried to change people's view of what is normal and acceptable in our society. They want us to accept that in the fifth richest country in the world it's normal and acceptable for people to be saddled with debt; for people to have to work long, often insecure, hours, stressed out, struggling to find time with their family; for people not to have a pay rise for years no matter how dedicated you are or how hard you work; for young people to have no prospect of owning their own home; for disabled people to be pushed to the edge by the benefits system; or for carers to be struggling without support or recognition.

Arguing about the finer points of Brexit and nothing else is a middle class luxury: an indulgence. Someone in a shop doorway in Brighton, or a single mum in a hostel in Margate: they aren't worrying about their right to go and live in Berlin, or Barcelona, or anything much more than how they can afford the bus fare to the GP, or feed themselves, and keep some sort of life going in the next few days and weeks. While we allow ourselves to become fixated on one issue, and a problem which is never going to be resolved while the current government is in place, people are taking their own lives, driven to despair by the loss of benefits; our NHS is being torn up and thrown to the dogs of privatisation; thousands of people are being forced to depend on the handouts from their local foodbank. Only a change of government can help them - and only a change of government can do anything to reclaim anything positive from the consequences of Brexit.

Labour has to address the urgent needs of ordinary people, and our most vulnerable citizens, and offer the hope of a society where they will be safe, supported, respected and empowered.

We've seen that trickle down economics don't work - now we have to work from the other end of the social scale.

In or out of the EU, we have to have a change of government to protect the most vulnerable of our citizens.

A fringe meeting on Tuesday night posed an interesting question: was Labour still the party of workers?

The panel, hosted by the Resolution Foundation, a think-tank that works to improve the living standards of those in Britain on low to middle incomes, was going to include Frances O'Grady, Kevin Maguire, and was chaired by Torsten Bell.

It was held in the Hilton Metropole: an ageing venue of unique ugliness - aptly referred to in Eliot's Wasteland, in one of many literary allusions that associate Brighton with the reputation of a place of unsavoury assignations. Once a grand Victorian hotel, now in a state of barely controlled decline, with many of the Conference events, such as this one, taking place in a massive room, emptied of all human context: a vast space, windowless, grey: oppressive - deeply depressing. Unreal city.

Deborah Mattinson from 'Britain Thinks' gave a statistical analysis of voters in the last election. How many workers had actually voted for Labour? She gave a breakdown of statistics, and indicated a problem with engaging working class voters.

Now it was time for Lucy Powell, MP, to speak.

She was well aware of the need to listen to the working classes, she said, smiling. In her constituency she had run a series of meetings with them, to encourage them to express their concerns. The older white working classes, she said, once they got over being -ha ha -#angryaboutbins (copyright Mrs Angry, 2016) revealed that they no longer felt they had 'purchase' over their communities. Oh. Did they use that term, wondered Mrs Angry, or are you putting words in their older white working class mouths?

It was good that Jeremy Corbyn seemed to give hope to some of these people, she admitted - but then contradicted herself somewhat by claiming many voters on the doorstep had been 'angry' - not about bins, but about him. Clearly not to the extent of failing to vote for a Labour MP, thought Mrs Angry, who was beginning to feel rather irritated by her (not helped by the fact that Powell was wearing the same green Boden dress Mrs Angry had worn the day before, unintentionally appropriate for two Irish events: a fact which obliged her to wonder, rather abashed, as to why she was choosing the same clothes as a shadow cabinet mutineer).

Kevin Maguire struck a somewhat different tone: rather less condescending, and more pragmatic - from a north eastern mining background, clearly he felt he might have a rather more informed view of what the working class, in 2017, was, and what they wanted to see from Labour. No sentimentality: listen, but challenge racism, promote Labour values.

Time for questions. Up shot Mrs Angry's hand. A BBC cameraman, who had been filming the discussion, appeared suddenly, too late to have any moderating effect on what now came out.

Did Lucy Powell not think she ought to reconsider the vocabulary she was using? Talking about the 'working classes' as 'they' and 'them': rather patronising, as if they were some sort of rare species, that needs protecting, when in fact the Labour movement is rooted in working class history ... People in the audience mumbled agreement: a few applauded.

By this time, Powell had realised her gaffe, and was flustered, muttering of course, of cours e ... Mrs Angry pointed out that like Maguire, she had family background in the former mining areas of the north east, (ironically we were sitting in the Durham room) and she knew that a whole generation of Labour voters had been lost (over the Blair, Brown & Miliband years), that Corbyn couldn't win them back overnight, it was going to take time - but clearly it was happening.

Of course, of course, she hadn't meant to be patronising. Her credentials: well, said the ex Somerville College, Oxford graduate, who comes from a family of teachers: she was a Mancunian. (Yes, thought Mrs Angry, not necessarily a term that is exclusively interchangeable with working class). She could remember visiting her grandparents, in their home, you know, and the pride they felt in their community - their privet hedge - Eh?

Privet hedge? asked Mrs Angry, thinking of the squalid slum terrace where her own grandparents had lived in Durham, and as Frances O'Grady and Deborah Mattinson tried to hide their laughter. Luxury!

The mood of the meeting changed then: Powell's anodyne politics were clearly not delivering the message most people wanted to hear. Before the end, one woman explained this was her first conference. The thing that had struck her, she said, was that the party seemed to consist of too many over educated young men in suits. Ha! I hear you, sister - Y es, said Mrs Angry, as the other women on the panel nodded: but this is better than it was, believe me. Although, she almost added, looking guiltily at herself, and Lucy Powell, the place is now full of middle class women dressed in Boden.

A brief escape from the vast, airless, gloomy rooms of the Metropole, but then back again, to a slightly less awful venue in the same hotel for the annual Labour Friends of Israel reception. Outside the entrance there was a noisy demonstration with people relentlessly chanting 'Israel is a terrorist state'. Mrs Angry's heart sank. Once inside, the reception was packed, and speeches were made by a young female MP from the Knesset, the Israeli ambassador, and Emily Thornberry, shadow Foreign Secretary, in place of Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn had come last year, courageously, although visibly nervous, and used his speech to condemn antisemitism - almost exclusively unreported by the mainstream media. This year, after so much controversy over this issue, it was clearly decided the better course of action was not to go at all.

Emily Thornberry and Ian McNichol listen to the Israeli ambassador

Waking up the next morning to another beautiful day in Brighton, Mrs Angry stumbled out of bed to peer out of the window at a stunning view of the sea, and the old pier, from the viewpoint of her hotel in the perfectly preserved Regency Square: a vista spoiled only by being bisected by the sky high column of the new observation tower.

Up then and off to the centre, even though this year, thanks to the mess up over her pass, she had no ticket for the Leader's speech: in the end it didn't matter, as, thanks to a kind steward, she found herself somehow sitting in the front section, in a better seat than ever.

And of all the speeches seen at the last few Conferences, this was one to be at: the hall was galvanised with a massive wave of energy, excitement, and enthusiasm. The contrast with the Miliband years, when he lumbered around the stage like a puppet, and the speech seemed to go on forever without making any point, or offering any hope, and the best reception he could expect was some dutiful applause, was striking.

This year Ed was spotted by a friend in the cheap seats, way behind Mrs Angry, looking on thoughtfully.

Down in the mosh pit, surrounded by a group of very excited Glaswegians, and a few seats along from a curiously subdued Owen Jones, the crowd's mood was exultant. The event was brilliantly presented: the right choice of music, timing, footage, graphics: very effective, and the perfect backdrop to the simplistic style of the leader himself.

No need to repeat the speech. There was not a single policy in it which you could not applaud: a range of courageous, practical ideas that meet the needs of all those who have been waiting for a fundamental change in the party, and in the political system. The part which was the most resonant for me was this:

The Tory approach to the economy isn't entrepreneurial. It's extractive. They're not focused on long-term investment and wealth creation. When you look at what they do rather than what they say it's all about driving down wages, services and standards ... to make as much money as quickly as possible with government not as the servant of the people but of global corporations.

And their disregard for rampant inequality, the hollowing out of our public services, the disdain for the powerless and the poor have made our society more brutal and less caring.

Now that degraded regime has a tragic monument the chilling wreckage of Grenfell Tower. A horrifying fire in which dozens perished an entirely avoidable human disaster. One which is an indictment not just of decades of failed housing policies and privatisation and the yawning inequality in one of the wealthiest boroughs and cities in the world, it is also a damning indictment of a whole outlook which values council tax refunds for the wealthy above decent provision for all and which has contempt for working class communities.

Before the fire, a tenants' group of Grenfell residents had warned ... and I quote words that should haunt all politicians "the Grenfell Action Group firmly believes that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord". Grenfell is not just the result of bad political decisions It stands for a failed and broken system which Labour must and will replace.

A broken system: nationally, and here, in easycouncil Barnet, freefalling into the abyss created by the hollowing out of every local service; a place where avarice and a merciless ideology drives an agenda of privatisation beyond the point of any effective restraint - or justification.

The tragedy of Grenfell has come to signify so much more than the terror and loss of that terrible night: it marks a moment in history from which we can never return, or look back, but only resolve to make the most radical changes to a society that can allow such a thing to happen. There is an appetite, a hunger for change now, that I don't remember seeing before, in my lifetime.

To see such widespread support expressed for example, for the re-nationalisation of our utilities, is quite something. The centre has shifted: years of Tory government and a lukewarm Labour opposition has created a more radical, reformist minded electorate, waiting for the opportunity offered by Corbyn to re-write the rule book, and make the impossible possible. As the Tories tear themselves apart, and face an existential crisis within their own party, the nation is looking elsewhere for leadership, new ideas - and hope.

Wandering back to the hotel, along the pebble beach, and then circling round the base of the new tower, Mrs Angry looked about, at the sea, and the old town.

Our Victorian forebears, terrified by Darwin, and the idea of a world without God, used to build piers, to annex the waves, if not Arnold's sea of faith, in the spirit of imperialism: now we construct towers to give us ascendance into heaven, and enable us to look down from a clearer perspective, one previously the privilege of that Victorian God: with a cool eye, and the authority of our own grasp on power.

Standing in the present, looking back to the historic square, or the old pier, still defying the motion of time and waves, maybe isn't such a bad thing, after all.

Change is difficult, for some more than others, within the party and without; but an acceptance that things cannot continue the way they are, and a willingness to consider more radical and challenging approaches to the issues that face us, is what we need. The message is clear for all of us - adapt, or die: embrace the cold reality of the new, or lose the achievements of the past, as well as the possibilities of the future.

That and nothing else should be our priority. No one has a coherent strategy for Brexit, nor for preventing it: there is no way of preventing it as things stand - and the nation the Tories want to build in its place is a terrifying prospect. Only a Labour government can create something that protects most, if not all, of the benefits we now have as part of the EU: but maybe, just maybe - if we are stuck with Brexit - it would be possible to create something even better.

Let's make it clear - we will never accept that this is normal or acceptable.

Yes, we will increase GDP, close the current account deficit and increase productivity. But life is not just about statistics. As Bobby Kennedy said almost 50 years ago:

"The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry." (18 March 1968)

The performance of our Government will be measured by the care we show to all our people and the richness of their lives.

We proved in the election, and we will now go on to prove in Government, our belief that:

Hope will always overcome fear.

Kindness and generosity will always overcome greedy self-interest.

And that the flame of solidarity in our society will never be extinguished.

For years we have proclaimed that "Another World is Possible."

I tell you now, that world is not just possible, it is in sight.

Let's create it together.

This is what people want to hear: not the politics of division and despair, of self interest and self satisfaction.

Interesting, and pleasing, that the Shadow Chancellor, and then on the last day, the Leader, both referred to poetry in their speeches: not Dover Beach, but Ben Okri, on Grenfell, by Corbyn.

Leave a post Brexit Tory to a choice of verse & they resort to Kipling, of course - as we saw this week.

Satisfaction of another kind was on offer later that day, at the Labour Party Irish Society do. From the moment of arrival, the reception was warm, welcoming, and for perhaps the first time at any Conference event, it was a feeling of being at home: the craic, the laughter, a roomful of other people carrying a burden of inherited Catholic guilt; the good humour of the hosts, and guests. Well: perhaps all but one of the guests. Read on.

The leader of the Irish Labour party addressed the gathering, suggesting that the speeches should not get in the way of our drinking, which was clearly good advice, faithfully adhered to by all, including Himself.

As to Brexit: the prospect of a hard border was simply unthinkable, he said. It would not happen. Could not happen.

Standing next to me was a familiar figure. Ah yes, to be sure: it was Your Man - (not mine) - Owen Smith, who in June was appointed by Corbyn as shadow Northern Ireland secretary. He stood there with a glass of beer in his hand, as if he did not quite know what to do with it (everyone else was drinking Guinness from a bottle) and listened more carefully than needed to the speeches. At one point he said to the speaker (who ignored him): you said that last year. I turned to him and suggested, perhaps unwisely, that if he could remember what was said last year, he clearly had not had enough to drink, either then, or now. Nothing. Nope. Not the slightest hint of amusement. He pursed his lips, like a Sunday school teacher.

Off then to another Irish event: 'Labour for a United Ireland - in a small room over a gentrified pub called the Pump House. A modest gathering, fewer than thirty, but the place was packed - and Ken Loach was due to come.

In fact this was the sort of meeting that makes Conference so worthwhile: real debate, thought provoking - provocative, even, as we shall see. The panel consisted of people like the Sinn Féin MP for West Belfast, Paul Maskey, and writer Geoff Bell.

Interesting to be reminded by Maskey of the previous times in history that English MPs have played 'the Orange card' to get what they want: Theresa May is following in a time honoured tradition by retaining power only by bartering with the DUP. And yet again, the fate of the Irish people is left in the balance while British interests come first: the continuation of an imperialist policy. Here is the island of Ireland, he said, administered by two states, and three governments: time it was understood you cannot tell the Irish people what to do anymore, and let them decide their own future, in or out of Europe.

