European elections - results

No Rusty Lee for MEP, despite UKIP coming second in European Parliament elections in the West Midlands overall.

Celeb MEP-fans need not panic, though - Michael Cashman got returned, though this time it'll be a lonely Birmingham-Brussels commute without any other Labour colleagues (and despite his registered address seeming to be in London...).

Local results: unavailable from Election Office?

Interestingly, although BCC is the Election Office for the Euro elections, and their election results page promises that results are published online before anywhere else, they don't seem to be providing any stats - linking instead to the BBC.

The BBC main news site has a full list for the region, and the BBC's WM area has a partial local breakdown for Birmingham. It's not clear whether we'll ever get a local results list off the BCC ... even though they are very revealing, showing that for Birmingham itself, UKIP was placed fourth behind the Conservatives, Labour and the Lib Dems.

UKIPerie

Despite predictions of major upsets, 5/6 MEPs are the same - just UKIP's Nikki Sinclaire being a new bunny, though according to her rather horribly yellow site (not yet updated to celebrate her win), she's been working as the other UKIP MEP's political advisor. Nikki's also planning to travel by Easyjet and stay in 2* hotels to use her MEP allowances to the best benefit of UKIP. Would be great to see those receipts published on her site, perhaps?


Our WM MEPs are now:

Tories:

• Philip Bradbourn
• Malcolm Harbour

UKIP:

• Mike Nattrass
• Nikki Sinclaire

Labour:

• Michael Cashman

Lib Dems:

• Liz Lynne

WM extremism?

I'm pleased the BNP didn't get any MEPs in the region, though they did poll 8.6% of the vote - or 121,967 votes in total - with a 34.8% turnout. Seems pretty high, even though it's only an increase of 1.1% on 2004 - perhaps some comfort to be taken in a worsening political and economic situation not moving the WM electorate to extremist views.

Unless of course, you take UKIP to be an extremist view. Perhaps this will prove to be the election in which UKIP became the acceptable face of anti-European, anti-immigration policies. It remains to be seen how acceptable they remain with respect to the alliances they may make in the European Parliament, and where they go with policy statements like "we believe the traditional British way of life is inherently good, and should be promoted for its own sake": cuddly fascists are still fascists.