Congratulations to Catherine Bearder!

I am so pleased that Catherine Bearder has been elected as an MEP in my region of the South East from the number 2 spot on the Lib Dem list. I have met Catherine a few times and as I mentioned in an article for Lib Dem Voice recently she is a strong and dedicated campaigner for our party who thoroughly deserves her seat in parliament. I am certain she will make an excellent MEP.

With the gloom of the BNP's wins yesterday, I stayed up until I had heard the South East results and at least then there was a ray of sunshine for me before I went to sleep.

Labour's shocking performance in Euro elections

With the dreadful news that the BNP have got two MEPs elected there is a risk that this news dominates the next news cycle and lets Labour off the hook.

But these results in a nationally contested election are the worst in Labour's history for alomst a hundred years. In fact you have to go back to just after they were formed when they were still finding their political feet to see a result so bad. It is amazing to see the party of government in such a state.

They have dropped more than 7 percentage points or in other words about a third of their support. In some regions their vote has more than halved in terms of absolute voters.

Now I have no idea what Gordon Brown is going to say to his colleagues at the PLP meeting later today. However I do know what they should say to him. They should tell him that he has led them to their worst and most embarrassing defeat in almost 100 years. They should insist that he cannot blame America, or the credit crunch, or the expenses scandal. He needs to take responsibility for this himself, in exactly the way that Gordon Brown used to blame John Major for the Tories problems in the run up to 1997.

I know I have banged on about this before but after last night it is more clear than ever before. The polls are not wrong. The Labour party is now despised by huge sections of the electorate. If Gordon Brown remains the leader, the party could be all but destroyed at the next General Election.

For their own sakes, Labour MPs need to act now. A new leader will not be a panacea. They will still almost certainly lose the next General Election but they would mitigate their losses and would live to fight another day.

PR is not to blame for BNP Euro wins

Like many others this morning I am sickened by the fact that the BNP has won two seats in the European parliament following the count overnight. I had to endure the sight of fascists being interviewed on TV knowing they now have a 5 year elected platform from which to espouse their hate as well as all the funding that comes from the result.

I have already seen that William Hague has been on the radio this morning trying to argue that Proportional Representation is to blame for the result.

I completely reject that argument. The BNP has got in in Yorkshire and the North West because of a combination of disgust in general with the political classes and especially Labour. They got almost 10% of the vote in Yorkshire and 8% in the North West. The unpalatable fact is that a lot of people in those regions were willing to vote for them.

But the biggest argument against blaming the electoral system is that it is precisely the First Past the Post system used at Westminster that has contributed so much to this problem in the first place. Voters feel disengaged from politics and great swathes of the North West and Yorkshire are safe seats where there is usually little campaigning from any of the major parties as they instead focus their energies on marginal constituencies. This lack of political activity and engagement creates a vacuum that parties like the BNP can then move into. If we had a fairer electoral system for Westminster, these politically bereft areas would have much stronger campaigning machines on the ground from the major parties and the BNP would have been unlikely to get any MEPs as a result. I have heard anecdotal evidence that in some areas, the only leaflets people received were from the BNP. This is a shocking indictment of the lack of campaigning capacity of the bigger parties and is a direct result of the broken electoral system we use in our country for Westminster elections.

So if anything last night's results are an argument for wholesale reform of our electoral systems used in all elections.

Labour are brave letting Brown front their Euro election broadcast!

Just saw the latest Labour Party Election Broadcast for the Euro elections on the TV. It features Gordon Brown telling us how great he is and what he has done for us and how awful it would be under "the alternative", presumably the Conservatives.

It is quite brave of Labour to have Brown fronting this and also releasing it on Youtube after his disastrous outing via this medium about MPs expenses a couple of weeks ago. Also, I don't understand why they are trying to turn the European elections into a referendum on Brown's performance. Do they not know how unpopular he is?