Loach arrived, and sat down. He apologised for being late, having been at a discussion about Israel and Palestine. He then said, in passing, that he had never heard a word of antisemitism in the Labour movement.

Who could have anything but but admiration for Ken Loach as an artist, and film maker? I'm proud to have been in a short film made in Barnet for which he recorded an introduction; 'I Daniel Blake', is an outstandingly moving and important work, and The Wind that Shakes the Barley, about the fight for Irish independence, is a masterpiece. However ... he was incredibly naive to make such a statement. He does not see the contradiction in telling us, as he did at this meeting, that he remembers the overt racism expressed towards Irish people,"no Irish, no blacks, no dogs", and the injustice of telling the Irish how to run their own country, while at the same time claiming the right to tell Jewish people that they are wrong to feel they are the target of racism too, or denying the experiences they have.

On the other hand, the thought occurred more than once during Conference, that the absence of a safe forum in which constructive political criticism of Israeli government policy towards the Palestinian people can be raised, respectfully, and without causing offence, has a dangerous consequence: a small minority of those who become interested in these issues, purely from a political perspective, sometimes end up adopting, intentionally or not, language and attitudes that are antisemitic, often from ignorance, and lack of challenge at an early point.

It is unfair to portray Labour members as a whole as holding or tolerating such views, however, as some political enemies like to do: almost all of the offensive material is from people who are mindless, anonymous trolls, or attach themselves to the fringes of extremist groups, not party members. Anyone within the party who resorts to such vile behaviour, should be dealt with as a matter of urgency, and kicked out - and hopefully will be, from now on.

Next morning I wandered into the hall just as a member of the 'Jewish Voice for Labour' movement was launching into a speech accusing the party of creating an amendment (supported by Barnet councillor Phil Cohen) targeting 'thought crime' - in a way that could only offend those who within the Jewish Labour Movement - such as former Labour candidate for Finchley and Golders Green, Jeremy Newmark - have worked to create the new party rule change that will deal with antisemitism - a change backed by Jeremy Corbyn. It was an ugly moment, and I left again, as soon as possible.

Later that day, I was chatting outside the Grand Hotel with one of the Labour councillors from Barnet, when another member of 'Jewish Voice for Labour', who knew the member, although this councillor strongly disagreed with her views, engaged us in an unsolicited argument. She felt aggrieved, stating that the Jewish Labour Movement should not, could not, represent her or the community. JLM, in fact, has a long and distinguished history of representation, founded as 'Poale Zion', at the beginning of the 20th century, and affiliated to the Labour party in 1920. Who or what are JVL? Not sure.

The amendment is passed, anyway - and now the party can move on: we hope. Yes: Mrs Angry, eternal optimist, again.

One of the most noticeable changes in Brighton, to me, since the last Conference here, is the increase in the number of homeless people on the streets: not just at night time, in shop doorways, but in the day, lying on mattresses and makeshift beds in the shopping areas and elsewhere. Not an unusual sight anywhere, sadly, now: but within the Conference zone, it was a timely reminder of the real extent of social deprivation happening now, worsening now.

Back at home, some people not at Conference, not party members, or activists, were busy tweeting their disapproval that Labour were apparently not debating Brexit. How dare the party to which they do not belong allow the Leader of the Labour party to cunningly manipulate them into a democratic vote choosing the issues to be debated?

Well, this was nonsense: members were balloted, and gave priority to other issues for those selected items. Elsewhere, everywhere, the subject of Brexit was very definitely given plenty of discussion.

Momentum's 'The World Transformed' - next to a bar named 'Revolution' ... and on the site of a house where Dr Johnson and Fanny Burney used to visit their friend, the writer and diarist Hester Thrale ...

But standing in the street one day, observing a homeless man huddled in a corner of a doorway, wrapped in a blanket, looking across the road in detached curiosity at the passing delegates and members and the queues of people waiting to enter Momentum's 'World Transformed, suddenly things seemed to fall into place: a moment of epiphany.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Tories have tried to change people's view of what is normal and acceptable in our society.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Tories have tried to change people's view of what is normal and acceptable in our society. They want us to accept that in the fifth richest country in the world it's normal and acceptable for people to be saddled with debt; for people to have to work long, often insecure, hours, stressed out, struggling to find time with their family; for people not to have a pay rise for years no matter how dedicated you are or how hard you work; for young people to have no prospect of owning their own home; for disabled people to be pushed to the edge by the benefits system; or for carers to be struggling without support or recognition.

Arguing about the finer points of Brexit and nothing else is a middle class luxury: an indulgence. Someone in a shop doorway in Brighton, or a single mum in a hostel in Margate: they aren't worrying about their right to go and live in Berlin, or Barcelona, or anything much more than how they can afford the bus fare to the GP, or feed themselves, and keep some sort of life going in the next few days and weeks. While we allow ourselves to become fixated on one issue, and a problem which is never going to be resolved while the current government is in place, people are taking their own lives, driven to despair by the loss of benefits; our NHS is being torn up and thrown to the dogs of privatisation; thousands of people are being forced to depend on the handouts from their local foodbank. Only a change of government can help them - and only a change of government can do anything to reclaim anything positive from the consequences of Brexit.

Labour has to address the urgent needs of ordinary people, and our most vulnerable citizens, and offer the hope of a society where they will be safe, supported, respected and empowered.

We've seen that trickle down economics don't work - now we have to work from the other end of the social scale.

In or out of the EU, we have to have a change of government to protect the most vulnerable of our citizens.

A fringe meeting on Tuesday night posed an interesting question: was Labour still the party of workers?

The panel, hosted by the Resolution Foundation, a think-tank that works to improve the living standards of those in Britain on low to middle incomes, was going to include Frances O'Grady, Kevin Maguire, and was chaired by Torsten Bell.

It was held in the Hilton Metropole: an ageing venue of unique ugliness - aptly referred to in Eliot's Wasteland, in one of many literary allusions that associate Brighton with the reputation of a place of unsavoury assignations. Once a grand Victorian hotel, now in a state of barely controlled decline, with many of the Conference events, such as this one, taking place in a massive room, emptied of all human context: a vast space, windowless, grey: oppressive - deeply depressing. Unreal city.

Deborah Mattinson from 'Britain Thinks' gave a statistical analysis of voters in the last election. How many workers had actually voted for Labour? She gave a breakdown of statistics, and indicated a problem with engaging working class voters.

Now it was time for Lucy Powell, MP, to speak.

She was well aware of the need to listen to the working classes, she said, smiling. In her constituency she had run a series of meetings with them, to encourage them to express their concerns. The older white working classes, she said, once they got over being -ha ha -#angryaboutbins (copyright Mrs Angry, 2016) revealed that they no longer felt they had 'purchase' over their communities. Oh. Did they use that term, wondered Mrs Angry, or are you putting words in their older white working class mouths?

It was good that Jeremy Corbyn seemed to give hope to some of these people, she admitted - but then contradicted herself somewhat by claiming many voters on the doorstep had been 'angry' - not about bins, but about him. Clearly not to the extent of failing to vote for a Labour MP, thought Mrs Angry, who was beginning to feel rather irritated by her (not helped by the fact that Powell was wearing the same green Boden dress Mrs Angry had worn the day before, unintentionally appropriate for two Irish events: a fact which obliged her to wonder, rather abashed, as to why she was choosing the same clothes as a shadow cabinet mutineer).

Kevin Maguire struck a somewhat different tone: rather less condescending, and more pragmatic - from a north eastern mining background, clearly he felt he might have a rather more informed view of what the working class, in 2017, was, and what they wanted to see from Labour. No sentimentality: listen, but challenge racism, promote Labour values.

Time for questions. Up shot Mrs Angry's hand. A BBC cameraman, who had been filming the discussion, appeared suddenly, too late to have any moderating effect on what now came out.

Did Lucy Powell not think she ought to reconsider the vocabulary she was using? Talking about the 'working classes' as 'they' and 'them': rather patronising, as if they were some sort of rare species, that needs protecting, when in fact the Labour movement is rooted in working class history ... People in the audience mumbled agreement: a few applauded.

By this time, Powell had realised her gaffe, and was flustered, muttering of course, of cours e ... Mrs Angry pointed out that like Maguire, she had family background in the former mining areas of the north east, (ironically we were sitting in the Durham room) and she knew that a whole generation of Labour voters had been lost (over the Blair, Brown & Miliband years), that Corbyn couldn't win them back overnight, it was going to take time - but clearly it was happening.

Of course, of course, she hadn't meant to be patronising. Her credentials: well, said the ex Somerville College, Oxford graduate, who comes from a family of teachers: she was a Mancunian. (Yes, thought Mrs Angry, not necessarily a term that is exclusively interchangeable with working class). She could remember visiting her grandparents, in their home, you know, and the pride they felt in their community - their privet hedge - Eh?

Privet hedge? asked Mrs Angry, thinking of the squalid slum terrace where her own grandparents had lived in Durham, and as Frances O'Grady and Deborah Mattinson tried to hide their laughter. Luxury!

The mood of the meeting changed then: Powell's anodyne politics were clearly not delivering the message most people wanted to hear. Before the end, one woman explained this was her first conference. The thing that had struck her, she said, was that the party seemed to consist of too many over educated young men in suits. Ha! I hear you, sister - Y es, said Mrs Angry, as the other women on the panel nodded: but this is better than it was, believe me. Although, she almost added, looking guiltily at herself, and Lucy Powell, the place is now full of middle class women dressed in Boden.

A brief escape from the vast, airless, gloomy rooms of the Metropole, but then back again, to a slightly less awful venue in the same hotel for the annual Labour Friends of Israel reception. Outside the entrance there was a noisy demonstration with people relentlessly chanting 'Israel is a terrorist state'. Mrs Angry's heart sank. Once inside, the reception was packed, and speeches were made by a young female MP from the Knesset, the Israeli ambassador, and Emily Thornberry, shadow Foreign Secretary, in place of Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn had come last year, courageously, although visibly nervous, and used his speech to condemn antisemitism - almost exclusively unreported by the mainstream media. This year, after so much controversy over this issue, it was clearly decided the better course of action was not to go at all.

Emily Thornberry and Ian McNichol listen to the Israeli ambassador

Waking up the next morning to another beautiful day in Brighton, Mrs Angry stumbled out of bed to peer out of the window at a stunning view of the sea, and the old pier, from the viewpoint of her hotel in the perfectly preserved Regency Square: a vista spoiled only by being bisected by the sky high column of the new observation tower.

Up then and off to the centre, even though this year, thanks to the mess up over her pass, she had no ticket for the Leader's speech: in the end it didn't matter, as, thanks to a kind steward, she found herself somehow sitting in the front section, in a better seat than ever.

And of all the speeches seen at the last few Conferences, this was one to be at: the hall was galvanised with a massive wave of energy, excitement, and enthusiasm. The contrast with the Miliband years, when he lumbered around the stage like a puppet, and the speech seemed to go on forever without making any point, or offering any hope, and the best reception he could expect was some dutiful applause, was striking.

This year Ed was spotted by a friend in the cheap seats, way behind Mrs Angry, looking on thoughtfully.

Down in the mosh pit, surrounded by a group of very excited Glaswegians, and a few seats along from a curiously subdued Owen Jones, the crowd's mood was exultant. The event was brilliantly presented: the right choice of music, timing, footage, graphics: very effective, and the perfect backdrop to the simplistic style of the leader himself.

No need to repeat the speech. There was not a single policy in it which you could not applaud: a range of courageous, practical ideas that meet the needs of all those who have been waiting for a fundamental change in the party, and in the political system. The part which was the most resonant for me was this:

The Tory approach to the economy isn't entrepreneurial. It's extractive. They're not focused on long-term investment and wealth creation. When you look at what they do rather than what they say it's all about driving down wages, services and standards ... to make as much money as quickly as possible with government not as the servant of the people but of global corporations.

And their disregard for rampant inequality, the hollowing out of our public services, the disdain for the powerless and the poor have made our society more brutal and less caring.

Now that degraded regime has a tragic monument the chilling wreckage of Grenfell Tower. A horrifying fire in which dozens perished an entirely avoidable human disaster. One which is an indictment not just of decades of failed housing policies and privatisation and the yawning inequality in one of the wealthiest boroughs and cities in the world, it is also a damning indictment of a whole outlook which values council tax refunds for the wealthy above decent provision for all and which has contempt for working class communities.

Before the fire, a tenants' group of Grenfell residents had warned ... and I quote words that should haunt all politicians "the Grenfell Action Group firmly believes that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord". Grenfell is not just the result of bad political decisions It stands for a failed and broken system which Labour must and will replace.

A broken system: nationally, and here, in easycouncil Barnet, freefalling into the abyss created by the hollowing out of every local service; a place where avarice and a merciless ideology drives an agenda of privatisation beyond the point of any effective restraint - or justification.

The tragedy of Grenfell has come to signify so much more than the terror and loss of that terrible night: it marks a moment in history from which we can never return, or look back, but only resolve to make the most radical changes to a society that can allow such a thing to happen. There is an appetite, a hunger for change now, that I don't remember seeing before, in my lifetime.

To see such widespread support expressed for example, for the re-nationalisation of our utilities, is quite something. The centre has shifted: years of Tory government and a lukewarm Labour opposition has created a more radical, reformist minded electorate, waiting for the opportunity offered by Corbyn to re-write the rule book, and make the impossible possible. As the Tories tear themselves apart, and face an existential crisis within their own party, the nation is looking elsewhere for leadership, new ideas - and hope.

Wandering back to the hotel, along the pebble beach, and then circling round the base of the new tower, Mrs Angry looked about, at the sea, and the old town.

