The council seats being contested on May 5 2016 were last fought in 2012. Thus the only fair comparison was with the vote 4 years ago. Somehow someone got hold of Labour's internal spin plan which was to compare the vote to that in 2015 ( when Labour did dreadfully) and so last night could then be painted as a less than disaster.
Of course 2015 was a general election year, different council wards were up for grabs and so it is comparing apples not with pears but with water melons. It is a ludicrous suggestion that 2015 is the benchmark metric - it was just a poor way to spin a bad result. Surely no-one would fall for it?
As things stand, Labour is a net 1 council down, has lost a net 52 councillors, has been pushed into a humiliating third place in Scotland behind the Tories and has also lost ground and its overall majority in Wales. It is not that anyone did really that well other than UKIP ( from a low base) and the Scottish Tories, once an endangered species. It is not that Labour has suffered a real disaster. But the truth is that Labour has not done well.
The results are not bad enough to guarantee a putsch against Comrade Corbyn but it is hard to describe them as good. Yet on Radio 4 the Today programme tells me " Labour has lost councillors but the vote is up on last year". The BBC needed no second invitation to lap up Labour's preposterous spin, it just went for it hook line and sinker. It was palpable nonsense but the biased BBC really doesn't even give a pretence of caring about that anymore.
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