The Times: Prepare for a shock BNP victory

[...] It is being said that the local elections on May 1 are a rather boring affair with the obvious exception of the battle between Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson to be the mayor of London. The BNP, however, will be more interested in the Greater London Assembly than whether Red Ken or the Blue Blond wins control of the capital city. For the complex electoral method - the additional member system - used for the assembly means that any political party has a decent chance of winning one of the 25 seats at stake if it can accumulate 6 per cent or so of the vote in the party list section of the ballot paper.

This is far from an impossible target for the BNP. The last local by-election conducted in London was on March 20 at Gooshays in the Borough of Havering. The BNP had narrowly won it in May 2006 in something close to a statistical fluke but now had to defend it after the departure of its councillor. It was assumed that this might be a challenge for the BNP. Far from it. Its share of the vote went up from 28 per cent to 38 per cent. The Liberal Democrats, for the record, managed the singularly strange feat of finishing sixth. Read more
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