Our Victorian forebears, terrified by Darwin, and the idea of a world without God, used to build piers, to annex the waves, if not Arnold's sea of faith, in the spirit of imperialism: now we construct towers to give us ascendance into heaven, and enable us to look down from a clearer perspective, one previously the privilege of that Victorian God: with a cool eye, and the authority of our own grasp on power.

Standing in the present, looking back to the historic square, or the old pier, still defying the motion of time and waves, maybe isn't such a bad thing, after all.

Change is difficult, for some more than others, within the party and without; but an acceptance that things cannot continue the way they are, and a willingness to consider more radical and challenging approaches to the issues that face us, is what we need. The message is clear for all of us - adapt, or die: embrace the cold reality of the new, or lose the achievements of the past, as well as the possibilities of the future.

That and nothing else should be our priority. No one has a coherent strategy for Brexit, nor for preventing it: there is no way of preventing it as things stand - and the nation the Tories want to build in its place is a terrifying prospect. Only a Labour government can create something that protects most, if not all, of the benefits we now have as part of the EU: but maybe, just maybe - if we are stuck with Brexit - it would be possible to create something even better.

Let's make it clear - we will never accept that this is normal or acceptable.

Yes, we will increase GDP, close the current account deficit and increase productivity. But life is not just about statistics. As Bobby Kennedy said almost 50 years ago:

"The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry." (18 March 1968)

The performance of our Government will be measured by the care we show to all our people and the richness of their lives.

We proved in the election, and we will now go on to prove in Government, our belief that:

Hope will always overcome fear.

Kindness and generosity will always overcome greedy self-interest.

And that the flame of solidarity in our society will never be extinguished.

For years we have proclaimed that "Another World is Possible."

I tell you now, that world is not just possible, it is in sight.

Let's create it together.

This is what people want to hear: not the politics of division and despair, of self interest and self satisfaction.

Interesting, and pleasing, that the Shadow Chancellor, and then on the last day, the Leader, both referred to poetry in their speeches: not Dover Beach, but Ben Okri, on Grenfell, by Corbyn.

Leave a post Brexit Tory to a choice of verse & they resort to Kipling, of course - as we saw this week.

Satisfaction of another kind was on offer later that day, at the Labour Party Irish Society do. From the moment of arrival, the reception was warm, welcoming, and for perhaps the first time at any Conference event, it was a feeling of being at home: the craic, the laughter, a roomful of other people carrying a burden of inherited Catholic guilt; the good humour of the hosts, and guests. Well: perhaps all but one of the guests. Read on.

The leader of the Irish Labour party addressed the gathering, suggesting that the speeches should not get in the way of our drinking, which was clearly good advice, faithfully adhered to by all, including Himself.

As to Brexit: the prospect of a hard border was simply unthinkable, he said. It would not happen. Could not happen.

Standing next to me was a familiar figure. Ah yes, to be sure: it was Your Man - (not mine) - Owen Smith, who in June was appointed by Corbyn as shadow Northern Ireland secretary. He stood there with a glass of beer in his hand, as if he did not quite know what to do with it (everyone else was drinking Guinness from a bottle) and listened more carefully than needed to the speeches. At one point he said to the speaker (who ignored him): you said that last year. I turned to him and suggested, perhaps unwisely, that if he could remember what was said last year, he clearly had not had enough to drink, either then, or now. Nothing. Nope. Not the slightest hint of amusement. He pursed his lips, like a Sunday school teacher.

Off then to another Irish event: 'Labour for a United Ireland - in a small room over a gentrified pub called the Pump House. A modest gathering, fewer than thirty, but the place was packed - and Ken Loach was due to come.

In fact this was the sort of meeting that makes Conference so worthwhile: real debate, thought provoking - provocative, even, as we shall see. The panel consisted of people like the Sinn Féin MP for West Belfast, Paul Maskey, and writer Geoff Bell.

Interesting to be reminded by Maskey of the previous times in history that English MPs have played 'the Orange card' to get what they want: Theresa May is following in a time honoured tradition by retaining power only by bartering with the DUP. And yet again, the fate of the Irish people is left in the balance while British interests come first: the continuation of an imperialist policy. Here is the island of Ireland, he said, administered by two states, and three governments: time it was understood you cannot tell the Irish people what to do anymore, and let them decide their own future, in or out of Europe.

Loach arrived, and sat down. He apologised for being late, having been at a discussion about Israel and Palestine. He then said, in passing, that he had never heard a word of antisemitism in the Labour movement.

Who could have anything but but admiration for Ken Loach as an artist, and film maker? I'm proud to have been in a short film made in Barnet for which he recorded an introduction; 'I Daniel Blake', is an outstandingly moving and important work, and The Wind that Shakes the Barley, about the fight for Irish independence, is a masterpiece. However ... he was incredibly naive to make such a statement. He does not see the contradiction in telling us, as he did at this meeting, that he remembers the overt racism expressed towards Irish people,"no Irish, no blacks, no dogs", and the injustice of telling the Irish how to run their own country, while at the same time claiming the right to tell Jewish people that they are wrong to feel they are the target of racism too, or denying the experiences they have.

On the other hand, the thought occurred more than once during Conference, that the absence of a safe forum in which constructive political criticism of Israeli government policy towards the Palestinian people can be raised, respectfully, and without causing offence, has a dangerous consequence: a small minority of those who become interested in these issues, purely from a political perspective, sometimes end up adopting, intentionally or not, language and attitudes that are antisemitic, often from ignorance, and lack of challenge at an early point.

It is unfair to portray Labour members as a whole as holding or tolerating such views, however, as some political enemies like to do: almost all of the offensive material is from people who are mindless, anonymous trolls, or attach themselves to the fringes of extremist groups, not party members. Anyone within the party who resorts to such vile behaviour, should be dealt with as a matter of urgency, and kicked out - and hopefully will be, from now on.

Next morning I wandered into the hall just as a member of the 'Jewish Voice for Labour' movement was launching into a speech accusing the party of creating an amendment (supported by Barnet councillor Phil Cohen) targeting 'thought crime' - in a way that could only offend those who within the Jewish Labour Movement - such as former Labour candidate for Finchley and Golders Green, Jeremy Newmark - have worked to create the new party rule change that will deal with antisemitism - a change backed by Jeremy Corbyn. It was an ugly moment, and I left again, as soon as possible.

Later that day, I was chatting outside the Grand Hotel with one of the Labour councillors from Barnet, when another member of 'Jewish Voice for Labour', who knew the member, although this councillor strongly disagreed with her views, engaged us in an unsolicited argument. She felt aggrieved, stating that the Jewish Labour Movement should not, could not, represent her or the community. JLM, in fact, has a long and distinguished history of representation, founded as 'Poale Zion', at the beginning of the 20th century, and affiliated to the Labour party in 1920. Who or what are JVL? Not sure.

The amendment is passed, anyway - and now the party can move on: we hope. Yes: Mrs Angry, eternal optimist, again.

One of the most noticeable changes in Brighton, to me, since the last Conference here, is the increase in the number of homeless people on the streets: not just at night time, in shop doorways, but in the day, lying on mattresses and makeshift beds in the shopping areas and elsewhere. Not an unusual sight anywhere, sadly, now: but within the Conference zone, it was a timely reminder of the real extent of social deprivation happening now, worsening now.

Back at home, some people not at Conference, not party members, or activists, were busy tweeting their disapproval that Labour were apparently not debating Brexit. How dare the party to which they do not belong allow the Leader of the Labour party to cunningly manipulate them into a democratic vote choosing the issues to be debated?

Well, this was nonsense: members were balloted, and gave priority to other issues for those selected items. Elsewhere, everywhere, the subject of Brexit was very definitely given plenty of discussion.

Momentum's 'The World Transformed' - next to a bar named 'Revolution' ... and on the site of a house where Dr Johnson and Fanny Burney used to visit their friend, the writer and diarist Hester Thrale ...

But standing in the street one day, observing a homeless man huddled in a corner of a doorway, wrapped in a blanket, looking across the road in detached curiosity at the passing delegates and members and the queues of people waiting to enter Momentum's 'World Transformed, suddenly things seemed to fall into place: a moment of epiphany.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Tories have tried to change people's view of what is normal and acceptable in our society.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Tories have tried to change people's view of what is normal and acceptable in our society. They want us to accept that in the fifth richest country in the world it's normal and acceptable for people to be saddled with debt; for people to have to work long, often insecure, hours, stressed out, struggling to find time with their family; for people not to have a pay rise for years no matter how dedicated you are or how hard you work; for young people to have no prospect of owning their own home; for disabled people to be pushed to the edge by the benefits system; or for carers to be struggling without support or recognition.

Arguing about the finer points of Brexit and nothing else is a middle class luxury: an indulgence. Someone in a shop doorway in Brighton, or a single mum in a hostel in Margate: they aren't worrying about their right to go and live in Berlin, or Barcelona, or anything much more than how they can afford the bus fare to the GP, or feed themselves, and keep some sort of life going in the next few days and weeks. While we allow ourselves to become fixated on one issue, and a problem which is never going to be resolved while the current government is in place, people are taking their own lives, driven to despair by the loss of benefits; our NHS is being torn up and thrown to the dogs of privatisation; thousands of people are being forced to depend on the handouts from their local foodbank. Only a change of government can help them - and only a change of government can do anything to reclaim anything positive from the consequences of Brexit.

Labour has to address the urgent needs of ordinary people, and our most vulnerable citizens, and offer the hope of a society where they will be safe, supported, respected and empowered.

We've seen that trickle down economics don't work - now we have to work from the other end of the social scale.

In or out of the EU, we have to have a change of government to protect the most vulnerable of our citizens.

A fringe meeting on Tuesday night posed an interesting question: was Labour still the party of workers?

The panel, hosted by the Resolution Foundation, a think-tank that works to improve the living standards of those in Britain on low to middle incomes, was going to include Frances O'Grady, Kevin Maguire, and was chaired by Torsten Bell.

It was held in the Hilton Metropole: an ageing venue of unique ugliness - aptly referred to in Eliot's Wasteland, in one of many literary allusions that associate Brighton with the reputation of a place of unsavoury assignations. Once a grand Victorian hotel, now in a state of barely controlled decline, with many of the Conference events, such as this one, taking place in a massive room, emptied of all human context: a vast space, windowless, grey: oppressive - deeply depressing. Unreal city.

Deborah Mattinson from 'Britain Thinks' gave a statistical analysis of voters in the last election. How many workers had actually voted for Labour? She gave a breakdown of statistics, and indicated a problem with engaging working class voters.

Now it was time for Lucy Powell, MP, to speak.

She was well aware of the need to listen to the working classes, she said, smiling. In her constituency she had run a series of meetings with them, to encourage them to express their concerns. The older white working classes, she said, once they got over being -ha ha -#angryaboutbins (copyright Mrs Angry, 2016) revealed that they no longer felt they had 'purchase' over their communities. Oh. Did they use that term, wondered Mrs Angry, or are you putting words in their older white working class mouths?

It was good that Jeremy Corbyn seemed to give hope to some of these people, she admitted - but then contradicted herself somewhat by claiming many voters on the doorstep had been 'angry' - not about bins, but about him. Clearly not to the extent of failing to vote for a Labour MP, thought Mrs Angry, who was beginning to feel rather irritated by her (not helped by the fact that Powell was wearing the same green Boden dress Mrs Angry had worn the day before, unintentionally appropriate for two Irish events: a fact which obliged her to wonder, rather abashed, as to why she was choosing the same clothes as a shadow cabinet mutineer).

Kevin Maguire struck a somewhat different tone: rather less condescending, and more pragmatic - from a north eastern mining background, clearly he felt he might have a rather more informed view of what the working class, in 2017, was, and what they wanted to see from Labour. No sentimentality: listen, but challenge racism, promote Labour values.

Time for questions. Up shot Mrs Angry's hand. A BBC cameraman, who had been filming the discussion, appeared suddenly, too late to have any moderating effect on what now came out.

Did Lucy Powell not think she ought to reconsider the vocabulary she was using? Talking about the 'working classes' as 'they' and 'them': rather patronising, as if they were some sort of rare species, that needs protecting, when in fact the Labour movement is rooted in working class history ... People in the audience mumbled agreement: a few applauded.

By this time, Powell had realised her gaffe, and was flustered, muttering of course, of cours e ... Mrs Angry pointed out that like Maguire, she had family background in the former mining areas of the north east, (ironically we were sitting in the Durham room) and she knew that a whole generation of Labour voters had been lost (over the Blair, Brown & Miliband years), that Corbyn couldn't win them back overnight, it was going to take time - but clearly it was happening.

Of course, of course, she hadn't meant to be patronising. Her credentials: well, said the ex Somerville College, Oxford graduate, who comes from a family of teachers: she was a Mancunian. (Yes, thought Mrs Angry, not necessarily a term that is exclusively interchangeable with working class). She could remember visiting her grandparents, in their home, you know, and the pride they felt in their community - their privet hedge - Eh?

Privet hedge? asked Mrs Angry, thinking of the squalid slum terrace where her own grandparents had lived in Durham, and as Frances O'Grady and Deborah Mattinson tried to hide their laughter. Luxury!

The mood of the meeting changed then: Powell's anodyne politics were clearly not delivering the message most people wanted to hear. Before the end, one woman explained this was her first conference. The thing that had struck her, she said, was that the party seemed to consist of too many over educated young men in suits. Ha! I hear you, sister - Y es, said Mrs Angry, as the other women on the panel nodded: but this is better than it was, believe me. Although, she almost added, looking guiltily at herself, and Lucy Powell, the place is now full of middle class women dressed in Boden.

