Wales leads way for Independents

The Times has a report headlined Independents charge through the Valleys and seize the reins linked here, the following is a quote: Before the vote, Labour held eight of the twenty-two unitary authorities in Wales. Yesterday it was left with just two, Neath Port Talbot and Rhondda Cynon Taf, as the party lost 122 Welsh councillors, according to the BBC, and collapsed to a disastrous third place in Cardiff. Newport, the last Welsh city in the party’s hands after 2004, fell to no overall control, and Flintshire, the only authority it had held in the North, went the same way. But it was in the valleys that Labour’s bedrock of support most dramatically collapsed. Independents delivered the knockout blows as former Labour supporters in the region gave their backing to local groups and individual candidates. Labour councils in Merthyr Tydfil, Blaenau Gwent, Torfaen and Caerphilly were all toppled. In the first two of these, independents and local parties had the numbers to take overall control, while in Torfaen independents became the second largest group, just two behind Labour’s eighteen seats. The lesson must be now taken on board across England, where the disastrous broadcasting of the BBC and its influence on the British political process is an ever more disgraceful fact of life.