A rejection of austerity

Sad he might well be, but he really doesn't have anyone to blame but himself at the pounding his party has received at the hands of an electorate that is, quite simply, pissed off at the treatment meted out by the Con-Dem coalition.

For two years now the coalition's byword has been austerity and austerity has been a euphemism for tax cuts for the corporations and the rich.

Unison's Dave Prentis summed it up when he pointed out that the public sector has lost 625 jobs for every day the coalition has been in power.

Meanwhile the working people of England and Wales have been made to pay for their bosses' failures and a banking crisis that has seen continuing rises for bank chiefs who have failed in their jobs and succeeded only in enriching themselves.

So much, then for the lackeys in the coalition. What about their Tory masters?

Well, they took a wellying as well, with seats falling to Labour in the hundreds.

In Birmingham the coalition faced disaster, losing overall control to a Labour Party that took the helm for the first time in nearly a dozen years, seizing 11 seats from the Tories and nine from the Lib Dems.

Southampton, Birmingham, Torfaen, Plymouth, Cardiff, Reading, Norwich, Swansea, Thurrock and Harlow fell to Labour and Prime Minister David Cameron took a clear message from his constituents when the Tories lost seats in his Witney constituency to Labour.

Even the cheapskate US-style gimmick of directly elected mayors was falling flat on its ugly face and Mr Cameron's call for "a Boris in every city" was looking as absurd as it really was.

Obviously, the thought of Johnson clones appearing in all our big cities appealed to the electorate as little as it does to us.

However, let's not fool ourselves that all this is a victory for Labour's policies.

It clearly isn't. It's a vote against the destructive and greedy policies of the bosses' coalition.

Labour leader Ed Miliband may say - quite accurately - that this is a vote against a government that raises taxes for ordinary people while cutting them for millionaires.

But we have yet to see that portrayal reflected in Labour's national policies, which are still equivocal to say the least.

The Labour Party needs to take a lesson from the results for Respect in Bradford which, with progressive and radical policies, took five seats including that of Labour's council leader.

Labour must now rely on Respect support to run the council and that's not necessarily a bad thing if it leads to an accommodation on progressive policies.

And Labour should note that in Torfaen, a Communist candidate polled more than one of the Lib Dem candidates on the strength of progressive policies.

Because it's by their policies that the newly strengthened Labour councils across Britain will be judged.

Merely transmitting Tory cuts with a doomed sense of inevitability will not be enough to merit the support that voters have vested in them.

New and creative ways of resisting central government's attacks on local facilities must be found and fought for.

And in that fight Labour could cement the respect of the electorate.

But in the absence of such a fightback, Labour will be doomed to follow in the shadow of the Tories, a pale pink imitation of a capitalist party implementing capitalist policies of public-sector pay freezes, slower cuts and only slightly fewer redundancies.

And, quite simply, that just wouldn't be good enough.