A brief escape from the vast, airless, gloomy rooms of the Metropole, but then back again, to a slightly less awful venue in the same hotel for the annual Labour Friends of Israel reception. Outside the entrance there was a noisy demonstration with people relentlessly chanting 'Israel is a terrorist state'. Mrs Angry's heart sank. Once inside, the reception was packed, and speeches were made by a young female MP from the Knesset, the Israeli ambassador, and Emily Thornberry, shadow Foreign Secretary, in place of Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn had come last year, courageously, although visibly nervous, and used his speech to condemn antisemitism - almost exclusively unreported by the mainstream media. This year, after so much controversy over this issue, it was clearly decided the better course of action was not to go at all.

Emily Thornberry and Ian McNichol listen to the Israeli ambassador

Waking up the next morning to another beautiful day in Brighton, Mrs Angry stumbled out of bed to peer out of the window at a stunning view of the sea, and the old pier, from the viewpoint of her hotel in the perfectly preserved Regency Square: a vista spoiled only by being bisected by the sky high column of the new observation tower.

Up then and off to the centre, even though this year, thanks to the mess up over her pass, she had no ticket for the Leader's speech: in the end it didn't matter, as, thanks to a kind steward, she found herself somehow sitting in the front section, in a better seat than ever.

And of all the speeches seen at the last few Conferences, this was one to be at: the hall was galvanised with a massive wave of energy, excitement, and enthusiasm. The contrast with the Miliband years, when he lumbered around the stage like a puppet, and the speech seemed to go on forever without making any point, or offering any hope, and the best reception he could expect was some dutiful applause, was striking.

This year Ed was spotted by a friend in the cheap seats, way behind Mrs Angry, looking on thoughtfully.

Down in the mosh pit, surrounded by a group of very excited Glaswegians, and a few seats along from a curiously subdued Owen Jones, the crowd's mood was exultant. The event was brilliantly presented: the right choice of music, timing, footage, graphics: very effective, and the perfect backdrop to the simplistic style of the leader himself.

No need to repeat the speech. There was not a single policy in it which you could not applaud: a range of courageous, practical ideas that meet the needs of all those who have been waiting for a fundamental change in the party, and in the political system. The part which was the most resonant for me was this:

The Tory approach to the economy isn't entrepreneurial. It's extractive. They're not focused on long-term investment and wealth creation. When you look at what they do rather than what they say it's all about driving down wages, services and standards ... to make as much money as quickly as possible with government not as the servant of the people but of global corporations.

And their disregard for rampant inequality, the hollowing out of our public services, the disdain for the powerless and the poor have made our society more brutal and less caring.

Now that degraded regime has a tragic monument the chilling wreckage of Grenfell Tower. A horrifying fire in which dozens perished an entirely avoidable human disaster. One which is an indictment not just of decades of failed housing policies and privatisation and the yawning inequality in one of the wealthiest boroughs and cities in the world, it is also a damning indictment of a whole outlook which values council tax refunds for the wealthy above decent provision for all and which has contempt for working class communities.

Before the fire, a tenants' group of Grenfell residents had warned ... and I quote words that should haunt all politicians "the Grenfell Action Group firmly believes that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord". Grenfell is not just the result of bad political decisions It stands for a failed and broken system which Labour must and will replace.

A broken system: nationally, and here, in easycouncil Barnet, freefalling into the abyss created by the hollowing out of every local service; a place where avarice and a merciless ideology drives an agenda of privatisation beyond the point of any effective restraint - or justification.

The tragedy of Grenfell has come to signify so much more than the terror and loss of that terrible night: it marks a moment in history from which we can never return, or look back, but only resolve to make the most radical changes to a society that can allow such a thing to happen. There is an appetite, a hunger for change now, that I don't remember seeing before, in my lifetime.

To see such widespread support expressed for example, for the re-nationalisation of our utilities, is quite something. The centre has shifted: years of Tory government and a lukewarm Labour opposition has created a more radical, reformist minded electorate, waiting for the opportunity offered by Corbyn to re-write the rule book, and make the impossible possible. As the Tories tear themselves apart, and face an existential crisis within their own party, the nation is looking elsewhere for leadership, new ideas - and hope.

Wandering back to the hotel, along the pebble beach, and then circling round the base of the new tower, Mrs Angry looked about, at the sea, and the old town.

Our Victorian forebears, terrified by Darwin, and the idea of a world without God, used to build piers, to annex the waves, if not Arnold's sea of faith, in the spirit of imperialism: now we construct towers to give us ascendance into heaven, and enable us to look down from a clearer perspective, one previously the privilege of that Victorian God: with a cool eye, and the authority of our own grasp on power.

Standing in the present, looking back to the historic square, or the old pier, still defying the motion of time and waves, maybe isn't such a bad thing, after all.

Change is difficult, for some more than others, within the party and without; but an acceptance that things cannot continue the way they are, and a willingness to consider more radical and challenging approaches to the issues that face us, is what we need. The message is clear for all of us - adapt, or die: embrace the cold reality of the new, or lose the achievements of the past, as well as the possibilities of the future.

That and nothing else should be our priority. No one has a coherent strategy for Brexit, nor for preventing it: there is no way of preventing it as things stand - and the nation the Tories want to build in its place is a terrifying prospect. Only a Labour government can create something that protects most, if not all, of the benefits we now have as part of the EU: but maybe, just maybe - if we are stuck with Brexit - it would be possible to create something even better.

Let's make it clear - we will never accept that this is normal or acceptable.

Yes, we will increase GDP, close the current account deficit and increase productivity. But life is not just about statistics. As Bobby Kennedy said almost 50 years ago:

"The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry." (18 March 1968)

The performance of our Government will be measured by the care we show to all our people and the richness of their lives.

We proved in the election, and we will now go on to prove in Government, our belief that:

Hope will always overcome fear.

Kindness and generosity will always overcome greedy self-interest.

And that the flame of solidarity in our society will never be extinguished.

For years we have proclaimed that "Another World is Possible."

I tell you now, that world is not just possible, it is in sight.

Let's create it together.

This is what people want to hear: not the politics of division and despair, of self interest and self satisfaction.

Interesting, and pleasing, that the Shadow Chancellor, and then on the last day, the Leader, both referred to poetry in their speeches: not Dover Beach, but Ben Okri, on Grenfell, by Corbyn.

Leave a post Brexit Tory to a choice of verse & they resort to Kipling, of course - as we saw this week.

Satisfaction of another kind was on offer later that day, at the Labour Party Irish Society do. From the moment of arrival, the reception was warm, welcoming, and for perhaps the first time at any Conference event, it was a feeling of being at home: the craic, the laughter, a roomful of other people carrying a burden of inherited Catholic guilt; the good humour of the hosts, and guests. Well: perhaps all but one of the guests. Read on.

The leader of the Irish Labour party addressed the gathering, suggesting that the speeches should not get in the way of our drinking, which was clearly good advice, faithfully adhered to by all, including Himself.

As to Brexit: the prospect of a hard border was simply unthinkable, he said. It would not happen. Could not happen.

Standing next to me was a familiar figure. Ah yes, to be sure: it was Your Man - (not mine) - Owen Smith, who in June was appointed by Corbyn as shadow Northern Ireland secretary. He stood there with a glass of beer in his hand, as if he did not quite know what to do with it (everyone else was drinking Guinness from a bottle) and listened more carefully than needed to the speeches. At one point he said to the speaker (who ignored him): you said that last year. I turned to him and suggested, perhaps unwisely, that if he could remember what was said last year, he clearly had not had enough to drink, either then, or now. Nothing. Nope. Not the slightest hint of amusement. He pursed his lips, like a Sunday school teacher.

Off then to another Irish event: 'Labour for a United Ireland - in a small room over a gentrified pub called the Pump House. A modest gathering, fewer than thirty, but the place was packed - and Ken Loach was due to come.

In fact this was the sort of meeting that makes Conference so worthwhile: real debate, thought provoking - provocative, even, as we shall see. The panel consisted of people like the Sinn Féin MP for West Belfast, Paul Maskey, and writer Geoff Bell.

Interesting to be reminded by Maskey of the previous times in history that English MPs have played 'the Orange card' to get what they want: Theresa May is following in a time honoured tradition by retaining power only by bartering with the DUP. And yet again, the fate of the Irish people is left in the balance while British interests come first: the continuation of an imperialist policy. Here is the island of Ireland, he said, administered by two states, and three governments: time it was understood you cannot tell the Irish people what to do anymore, and let them decide their own future, in or out of Europe.

Loach arrived, and sat down. He apologised for being late, having been at a discussion about Israel and Palestine. He then said, in passing, that he had never heard a word of antisemitism in the Labour movement.

Who could have anything but but admiration for Ken Loach as an artist, and film maker? I'm proud to have been in a short film made in Barnet for which he recorded an introduction; 'I Daniel Blake', is an outstandingly moving and important work, and The Wind that Shakes the Barley, about the fight for Irish independence, is a masterpiece. However ... he was incredibly naive to make such a statement. He does not see the contradiction in telling us, as he did at this meeting, that he remembers the overt racism expressed towards Irish people,"no Irish, no blacks, no dogs", and the injustice of telling the Irish how to run their own country, while at the same time claiming the right to tell Jewish people that they are wrong to feel they are the target of racism too, or denying the experiences they have.

On the other hand, the thought occurred more than once during Conference, that the absence of a safe forum in which constructive political criticism of Israeli government policy towards the Palestinian people can be raised, respectfully, and without causing offence, has a dangerous consequence: a small minority of those who become interested in these issues, purely from a political perspective, sometimes end up adopting, intentionally or not, language and attitudes that are antisemitic, often from ignorance, and lack of challenge at an early point.

It is unfair to portray Labour members as a whole as holding or tolerating such views, however, as some political enemies like to do: almost all of the offensive material is from people who are mindless, anonymous trolls, or attach themselves to the fringes of extremist groups, not party members. Anyone within the party who resorts to such vile behaviour, should be dealt with as a matter of urgency, and kicked out - and hopefully will be, from now on.

Next morning I wandered into the hall just as a member of the 'Jewish Voice for Labour' movement was launching into a speech accusing the party of creating an amendment (supported by Barnet councillor Phil Cohen) targeting 'thought crime' - in a way that could only offend those who within the Jewish Labour Movement - such as former Labour candidate for Finchley and Golders Green, Jeremy Newmark - have worked to create the new party rule change that will deal with antisemitism - a change backed by Jeremy Corbyn. It was an ugly moment, and I left again, as soon as possible.

Later that day, I was chatting outside the Grand Hotel with one of the Labour councillors from Barnet, when another member of 'Jewish Voice for Labour', who knew the member, although this councillor strongly disagreed with her views, engaged us in an unsolicited argument. She felt aggrieved, stating that the Jewish Labour Movement should not, could not, represent her or the community. JLM, in fact, has a long and distinguished history of representation, founded as 'Poale Zion', at the beginning of the 20th century, and affiliated to the Labour party in 1920. Who or what are JVL? Not sure.

The amendment is passed, anyway - and now the party can move on: we hope. Yes: Mrs Angry, eternal optimist, again.

One of the most noticeable changes in Brighton, to me, since the last Conference here, is the increase in the number of homeless people on the streets: not just at night time, in shop doorways, but in the day, lying on mattresses and makeshift beds in the shopping areas and elsewhere. Not an unusual sight anywhere, sadly, now: but within the Conference zone, it was a timely reminder of the real extent of social deprivation happening now, worsening now.

Back at home, some people not at Conference, not party members, or activists, were busy tweeting their disapproval that Labour were apparently not debating Brexit. How dare the party to which they do not belong allow the Leader of the Labour party to cunningly manipulate them into a democratic vote choosing the issues to be debated?

Well, this was nonsense: members were balloted, and gave priority to other issues for those selected items. Elsewhere, everywhere, the subject of Brexit was very definitely given plenty of discussion.

Momentum's 'The World Transformed' - next to a bar named 'Revolution' ... and on the site of a house where Dr Johnson and Fanny Burney used to visit their friend, the writer and diarist Hester Thrale ...

But standing in the street one day, observing a homeless man huddled in a corner of a doorway, wrapped in a blanket, looking across the road in detached curiosity at the passing delegates and members and the queues of people waiting to enter Momentum's 'World Transformed, suddenly things seemed to fall into place: a moment of epiphany.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Tories have tried to change people's view of what is normal and acceptable in our society.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Tories have tried to change people's view of what is normal and acceptable in our society. They want us to accept that in the fifth richest country in the world it's normal and acceptable for people to be saddled with debt; for people to have to work long, often insecure, hours, stressed out, struggling to find time with their family; for people not to have a pay rise for years no matter how dedicated you are or how hard you work; for young people to have no prospect of owning their own home; for disabled people to be pushed to the edge by the benefits system; or for carers to be struggling without support or recognition.

Arguing about the finer points of Brexit and nothing else is a middle class luxury: an indulgence. Someone in a shop doorway in Brighton, or a single mum in a hostel in Margate: they aren't worrying about their right to go and live in Berlin, or Barcelona, or anything much more than how they can afford the bus fare to the GP, or feed themselves, and keep some sort of life going in the next few days and weeks. While we allow ourselves to become fixated on one issue, and a problem which is never going to be resolved while the current government is in place, people are taking their own lives, driven to despair by the loss of benefits; our NHS is being torn up and thrown to the dogs of privatisation; thousands of people are being forced to depend on the handouts from their local foodbank. Only a change of government can help them - and only a change of government can do anything to reclaim anything positive from the consequences of Brexit.

Labour has to address the urgent needs of ordinary people, and our most vulnerable citizens, and offer the hope of a society where they will be safe, supported, respected and empowered.

We've seen that trickle down economics don't work - now we have to work from the other end of the social scale.

In or out of the EU, we have to have a change of government to protect the most vulnerable of our citizens.

A fringe meeting on Tuesday night posed an interesting question: was Labour still the party of workers?

