Well it's a week late coming, but the Poorhouse finally managed to look up the election results for the recent UK local elections. To be fair, hardly any of the rest of the country seemed that interested either. Luckily the Poorhouse did remember to vote, but really only because of the magic of Internet voting and repeated self-created electronic reminders rather than general electoral excitement and promotion of the democratic process by the parties involved. Would a leaflet or two - or even a handshake - be too much to ask?

In good news, New Labour got a slight kicking, losing 505 councillors and 9 councils - although some were predicting a greater loss than that for them. In bad news, the Tories did rather better than last time gaining 911 new councillors and 39 councils.

It must be said that one of these Tory gains was entirely the result of by random chance. In Scotter, Lincolnshire both Birkenshaw (Lib Dem) and Underwood-Frost (Conservative) seemingly scored the same number of votes. Rather than any sort of re-vote or head-to-head against just those candidates the law of the land was apparently followed, and citizens of Scotter are now represented in council by a Tory because he happened to guess the way a literal coin-toss would land. And to think some heretics say the political process is a pointless farce...

Here's the results summary, courtesy of the BBC.

The local elections:

Scottish Parliament:

And the Welsh Assembly:

Scottish and Welsh nationalism perhaps reared their head a little, with gains by Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party (fear not neophytes - despite the name it's not the equivalent of the awful British National Party) generally at the slight expense of Labour. In fact the SNP is now the largest party within the Scottish Parliament, beating Labour by one seat, causing all sorts of coalition discussions between parties trying to get a nice big overall majority.

In other politico nonsense, of course Tony Blair put in his resignation date today - 27th June. John Prescott is stepping down as Deputy Prime Minister, and we already heard that John Reid will quit as Home Secretary nice and soon too, possibly in an attempt to make the likely forthcoming premier Gordon Brown's unemployment statistics look bad.

Whatever one might say, the Poorhouse will kind of miss Blair. For all his many hideous and harmful mistakes / misguidedness / Bush-love he always put on a good media show. It's not every administration that is web-trendy enough to have his own Youtube channel now is it? You almost feel sorry for him listening to his outgoing speeches. Gordon Brown's effort on the other hand should he continue will no doubt be a laugh a minute. Unfortunately Blair isn't quite web 2.0 social networking trendy enough to allow commenting or embedding on some of his youtube efforts, but here, as a special treat, is Tony - man of the people - "on the spot".

Hey, it could be worse. Remember Webcameron (which still exists, believe it or not)? Curse us for interrupting his washing-up.

Not that the Poorhouse doesn't love new-age web interactivity - but really, even this article wasn't written with hands covered in soap suds and screaming children in the background believe it or not.