The panel, hosted by the Resolution Foundation, a think-tank that works to improve the living standards of those in Britain on low to middle incomes, was going to include Frances O'Grady, Kevin Maguire, and was chaired by Torsten Bell.

It was held in the Hilton Metropole: an ageing venue of unique ugliness - aptly referred to in Eliot's Wasteland, in one of many literary allusions that associate Brighton with the reputation of a place of unsavoury assignations. Once a grand Victorian hotel, now in a state of barely controlled decline, with many of the Conference events, such as this one, taking place in a massive room, emptied of all human context: a vast space, windowless, grey: oppressive - deeply depressing. Unreal city.

Deborah Mattinson from 'Britain Thinks' gave a statistical analysis of voters in the last election. How many workers had actually voted for Labour? She gave a breakdown of statistics, and indicated a problem with engaging working class voters.

Now it was time for Lucy Powell, MP, to speak.

She was well aware of the need to listen to the working classes, she said, smiling. In her constituency she had run a series of meetings with them, to encourage them to express their concerns. The older white working classes, she said, once they got over being -ha ha -#angryaboutbins (copyright Mrs Angry, 2016) revealed that they no longer felt they had 'purchase' over their communities. Oh. Did they use that term, wondered Mrs Angry, or are you putting words in their older white working class mouths?

It was good that Jeremy Corbyn seemed to give hope to some of these people, she admitted - but then contradicted herself somewhat by claiming many voters on the doorstep had been 'angry' - not about bins, but about him. Clearly not to the extent of failing to vote for a Labour MP, thought Mrs Angry, who was beginning to feel rather irritated by her (not helped by the fact that Powell was wearing the same green Boden dress Mrs Angry had worn the day before, unintentionally appropriate for two Irish events: a fact which obliged her to wonder, rather abashed, as to why she was choosing the same clothes as a shadow cabinet mutineer).

Kevin Maguire struck a somewhat different tone: rather less condescending, and more pragmatic - from a north eastern mining background, clearly he felt he might have a rather more informed view of what the working class, in 2017, was, and what they wanted to see from Labour. No sentimentality: listen, but challenge racism, promote Labour values.

Time for questions. Up shot Mrs Angry's hand. A BBC cameraman, who had been filming the discussion, appeared suddenly, too late to have any moderating effect on what now came out.

Did Lucy Powell not think she ought to reconsider the vocabulary she was using? Talking about the 'working classes' as 'they' and 'them': rather patronising, as if they were some sort of rare species, that needs protecting, when in fact the Labour movement is rooted in working class history ... People in the audience mumbled agreement: a few applauded.

By this time, Powell had realised her gaffe, and was flustered, muttering of course, of cours e ... Mrs Angry pointed out that like Maguire, she had family background in the former mining areas of the north east, (ironically we were sitting in the Durham room) and she knew that a whole generation of Labour voters had been lost (over the Blair, Brown & Miliband years), that Corbyn couldn't win them back overnight, it was going to take time - but clearly it was happening.

Of course, of course, she hadn't meant to be patronising. Her credentials: well, said the ex Somerville College, Oxford graduate, who comes from a family of teachers: she was a Mancunian. (Yes, thought Mrs Angry, not necessarily a term that is exclusively interchangeable with working class). She could remember visiting her grandparents, in their home, you know, and the pride they felt in their community - their privet hedge - Eh?

Privet hedge? asked Mrs Angry, thinking of the squalid slum terrace where her own grandparents had lived in Durham, and as Frances O'Grady and Deborah Mattinson tried to hide their laughter. Luxury!

The mood of the meeting changed then: Powell's anodyne politics were clearly not delivering the message most people wanted to hear. Before the end, one woman explained this was her first conference. The thing that had struck her, she said, was that the party seemed to consist of too many over educated young men in suits. Ha! I hear you, sister - Y es, said Mrs Angry, as the other women on the panel nodded: but this is better than it was, believe me. Although, she almost added, looking guiltily at herself, and Lucy Powell, the place is now full of middle class women dressed in Boden.

A brief escape from the vast, airless, gloomy rooms of the Metropole, but then back again, to a slightly less awful venue in the same hotel for the annual Labour Friends of Israel reception. Outside the entrance there was a noisy demonstration with people relentlessly chanting 'Israel is a terrorist state'. Mrs Angry's heart sank. Once inside, the reception was packed, and speeches were made by a young female MP from the Knesset, the Israeli ambassador, and Emily Thornberry, shadow Foreign Secretary, in place of Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn had come last year, courageously, although visibly nervous, and used his speech to condemn antisemitism - almost exclusively unreported by the mainstream media. This year, after so much controversy over this issue, it was clearly decided the better course of action was not to go at all.

Emily Thornberry and Ian McNichol listen to the Israeli ambassador

Waking up the next morning to another beautiful day in Brighton, Mrs Angry stumbled out of bed to peer out of the window at a stunning view of the sea, and the old pier, from the viewpoint of her hotel in the perfectly preserved Regency Square: a vista spoiled only by being bisected by the sky high column of the new observation tower.

Up then and off to the centre, even though this year, thanks to the mess up over her pass, she had no ticket for the Leader's speech: in the end it didn't matter, as, thanks to a kind steward, she found herself somehow sitting in the front section, in a better seat than ever.

And of all the speeches seen at the last few Conferences, this was one to be at: the hall was galvanised with a massive wave of energy, excitement, and enthusiasm. The contrast with the Miliband years, when he lumbered around the stage like a puppet, and the speech seemed to go on forever without making any point, or offering any hope, and the best reception he could expect was some dutiful applause, was striking.

This year Ed was spotted by a friend in the cheap seats, way behind Mrs Angry, looking on thoughtfully.

Down in the mosh pit, surrounded by a group of very excited Glaswegians, and a few seats along from a curiously subdued Owen Jones, the crowd's mood was exultant. The event was brilliantly presented: the right choice of music, timing, footage, graphics: very effective, and the perfect backdrop to the simplistic style of the leader himself.

No need to repeat the speech. There was not a single policy in it which you could not applaud: a range of courageous, practical ideas that meet the needs of all those who have been waiting for a fundamental change in the party, and in the political system. The part which was the most resonant for me was this:

The Tory approach to the economy isn't entrepreneurial. It's extractive. They're not focused on long-term investment and wealth creation. When you look at what they do rather than what they say it's all about driving down wages, services and standards ... to make as much money as quickly as possible with government not as the servant of the people but of global corporations.

And their disregard for rampant inequality, the hollowing out of our public services, the disdain for the powerless and the poor have made our society more brutal and less caring.

Now that degraded regime has a tragic monument the chilling wreckage of Grenfell Tower. A horrifying fire in which dozens perished an entirely avoidable human disaster. One which is an indictment not just of decades of failed housing policies and privatisation and the yawning inequality in one of the wealthiest boroughs and cities in the world, it is also a damning indictment of a whole outlook which values council tax refunds for the wealthy above decent provision for all and which has contempt for working class communities.

Before the fire, a tenants' group of Grenfell residents had warned ... and I quote words that should haunt all politicians "the Grenfell Action Group firmly believes that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord". Grenfell is not just the result of bad political decisions It stands for a failed and broken system which Labour must and will replace.

A broken system: nationally, and here, in easycouncil Barnet, freefalling into the abyss created by the hollowing out of every local service; a place where avarice and a merciless ideology drives an agenda of privatisation beyond the point of any effective restraint - or justification.

The tragedy of Grenfell has come to signify so much more than the terror and loss of that terrible night: it marks a moment in history from which we can never return, or look back, but only resolve to make the most radical changes to a society that can allow such a thing to happen. There is an appetite, a hunger for change now, that I don't remember seeing before, in my lifetime.

To see such widespread support expressed for example, for the re-nationalisation of our utilities, is quite something. The centre has shifted: years of Tory government and a lukewarm Labour opposition has created a more radical, reformist minded electorate, waiting for the opportunity offered by Corbyn to re-write the rule book, and make the impossible possible. As the Tories tear themselves apart, and face an existential crisis within their own party, the nation is looking elsewhere for leadership, new ideas - and hope.

Wandering back to the hotel, along the pebble beach, and then circling round the base of the new tower, Mrs Angry looked about, at the sea, and the old town.

Our Victorian forebears, terrified by Darwin, and the idea of a world without God, used to build piers, to annex the waves, if not Arnold's sea of faith, in the spirit of imperialism: now we construct towers to give us ascendance into heaven, and enable us to look down from a clearer perspective, one previously the privilege of that Victorian God: with a cool eye, and the authority of our own grasp on power.

Standing in the present, looking back to the historic square, or the old pier, still defying the motion of time and waves, maybe isn't such a bad thing, after all.

Change is difficult, for some more than others, within the party and without; but an acceptance that things cannot continue the way they are, and a willingness to consider more radical and challenging approaches to the issues that face us, is what we need. The message is clear for all of us - adapt, or die: embrace the cold reality of the new, or lose the achievements of the past, as well as the possibilities of the future.

That and nothing else should be our priority. No one has a coherent strategy for Brexit, nor for preventing it: there is no way of preventing it as things stand - and the nation the Tories want to build in its place is a terrifying prospect. Only a Labour government can create something that protects most, if not all, of the benefits we now have as part of the EU: but maybe, just maybe - if we are stuck with Brexit - it would be possible to create something even better.

Let's make it clear - we will never accept that this is normal or acceptable.

Yes, we will increase GDP, close the current account deficit and increase productivity. But life is not just about statistics. As Bobby Kennedy said almost 50 years ago:

"The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry." (18 March 1968)

The performance of our Government will be measured by the care we show to all our people and the richness of their lives.

We proved in the election, and we will now go on to prove in Government, our belief that:

Hope will always overcome fear.

Kindness and generosity will always overcome greedy self-interest.

And that the flame of solidarity in our society will never be extinguished.

For years we have proclaimed that "Another World is Possible."

I tell you now, that world is not just possible, it is in sight.

Let's create it together.

This is what people want to hear: not the politics of division and despair, of self interest and self satisfaction.

Interesting, and pleasing, that the Shadow Chancellor, and then on the last day, the Leader, both referred to poetry in their speeches: not Dover Beach, but Ben Okri, on Grenfell, by Corbyn.

Leave a post Brexit Tory to a choice of verse & they resort to Kipling, of course - as we saw this week.

Satisfaction of another kind was on offer later that day, at the Labour Party Irish Society do. From the moment of arrival, the reception was warm, welcoming, and for perhaps the first time at any Conference event, it was a feeling of being at home: the craic, the laughter, a roomful of other people carrying a burden of inherited Catholic guilt; the good humour of the hosts, and guests. Well: perhaps all but one of the guests. Read on.

The leader of the Irish Labour party addressed the gathering, suggesting that the speeches should not get in the way of our drinking, which was clearly good advice, faithfully adhered to by all, including Himself.

As to Brexit: the prospect of a hard border was simply unthinkable, he said. It would not happen. Could not happen.

Standing next to me was a familiar figure. Ah yes, to be sure: it was Your Man - (not mine) - Owen Smith, who in June was appointed by Corbyn as shadow Northern Ireland secretary. He stood there with a glass of beer in his hand, as if he did not quite know what to do with it (everyone else was drinking Guinness from a bottle) and listened more carefully than needed to the speeches. At one point he said to the speaker (who ignored him): you said that last year. I turned to him and suggested, perhaps unwisely, that if he could remember what was said last year, he clearly had not had enough to drink, either then, or now. Nothing. Nope. Not the slightest hint of amusement. He pursed his lips, like a Sunday school teacher.

Off then to another Irish event: 'Labour for a United Ireland - in a small room over a gentrified pub called the Pump House. A modest gathering, fewer than thirty, but the place was packed - and Ken Loach was due to come.

In fact this was the sort of meeting that makes Conference so worthwhile: real debate, thought provoking - provocative, even, as we shall see. The panel consisted of people like the Sinn Féin MP for West Belfast, Paul Maskey, and writer Geoff Bell.

Interesting to be reminded by Maskey of the previous times in history that English MPs have played 'the Orange card' to get what they want: Theresa May is following in a time honoured tradition by retaining power only by bartering with the DUP. And yet again, the fate of the Irish people is left in the balance while British interests come first: the continuation of an imperialist policy. Here is the island of Ireland, he said, administered by two states, and three governments: time it was understood you cannot tell the Irish people what to do anymore, and let them decide their own future, in or out of Europe.

Loach arrived, and sat down. He apologised for being late, having been at a discussion about Israel and Palestine. He then said, in passing, that he had never heard a word of antisemitism in the Labour movement.

Who could have anything but but admiration for Ken Loach as an artist, and film maker? I'm proud to have been in a short film made in Barnet for which he recorded an introduction; 'I Daniel Blake', is an outstandingly moving and important work, and The Wind that Shakes the Barley, about the fight for Irish independence, is a masterpiece. However ... he was incredibly naive to make such a statement. He does not see the contradiction in telling us, as he did at this meeting, that he remembers the overt racism expressed towards Irish people,"no Irish, no blacks, no dogs", and the injustice of telling the Irish how to run their own country, while at the same time claiming the right to tell Jewish people that they are wrong to feel they are the target of racism too, or denying the experiences they have.

On the other hand, the thought occurred more than once during Conference, that the absence of a safe forum in which constructive political criticism of Israeli government policy towards the Palestinian people can be raised, respectfully, and without causing offence, has a dangerous consequence: a small minority of those who become interested in these issues, purely from a political perspective, sometimes end up adopting, intentionally or not, language and attitudes that are antisemitic, often from ignorance, and lack of challenge at an early point.

It is unfair to portray Labour members as a whole as holding or tolerating such views, however, as some political enemies like to do: almost all of the offensive material is from people who are mindless, anonymous trolls, or attach themselves to the fringes of extremist groups, not party members. Anyone within the party who resorts to such vile behaviour, should be dealt with as a matter of urgency, and kicked out - and hopefully will be, from now on.

Next morning I wandered into the hall just as a member of the 'Jewish Voice for Labour' movement was launching into a speech accusing the party of creating an amendment (supported by Barnet councillor Phil Cohen) targeting 'thought crime' - in a way that could only offend those who within the Jewish Labour Movement - such as former Labour candidate for Finchley and Golders Green, Jeremy Newmark - have worked to create the new party rule change that will deal with antisemitism - a change backed by Jeremy Corbyn. It was an ugly moment, and I left again, as soon as possible.

Later that day, I was chatting outside the Grand Hotel with one of the Labour councillors from Barnet, when another member of 'Jewish Voice for Labour', who knew the member, although this councillor strongly disagreed with her views, engaged us in an unsolicited argument. She felt aggrieved, stating that the Jewish Labour Movement should not, could not, represent her or the community. JLM, in fact, has a long and distinguished history of representation, founded as 'Poale Zion', at the beginning of the 20th century, and affiliated to the Labour party in 1920. Who or what are JVL? Not sure.

The amendment is passed, anyway - and now the party can move on: we hope. Yes: Mrs Angry, eternal optimist, again.

One of the most noticeable changes in Brighton, to me, since the last Conference here, is the increase in the number of homeless people on the streets: not just at night time, in shop doorways, but in the day, lying on mattresses and makeshift beds in the shopping areas and elsewhere. Not an unusual sight anywhere, sadly, now: but within the Conference zone, it was a timely reminder of the real extent of social deprivation happening now, worsening now.

Back at home, some people not at Conference, not party members, or activists, were busy tweeting their disapproval that Labour were apparently not debating Brexit. How dare the party to which they do not belong allow the Leader of the Labour party to cunningly manipulate them into a democratic vote choosing the issues to be debated?

Well, this was nonsense: members were balloted, and gave priority to other issues for those selected items. Elsewhere, everywhere, the subject of Brexit was very definitely given plenty of discussion.

Momentum's 'The World Transformed' - next to a bar named 'Revolution' ... and on the site of a house where Dr Johnson and Fanny Burney used to visit their friend, the writer and diarist Hester Thrale ...

But standing in the street one day, observing a homeless man huddled in a corner of a doorway, wrapped in a blanket, looking across the road in detached curiosity at the passing delegates and members and the queues of people waiting to enter Momentum's 'World Transformed, suddenly things seemed to fall into place: a moment of epiphany.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Tories have tried to change people's view of what is normal and acceptable in our society.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Tories have tried to change people's view of what is normal and acceptable in our society. They want us to accept that in the fifth richest country in the world it's normal and acceptable for people to be saddled with debt; for people to have to work long, often insecure, hours, stressed out, struggling to find time with their family; for people not to have a pay rise for years no matter how dedicated you are or how hard you work; for young people to have no prospect of owning their own home; for disabled people to be pushed to the edge by the benefits system; or for carers to be struggling without support or recognition.

Arguing about the finer points of Brexit and nothing else is a middle class luxury: an indulgence. Someone in a shop doorway in Brighton, or a single mum in a hostel in Margate: they aren't worrying about their right to go and live in Berlin, or Barcelona, or anything much more than how they can afford the bus fare to the GP, or feed themselves, and keep some sort of life going in the next few days and weeks. While we allow ourselves to become fixated on one issue, and a problem which is never going to be resolved while the current government is in place, people are taking their own lives, driven to despair by the loss of benefits; our NHS is being torn up and thrown to the dogs of privatisation; thousands of people are being forced to depend on the handouts from their local foodbank. Only a change of government can help them - and only a change of government can do anything to reclaim anything positive from the consequences of Brexit.

Labour has to address the urgent needs of ordinary people, and our most vulnerable citizens, and offer the hope of a society where they will be safe, supported, respected and empowered.

We've seen that trickle down economics don't work - now we have to work from the other end of the social scale.

In or out of the EU, we have to have a change of government to protect the most vulnerable of our citizens.

A fringe meeting on Tuesday night posed an interesting question: was Labour still the party of workers?

The panel, hosted by the Resolution Foundation, a think-tank that works to improve the living standards of those in Britain on low to middle incomes, was going to include Frances O'Grady, Kevin Maguire, and was chaired by Torsten Bell.

It was held in the Hilton Metropole: an ageing venue of unique ugliness - aptly referred to in Eliot's Wasteland, in one of many literary allusions that associate Brighton with the reputation of a place of unsavoury assignations. Once a grand Victorian hotel, now in a state of barely controlled decline, with many of the Conference events, such as this one, taking place in a massive room, emptied of all human context: a vast space, windowless, grey: oppressive - deeply depressing. Unreal city.

Deborah Mattinson from 'Britain Thinks' gave a statistical analysis of voters in the last election. How many workers had actually voted for Labour? She gave a breakdown of statistics, and indicated a problem with engaging working class voters.

Now it was time for Lucy Powell, MP, to speak.

She was well aware of the need to listen to the working classes, she said, smiling. In her constituency she had run a series of meetings with them, to encourage them to express their concerns. The older white working classes, she said, once they got over being -ha ha -#angryaboutbins (copyright Mrs Angry, 2016) revealed that they no longer felt they had 'purchase' over their communities. Oh. Did they use that term, wondered Mrs Angry, or are you putting words in their older white working class mouths?

It was good that Jeremy Corbyn seemed to give hope to some of these people, she admitted - but then contradicted herself somewhat by claiming many voters on the doorstep had been 'angry' - not about bins, but about him. Clearly not to the extent of failing to vote for a Labour MP, thought Mrs Angry, who was beginning to feel rather irritated by her (not helped by the fact that Powell was wearing the same green Boden dress Mrs Angry had worn the day before, unintentionally appropriate for two Irish events: a fact which obliged her to wonder, rather abashed, as to why she was choosing the same clothes as a shadow cabinet mutineer).

Kevin Maguire struck a somewhat different tone: rather less condescending, and more pragmatic - from a north eastern mining background, clearly he felt he might have a rather more informed view of what the working class, in 2017, was, and what they wanted to see from Labour. No sentimentality: listen, but challenge racism, promote Labour values.

Time for questions. Up shot Mrs Angry's hand. A BBC cameraman, who had been filming the discussion, appeared suddenly, too late to have any moderating effect on what now came out.

Did Lucy Powell not think she ought to reconsider the vocabulary she was using? Talking about the 'working classes' as 'they' and 'them': rather patronising, as if they were some sort of rare species, that needs protecting, when in fact the Labour movement is rooted in working class history ... People in the audience mumbled agreement: a few applauded.

By this time, Powell had realised her gaffe, and was flustered, muttering of course, of cours e ... Mrs Angry pointed out that like Maguire, she had family background in the former mining areas of the north east, (ironically we were sitting in the Durham room) and she knew that a whole generation of Labour voters had been lost (over the Blair, Brown & Miliband years), that Corbyn couldn't win them back overnight, it was going to take time - but clearly it was happening.

Of course, of course, she hadn't meant to be patronising. Her credentials: well, said the ex Somerville College, Oxford graduate, who comes from a family of teachers: she was a Mancunian. (Yes, thought Mrs Angry, not necessarily a term that is exclusively interchangeable with working class). She could remember visiting her grandparents, in their home, you know, and the pride they felt in their community - their privet hedge - Eh?

Privet hedge? asked Mrs Angry, thinking of the squalid slum terrace where her own grandparents had lived in Durham, and as Frances O'Grady and Deborah Mattinson tried to hide their laughter. Luxury!

The mood of the meeting changed then: Powell's anodyne politics were clearly not delivering the message most people wanted to hear. Before the end, one woman explained this was her first conference. The thing that had struck her, she said, was that the party seemed to consist of too many over educated young men in suits. Ha! I hear you, sister - Y es, said Mrs Angry, as the other women on the panel nodded: but this is better than it was, believe me. Although, she almost added, looking guiltily at herself, and Lucy Powell, the place is now full of middle class women dressed in Boden.

A brief escape from the vast, airless, gloomy rooms of the Metropole, but then back again, to a slightly less awful venue in the same hotel for the annual Labour Friends of Israel reception. Outside the entrance there was a noisy demonstration with people relentlessly chanting 'Israel is a terrorist state'. Mrs Angry's heart sank. Once inside, the reception was packed, and speeches were made by a young female MP from the Knesset, the Israeli ambassador, and Emily Thornberry, shadow Foreign Secretary, in place of Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn had come last year, courageously, although visibly nervous, and used his speech to condemn antisemitism - almost exclusively unreported by the mainstream media. This year, after so much controversy over this issue, it was clearly decided the better course of action was not to go at all.

Emily Thornberry and Ian McNichol listen to the Israeli ambassador

Waking up the next morning to another beautiful day in Brighton, Mrs Angry stumbled out of bed to peer out of the window at a stunning view of the sea, and the old pier, from the viewpoint of her hotel in the perfectly preserved Regency Square: a vista spoiled only by being bisected by the sky high column of the new observation tower.

Up then and off to the centre, even though this year, thanks to the mess up over her pass, she had no ticket for the Leader's speech: in the end it didn't matter, as, thanks to a kind steward, she found herself somehow sitting in the front section, in a better seat than ever.

And of all the speeches seen at the last few Conferences, this was one to be at: the hall was galvanised with a massive wave of energy, excitement, and enthusiasm. The contrast with the Miliband years, when he lumbered around the stage like a puppet, and the speech seemed to go on forever without making any point, or offering any hope, and the best reception he could expect was some dutiful applause, was striking.

This year Ed was spotted by a friend in the cheap seats, way behind Mrs Angry, looking on thoughtfully.

Down in the mosh pit, surrounded by a group of very excited Glaswegians, and a few seats along from a curiously subdued Owen Jones, the crowd's mood was exultant. The event was brilliantly presented: the right choice of music, timing, footage, graphics: very effective, and the perfect backdrop to the simplistic style of the leader himself.

No need to repeat the speech. There was not a single policy in it which you could not applaud: a range of courageous, practical ideas that meet the needs of all those who have been waiting for a fundamental change in the party, and in the political system. The part which was the most resonant for me was this:

The Tory approach to the economy isn't entrepreneurial. It's extractive. They're not focused on long-term investment and wealth creation. When you look at what they do rather than what they say it's all about driving down wages, services and standards ... to make as much money as quickly as possible with government not as the servant of the people but of global corporations.

And their disregard for rampant inequality, the hollowing out of our public services, the disdain for the powerless and the poor have made our society more brutal and less caring.

Now that degraded regime has a tragic monument the chilling wreckage of Grenfell Tower. A horrifying fire in which dozens perished an entirely avoidable human disaster. One which is an indictment not just of decades of failed housing policies and privatisation and the yawning inequality in one of the wealthiest boroughs and cities in the world, it is also a damning indictment of a whole outlook which values council tax refunds for the wealthy above decent provision for all and which has contempt for working class communities.

Before the fire, a tenants' group of Grenfell residents had warned ... and I quote words that should haunt all politicians "the Grenfell Action Group firmly believes that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord". Grenfell is not just the result of bad political decisions It stands for a failed and broken system which Labour must and will replace.

A broken system: nationally, and here, in easycouncil Barnet, freefalling into the abyss created by the hollowing out of every local service; a place where avarice and a merciless ideology drives an agenda of privatisation beyond the point of any effective restraint - or justification.

The tragedy of Grenfell has come to signify so much more than the terror and loss of that terrible night: it marks a moment in history from which we can never return, or look back, but only resolve to make the most radical changes to a society that can allow such a thing to happen. There is an appetite, a hunger for change now, that I don't remember seeing before, in my lifetime.

To see such widespread support expressed for example, for the re-nationalisation of our utilities, is quite something. The centre has shifted: years of Tory government and a lukewarm Labour opposition has created a more radical, reformist minded electorate, waiting for the opportunity offered by Corbyn to re-write the rule book, and make the impossible possible. As the Tories tear themselves apart, and face an existential crisis within their own party, the nation is looking elsewhere for leadership, new ideas - and hope.

Wandering back to the hotel, along the pebble beach, and then circling round the base of the new tower, Mrs Angry looked about, at the sea, and the old town.

Our Victorian forebears, terrified by Darwin, and the idea of a world without God, used to build piers, to annex the waves, if not Arnold's sea of faith, in the spirit of imperialism: now we construct towers to give us ascendance into heaven, and enable us to look down from a clearer perspective, one previously the privilege of that Victorian God: with a cool eye, and the authority of our own grasp on power.

Standing in the present, looking back to the historic square, or the old pier, still defying the motion of time and waves, maybe isn't such a bad thing, after all.

Change is difficult, for some more than others, within the party and without; but an acceptance that things cannot continue the way they are, and a willingness to consider more radical and challenging approaches to the issues that face us, is what we need. The message is clear for all of us - adapt, or die: embrace the cold reality of the new, or lose the achievements of the past, as well as the possibilities of the future.

That and nothing else should be our priority. No one has a coherent strategy for Brexit, nor for preventing it: there is no way of preventing it as things stand - and the nation the Tories want to build in its place is a terrifying prospect. Only a Labour government can create something that protects most, if not all, of the benefits we now have as part of the EU: but maybe, just maybe - if we are stuck with Brexit - it would be possible to create something even better.

Let's make it clear - we will never accept that this is normal or acceptable.

Yes, we will increase GDP, close the current account deficit and increase productivity. But life is not just about statistics. As Bobby Kennedy said almost 50 years ago:

"The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry." (18 March 1968)

The performance of our Government will be measured by the care we show to all our people and the richness of their lives.

We proved in the election, and we will now go on to prove in Government, our belief that:

Hope will always overcome fear.

Kindness and generosity will always overcome greedy self-interest.

And that the flame of solidarity in our society will never be extinguished.

For years we have proclaimed that "Another World is Possible."

I tell you now, that world is not just possible, it is in sight.

Let's create it together.

This is what people want to hear: not the politics of division and despair, of self interest and self satisfaction.

Interesting, and pleasing, that the Shadow Chancellor, and then on the last day, the Leader, both referred to poetry in their speeches: not Dover Beach, but Ben Okri, on Grenfell, by Corbyn.

Leave a post Brexit Tory to a choice of verse & they resort to Kipling, of course - as we saw this week.

Satisfaction of another kind was on offer later that day, at the Labour Party Irish Society do. From the moment of arrival, the reception was warm, welcoming, and for perhaps the first time at any Conference event, it was a feeling of being at home: the craic, the laughter, a roomful of other people carrying a burden of inherited Catholic guilt; the good humour of the hosts, and guests. Well: perhaps all but one of the guests. Read on.

The leader of the Irish Labour party addressed the gathering, suggesting that the speeches should not get in the way of our drinking, which was clearly good advice, faithfully adhered to by all, including Himself.

As to Brexit: the prospect of a hard border was simply unthinkable, he said. It would not happen. Could not happen.

Standing next to me was a familiar figure. Ah yes, to be sure: it was Your Man - (not mine) - Owen Smith, who in June was appointed by Corbyn as shadow Northern Ireland secretary. He stood there with a glass of beer in his hand, as if he did not quite know what to do with it (everyone else was drinking Guinness from a bottle) and listened more carefully than needed to the speeches. At one point he said to the speaker (who ignored him): you said that last year. I turned to him and suggested, perhaps unwisely, that if he could remember what was said last year, he clearly had not had enough to drink, either then, or now. Nothing. Nope. Not the slightest hint of amusement. He pursed his lips, like a Sunday school teacher.

Off then to another Irish event: 'Labour for a United Ireland - in a small room over a gentrified pub called the Pump House. A modest gathering, fewer than thirty, but the place was packed - and Ken Loach was due to come.

In fact this was the sort of meeting that makes Conference so worthwhile: real debate, thought provoking - provocative, even, as we shall see. The panel consisted of people like the Sinn Féin MP for West Belfast, Paul Maskey, and writer Geoff Bell.

Interesting to be reminded by Maskey of the previous times in history that English MPs have played 'the Orange card' to get what they want: Theresa May is following in a time honoured tradition by retaining power only by bartering with the DUP. And yet again, the fate of the Irish people is left in the balance while British interests come first: the continuation of an imperialist policy. Here is the island of Ireland, he said, administered by two states, and three governments: time it was understood you cannot tell the Irish people what to do anymore, and let them decide their own future, in or out of Europe.

Loach arrived, and sat down. He apologised for being late, having been at a discussion about Israel and Palestine. He then said, in passing, that he had never heard a word of antisemitism in the Labour movement.

Who could have anything but but admiration for Ken Loach as an artist, and film maker? I'm proud to have been in a short film made in Barnet for which he recorded an introduction; 'I Daniel Blake', is an outstandingly moving and important work, and The Wind that Shakes the Barley, about the fight for Irish independence, is a masterpiece. However ... he was incredibly naive to make such a statement. He does not see the contradiction in telling us, as he did at this meeting, that he remembers the overt racism expressed towards Irish people,"no Irish, no blacks, no dogs", and the injustice of telling the Irish how to run their own country, while at the same time claiming the right to tell Jewish people that they are wrong to feel they are the target of racism too, or denying the experiences they have.

On the other hand, the thought occurred more than once during Conference, that the absence of a safe forum in which constructive political criticism of Israeli government policy towards the Palestinian people can be raised, respectfully, and without causing offence, has a dangerous consequence: a small minority of those who become interested in these issues, purely from a political perspective, sometimes end up adopting, intentionally or not, language and attitudes that are antisemitic, often from ignorance, and lack of challenge at an early point.

It is unfair to portray Labour members as a whole as holding or tolerating such views, however, as some political enemies like to do: almost all of the offensive material is from people who are mindless, anonymous trolls, or attach themselves to the fringes of extremist groups, not party members. Anyone within the party who resorts to such vile behaviour, should be dealt with as a matter of urgency, and kicked out - and hopefully will be, from now on.

Next morning I wandered into the hall just as a member of the 'Jewish Voice for Labour' movement was launching into a speech accusing the party of creating an amendment (supported by Barnet councillor Phil Cohen) targeting 'thought crime' - in a way that could only offend those who within the Jewish Labour Movement - such as former Labour candidate for Finchley and Golders Green, Jeremy Newmark - have worked to create the new party rule change that will deal with antisemitism - a change backed by Jeremy Corbyn. It was an ugly moment, and I left again, as soon as possible.

Later that day, I was chatting outside the Grand Hotel with one of the Labour councillors from Barnet, when another member of 'Jewish Voice for Labour', who knew the member, although this councillor strongly disagreed with her views, engaged us in an unsolicited argument. She felt aggrieved, stating that the Jewish Labour Movement should not, could not, represent her or the community. JLM, in fact, has a long and distinguished history of representation, founded as 'Poale Zion', at the beginning of the 20th century, and affiliated to the Labour party in 1920. Who or what are JVL? Not sure.

The amendment is passed, anyway - and now the party can move on: we hope. Yes: Mrs Angry, eternal optimist, again.

One of the most noticeable changes in Brighton, to me, since the last Conference here, is the increase in the number of homeless people on the streets: not just at night time, in shop doorways, but in the day, lying on mattresses and makeshift beds in the shopping areas and elsewhere. Not an unusual sight anywhere, sadly, now: but within the Conference zone, it was a timely reminder of the real extent of social deprivation happening now, worsening now.

Back at home, some people not at Conference, not party members, or activists, were busy tweeting their disapproval that Labour were apparently not debating Brexit. How dare the party to which they do not belong allow the Leader of the Labour party to cunningly manipulate them into a democratic vote choosing the issues to be debated?

Well, this was nonsense: members were balloted, and gave priority to other issues for those selected items. Elsewhere, everywhere, the subject of Brexit was very definitely given plenty of discussion.

Momentum's 'The World Transformed' - next to a bar named 'Revolution' ... and on the site of a house where Dr Johnson and Fanny Burney used to visit their friend, the writer and diarist Hester Thrale ...

But standing in the street one day, observing a homeless man huddled in a corner of a doorway, wrapped in a blanket, looking across the road in detached curiosity at the passing delegates and members and the queues of people waiting to enter Momentum's 'World Transformed, suddenly things seemed to fall into place: a moment of epiphany.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Tories have tried to change people's view of what is normal and acceptable in our society.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Last night we had the re-run of the Barnet Audit Committee, this time with a largely complete audit report. I blogged about the previous meeting here.

Most of the issues identified at the previous meeting still exist but we now had a largely complete report with just a few odds and ends in need of completion. Before the meeting got under way the Chair of the committee Cllr Hugh Rayner made a statement, one which was critical of Capita's performance and one which sought to build bridges with the external auditor after the unjustified pummelling they received from certain Conservative members at the previous meeting. He said that the reason for the late production of the audit report was not just the external auditor's (BDO) fault but the format in which Capita had provided the information to BDO "almost as if Capita were talking to BDO in a foreign language". He noted that there would be a service credit (a penalty) to be paid by Capita of £55,000, some or all of which may have to be paid to BDO for all the extra and unbudgeted time they expended to get the accounts into a usable format. He praised BDO "for doing a magnificent job in difficult circumstances". Cllr Rayner went on to say that he was satisfied by the financial state of Barnet but not about the process of collecting financial data and that he was commissioning a review to be carried out by the Section 151 Officer to understand what happened and to bring that review to the November audit meeting.

I mention all of this as it seems unprecedented in Barnet's history and suggests some very serious problems have been encountered. Normally this would not have been so openly addressed so it is refreshing to see Cllr Rayner be so open and transparent about this.

Next up were three of the Barnet Bloggers, Barnet Eye and myself who addressed the committee, and then Mrs Angry as well for the questioning. As is so often the way, comments are received in silence and questions dealt with in a perfunctory manner. Often answers are supplied but not necessarily to the question asked. A copy of the questions and the answers provided can be read here.

After the questions, the Partner from BDO went through their report page by page. The key issue that became apparent is that the auditor can still provide a true and fair judgement on the report if the variation is less than 1.5% of the total council budget which the auditor said was in the region of £13 million pounds. That may seem a small amount in audit terms but that is a massive amount in terms of the amount raised through Council Tax (9%) and to set it in context the cuts to the library service were aimed at saving £2.3 million.

This becomes more important when the issue of bad debts were discussed. This included a debt of £4.6 million from Re, the Capita joint venture. It appears that this is a shortfall against guaranteed income targets. The auditor said that he was satisfied with the management representation that the debt is recoverable even though nothing has been billed and no confirmation of liability has been received from Re. At this point the Partnership Director from Capita spoke to say that he "acknowledged the disputed £4.6 million" but that would be subject to debate. My interpretation is clear, that the chances of recovering all £4.6 million are slim to nil. When the auditor was questioned he made the point that all of it or none of it might be recovered but because it was below the 1.5% threshold it didn't matter from an audit perspective. The auditor has covered his backside and preserved the auditors professional indemnity cover by getting management to make a signed representation that it is recoverable but the sum is still at risk. Interestingly Cllr Finn made the point that Capita compiled the accounts which recognised the debt and Capita owed the money therefore they must recognise the debt. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way although it highlights the massive conflict of interest of having a contractor that owes money who also prepares the accounts.

There were many disturbing comments raised during the meeting but perhaps two of the most shocking were both on the same subject, one made by the auditor and one made by an independent member of the audit committee. First of all the external auditor said when discussing the use of reserves that in the medium term till 2020 the council could manage its budget drawing off reserves but after 2020 the council "will need a complete re-write of what you do" if there is any hope of balancing the budget. This was then reinforced by the independent member Richard Harbord. Now Mr Harbord rarely speaks up and some may wonder why he is on the committee but he is a local government finance expert having previously been a local authority CEO and is a regular contributor to a local authority finance website Room 151. He confirmed that indeed after 2020 local authorities "haven't got the faintest idea how they will be financed in any way shape or form". He made the point that so many changes to local authority finance need primary legislation but the legislative timetable was full because of Brexit. The Director of Resources also made the point that they don't have enough funding to meet next years requirements and that is why further cuts are on the way. It looks like we are in a complete mess and based on both Mr Harbord's and the external auditors comments this must be the biggest single risk to the future of the council.

Towards the end the external auditor was asked how Barnet rated compared to other local authorities in the preparation of their accounts. I suspect some councillors were expecting a positive answer but no. Some clients could be worse than this "but taken in the round I would put you on the not so good step of the range I am dealing with".

To be clear, the audit process has been a mess, there are "loads of issues" as noted by one committee member, which need to be addressed. There will be a review document in November but it will be essential to see how any action plan addresses these problems. My concern has always been that having such a key function as finance run by an external contractor, Capita, creates divisions, barriers and risks that key financial actions will not be undertaken properly. The fact that Capita are in effect being fined £55,000 for their miserable performance at this audit must raise doubts about their ability to continue to provide the financial function for the council. At some point in the very near future I believe that councillors will need to consider taking the finance team back in house where there can be proper control and insight into this vital function. The interchangeability of Capita and LBB staff makes for confusion and a real chance that matters get missed or fall down the cracks between the two organisations.

I will report back after the November meeting but watch out for a series of blogs coming up in the next week or so.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Last night we had the re-run of the Barnet Audit Committee, this time with a largely complete audit report. I blogged about the previous meeting here. Most of the issues identified at the previous meeting still exist but we now had a largely complete report with just a few odds and ends in need of completion.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Councillor Reuben Thompstone is the chair of the Children, Education, Libraries & Safeguarding Committee for Barnet Council. In return for this, he receives a Special responsibility allowance of £15,333 on top of the ten grand basic allowance he gets as a councillor.
This Committee has a wide range of responsibilities, which include:

· Planning the adequate provision of school places in the Borough
· Investment in educational infrastructure;
· The Library Service
· Cultural activities
· Powers, duties and functions of the Council in relation to Children's Services (including schools)
· Approving the Children and Young People Plan

This Committee also leads on the Council's responsibilities under the Children Act 2004 and Education and inspection Act 2007 to:

· Oversee effective support for young people in care; and enhance the Council's corporate parenting role
· Oversee the multi-agency Youth Offending Team
· Oversee the effective provision of support across partners for the well-being of vulnerable families - including the Troubled Families programme

The Children, Education, Libraries and Safeguarding Committee is made up of Councillors and co-opted Members. This Committee has three co-opted Voluntary Aided School Representatives to provide a faith perspective on education matters.

The Committee also has two Parent governor representatives elected by other parent governors to represent the views of all parents on decisions relating to education.

I think most people would agree that this is an important role and that it deserves a chairman who is competent and takes the role seriously. Firstly lets consider what the role of a councillor is. Councillors are elected by the voters in their ward as representatives to ensure that the organisation is run in the interests of the voters, taxpayers and residents. They are expected to ensure that the paid officers do their jobs and that their is proper democratic oversight. Council meetings are held in public, so that anyone who is interested can see that everything is being run in above board fashion. The constitution of the council allows for residents to ask questions at meetings, make representations and present petitions. The constitution allows for a maximum of half an hour for this at meetings.

There is a very sensible reason for this. Councillors are meant to represent residents and this half an hour allows for residents to have their say. Regardless of whether councillors agree with what members of the public have to say, if they are doing their job properly, they listen with respect and if there are genuine issues, they should do their best to address these issues.

The role of the chair of the committee is to ensure that the meeting is run effectively. A primary role is to ensure that when members of the public interact with the committee, their concerns are addressed. Members of the public, who give up their time to address the committee do so out of a public spirited desire for the council to conduct their business in a proper manner.

I've asked questions on many occasions, presented petitions and addressed committees. Whenever I have done this, it has been because I felt the council needed to address serious issues. Unlike councillors, I don't get paid to do this. I get nothing at all out of the experience, except on occasion something to say in a blog. Most of the people who ask questions don't even get to write a blog. They just care. One example of such a person is Gerrard Roots. Gerrard asked a question to the CELS committee on Wednesday night. Mr Roots was formerly the curator of Church Farmhouse Museum. He dedicated his working life to the culture of our Borough and is clearly a man with a great wealth of knowledge and a huge interest in the cultural life of the Borough. He curated many exhibitions of great value to the people of the Borough and during his tenure, he built the reputation of Church Farmhouse as a highly innovative museum. many of the exhibitions were featured in TV and radio articles. I first got to know Mr Roots when the museum featured an exhibition about popular music in the Borough ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/content/image_galleries/music_barnet_pop_exhibition_gallery.shtml) .
Our studio contributed many exhibits. Other excellent exhibitions I recall were ones such as the one of photography of the Spanish Civil War, the Harry Beck London Transport Exhibiton and the one LGBT culture in the Borough.

He is a very well respected member of the local community and he asked a question about the meeting held to put together a bid for the Barnet bid for London Borough of Culture, which was mentioned in the meeting Agenda reports pack - I would have expected Mr Roots to be a prime contact to attend such a meeting, given his wealth of knowledge, contacts and history of working in arts and culture in the Borough.

"Please give me a complete list of those 100 or so individuals and organizations invited to the workshop held in July, and the names of those who actually attended. Please tell me, too, the name of the 'outside facilitator' who convened the workshop. In addition, please give me a complete list of the individuals and organizations who participated in the follow-up workshop held on 9 November."

The response Mr Roots received was as follows

The request for information will need to be assessed through the Information Management Team due to the provisions in legislation, Freedom of Information Act 2000 and the Data Protection Act 1998.

For further information and to make a freedom of information request please visit the following webpage:

https://www.barnet.gov.uk/citizen-home/council-anddemocracy/data-protection-and-freedom-ofinformation/freedom-of-information-act.html

I was present for the meeting. Mr Roots used the opportunity to ask a supplimentary question. What ensured was perhaps the worst example of how a chair should behave I have ever seen. Mr Roots was rightly upset that he'd received a complete non answer. As a very minimum, given the huge sum Councillor Thompstone is paid as a committee chair, I would expect him to read answers to questions and to challenge the officers if a non answer is given. Mr Roots asked why he'd received a non answer. It was clear what information was required. The council could redact any individuals name that they wished. He asked for the individuals and the organisations. There is no reason why a list of the organisations asked couldn't be provided. I personally cannot see why there is any privacy issue in regards to individuals attending if they are representing an organisation at a council run meeting, however they could have said "A representative from Brent Cross shopping centre" had they wished.

The organisations represented included Barnet Clinical Commissioning Group, CommUNITY Barnet, Barnet and Southgate College, Middlesex University, Brent Cross shopping centre,
Metropolitan Police, Job Centre Plus, Groundwork London, Federation of Small Businesses, West London Business, Argent Related and Saracens, according to the report.

I would have expected those attending to be aware that the council has an openness and transparency policy and that they should have been informed that their names may be made public. Given that a bid for London Borough of Culture is a positive and good thing to do, any individual should welcome the opportunity to be named as a represenatative. It seems ironic that Mr Roots name has appeared on the council website, when names of people attending a meeting, which I believe should be open and transparent is deemed "Private".

In short, the official rather than helping a resident with a valid question, were as obstructive as possible. Mr Roots was simply told he had to issue an FoI request. Given that the council were discussing the bid, councillors and members of the public had no opportunity to actually find out who had been engaged. Not only that but Councillor Thompstone, rather than standing up for a taxpaying resident with a genuine interest in culture, rudely dismissed Mr Roots, once it was clear that the officer was not interested in answering.

I also spoke at the meeting. I had previously emailed all of the councillors, to make what I believe were helpful suggestions. Mr Thompstone did not acknowledge my email. When I spoke, he did not welcome me or thank me. I was polite and I believe my input could only be construed as constructive, even if he didn't agree at all with what I was saying. I may be old fashioned, but I detest bad manners. I had put myself out to attend his committee and make a positive input to a process which should be good for Barnet. Councillor Thompstone treated me with complete contempt. Now you may think that he simply sees me as a trouble making political opponent. If he does, he clearly didn't read my email or listen to what I had to say. If he isn't doing that, then he's really not doing his job.

My mind went back to when I addressed the Audit Committee chaired by Hugh Rayner in September. I also made a statement at that meeting (as did fellow blogger John Dix). It was a difficult meeting for Cllr Rayner. However, he made a point of thanking myself and John after and assurring us that he was listening to our comments and taking them on board. He also thanked us for our efforts. Whilst I disagree with Hugh on many political issues, I respect him and think he is a decent chairman. He clearly recognises the rights of residents and the value of engagement. He also was quite happy to challenge Capita and demonstrate leadership in his role.

Sadly Councillor Thompstone is the opposite. As well as Mr Roots, fellow blogger Theresa Musgrove and Local campaigner Barbara Jacobson also asked questions. Mr Thompstone repeatedly interrupted Ms Musgrove, hectoring her saying "have you actually got a question". Ms Jacobson was treated with equal contempt. Councillor Thompstone answered no questions. He simply asked officers to respond. That is not what a char should do, especially when officers are not providing answers.

We then had a lady presenting a petition on School funding. Labour Councillors asked for Councillor Thompstone to write to the Secretary of State for education to ensure that Barnet does not lose out when the new funding arrangements are introduced. Councillor Thompstone asked the lead officer to explain what he was doing in this respect. A cross London organisation of Boroughs is working to make the case. The officer felt that his was a good forum to apply pressure. Labour members agreed, but asked if he could also write to the secretary of state, to specifically make the case for Barnet. Councillor Thompstone refused. I was quite shocked. As a Conservative Council, with many outstanding schools, Councillor Thompstone is ideally placed to try and get a good deal for Barnet pupils. Tory Councillors across London are doing just this. Sadly Councillor Thompstone, the man responsible for education in Barnet, does not think it is necessary to try and work for a better deal.

It may amuse you to know that I was out for a few beers with a mate of mine last night, who is a Tory Councillor in Bedfordshire. He was telling me that he's currently furiously lobbying the Tory government about changes to the rail service, which will adversely affect his ward and the residents who elected him. This is what good councillors do. I've attended most of the committees of Barnet Council. It is clear to me that of all of these, Thompstone is the worst chair (IMHO). Not only is he rude, but he doesn't take responsibility, doesn't listen and is cowardly. Failing to write to the secretary of state to defend Barnet Schools is a shocking dereliction of duty. He gave no reason other than "I am not into political grandstanding". If Councillor Thompstone is unable to write a letter to the secretary of state for Education which lays out good reasons why schools in Barnet need to have their funding protected, then he is not up to the job and should let someone who will take responsibility do the job. If he thinks standing up for pupils and schools is "grandstanding" then lord help us. I have a vested interest in this. I am the chair of a trust which is responsible for raising funding for one of Barnets top schools. I have seen first hand just how devastating the current financial position of schools is becoming. When flagship schools, which are in the list of top schools in the country can't balance the books, something is seriously wrong.

During the meeting, perhaps the most useful input came from Councillor Helena Hart. She is a long standing Tory councillor who clearly takes her role seriously. She is chair of the Health and Wellbeing board and is an excellent councillor. It is no surprise to me that Barnet failed an OFSTED inspection for childrens services when they let a buffoon like Thompstone run the committee. If I was the Leader of The Council, I'd promote Helena Hart to the job. She would do the job properly and I would have no material for blogs like this. But sadly in the London Borough of Barnet, being good at your job means nothing when the allowances are dished out. These committee chair roles are simply used as a mechanism to dish out taxpayer funded allowances to political allies.

The only quality Thompstone demonstrated that could possibly justify his role is the fact that he's clearly an excellent brown noser, who wants to stay in with his political masters. He clearly thinks writing to the secretary of state to defend Barnet schools is a bad career move as he plots his political career. Sadly he is too dim to realise that if he makes a good case, he will come to the attention of the high fliers and will be seen as a man who can do tough jobs.

I will wrap this up with a question about leadership. Who was the greatest ever Tory Prime Minister? My vote would be for Winston Churchill. Churchill was not afraid to stand up for his beliefs, he was fearless. What do you think Churchill would have made of a spineless individual, unprepared to stand up for the students who he is responsible for educating? I doubt that Thompstone would have got on in Churchills Tory party. Sadly though, things are done rather differently in Barnet.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Councillor Reuben Thompstone is the chair of the Children, Education, Libraries & Safeguarding Committee for Barnet Council. In return for this, he receives a Special responsibility allowance of £15,333 on top of the ten grand basic allowance he gets as a councillor.

# data[].attributes.body
There are 4 active bloggers in Barnet. You can follow them on their blogs and on Twitter to find out more about things happening in Barnet.

They are the 4 bloggers in Barnet: Mr Mustard, Mr Reasonable, Roger Tichborne and Mrs Angry.

# data[].attributes.body
Hello everybody

As I want you on my website, I want to introduce myself. My name is Calvin Casino.

You might remember me that in March 2016 I did exposed Barnet Council's awful & terrible actions for wrongfully cancelling disabled persons freedom passes without any reasons whatsoever & that the blog the Barnet Eye awarded me last year December 2016 with the Barnet Eye person of the year 2016. Two Barnet bloggers Roger Tichborne (Barnet Eye blogger) & Mrs Angry (Broken Barnet Blogger) had done very well. Finding out the truth behind the cancellation of freedom passes by Barnet Council & Capita.

Since I was awarded "Barnet Eye person of the year", I became more & more aware of local affairs in Barnet. Recently, Barnet Council had completely reached a new low. By declaring Sadiq Khan - Mayor Of London the "enemy of the people of Barnet". When I hear it about on Twitter, I was so shocked. Someone named David Longstaff (Tory councillor) tabled the ludicrous motion with title "Is Mayor Khan an enemy of the people of Barnet".

This is not grow up politics, it is childish politics & yet, all Tory councillors (yes, 32 Tory councillors) voted for the meaningless motion which did sparked outrage on Twitter in Barnet, London & the rest of the UK. Calling London Mayor the enemy of the people? That is playground politics & the council behaved like Trump for using that kind of language with a term "enemy of the people".

Let me tell you something. Sadiq Khan is not the enemy of the people of Barnet. You might not like him & his Mayoral programme but calling him "enemy" is not going to solve anything. Very irresponsible & out of touch. Logically, it is not right.

Also Barnet Council is launching a bid to become London Borough of Culture, the council under Tory administration has the bad record. How can they become London Borough of Culture when they closed down venues, music venues, libraries & placed like Church farmhouse & Finchley Carnival. Seriously, how careless is Tory led Barnet Council? It is a insult to us. The Barnet residents. If Barnet wasn't doing all that, it would had the great potential to become London Borough of Culture. Unfortunately Barnet is not like other London Boroughs like Camden (which is famous for music hub like the Roundhouse).

& then there are Capita - the bureaucrats. Capita bureaucracy have totally disadvantaged us the Barnet citizens. Everything. Outsourcing in Barnet as they are partners with the Conservatives. Responsible for Barnet libraries closure & revoking freedom passes (which they were the ones who wrote the letters to every single freedom pass holders in February 2016 - one month before Tory Barnet cancelled wrongly).

Barnet, our beloved home Borough is broken. Tory councillors & Capita bureaucrats. They screw up everything.

But let's not despair anymore. We got Barnet election coming soon in May so when the election comes, vote for any party: Labour, Lib Dem, Green. (although I won't tell you what to do but not turning up to vote will be missed opportunity so don't think about throwing your vote away even if the Tories does win which I hope & pray they won't).

We the Barnet residents need change. A real change so that when we elected councillors, they won't let us down like Tory Barnet councillors.

I want Barnet Council which does gets on job, I want Barnet Council that cares for people, I want Barnet Council that is putting the community first (which currently we are not getting from the council at the moment) & I want Barnet Council to be Tory-free & Capita-free. Barnet Council without Tories & Capita in it.

I hope & pray that you the Barnet residents can make the right choice. This is why I created this padlet wall website for you to check out.

Take care & have a nice day. Peace

# data[].attributes.body
Labour: 40 councillors. Tory: 15 councillors & Lib Dem: 8 councillors

# data[].attributes.body
Flytipping, pot holes, libraries, high streets, dimmed street lighting, anti-social behaviour, housing, crime, social care, funding, transport, green belt, environment, health, money, local economy. The list goes on.

# data[].attributes.body
This is the building where people work in the local authority. Barnet Council. London Borough of Barnet.

# data[].attributes.body
This is the building where the councillors go there to debate & vote on motions. It is also the building for Barnet citizens to attend the council meetings to hold Barnet councillors to account for session proceedings. Local affairs are discussed there in Hendon Town Hall with meetings, items & agendas.

There are different type of committees in the Town Hall at Hendon.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Countdown to May 3, 2018 7:00 am. Showing days, hours, minutes and seconds ticking down to 0

# data[].attributes.body
While commenting or adding attachment, please state your name unless you want to remain anonymous which is your decision if you want to.

# data[].attributes.body
Please feel free to add anything, comment, debate (as long it is not too heated), whatever. :-)

# data[].attributes.body
Welcome to my Barnet election padlet wall website.

My name is Calvin Casino.

Over the next 5 months, I will be adding things that will be anything to do with 2018 local council election in Barnet. I will add analysis, facts & even prediction of how Barnet election will play out from now until election on Thursday 3rd May 2018. Watch this space. 😀🙂