At noon today

I finally switched on my computer (largely because I had an e-mail from a French friend that asked why there were no results) and found the HuffPo summary immediately. No surprises. Labour making gains at the government's expense - it was expected and is not unusual for local elections around half-way through a government's life. Under the Thatcher government this used to happen quite often yet the lady went on to lead her party to victory several times.

Low turn-out? Expected and predicted even by this blog. Labour wins Liverpool's first Mayoral election? well, who thought it would turn out otherwise?

Elsewhere Nottingham, Manchester and Coventry all voted No to the PM's plan to have elected Mayors. A referendum on in Birmingham is likely to produce the same result.

That, I must admit, is excellent news. We do not need any more layers of politicians directly elected by a small proportion of the population who have no real power but lots of money for waste and corruption.

Later on, I shall look up UKIP results so far.

UPDATE: It seems that the turn-out across the country was 32 per cent, a little low even for local elections, which proves my tentative prediction. Most people are disenchanted with the main parties and see no point in voting for a sham local government. However, that disenchantment, for the most part is not turning to votes for smaller parties or independents, which is a pity.

Another unexciting predictions looks likely to come true: UKIP is doing well enough for them to be pleased. Seats taken and in Tunbridge Wells the leader of the council has been defeated by UKIP. Other candidates came second and third. A good enough result but not startling; there will be celebrations in UKIP and no thought to the morrow as usual. It also looks like across the country they will still be behind the Lib-Dims.

ADDENDUM: The Guardian's live blog seems pretty good. Among other things we are told that Doncaster has voted to keep a directly elected Mayor and Peter Davies of the English Democrats remains it. Also, there is speculation that Boris Johnson might actually increase his majority. For 3.05 the blog says:

Ken Livingstone's team are privately conceding defeat in the London mayoral contest. My colleague Hélène Mulholland has been talking to them, and she says they are resigned to Boris Johnson winning. They even think that Johnson will increase his majority. In 2008 Johnson had 53% of the vote when second preferences were included, and Livingstone was on 47%.

I shall refrain from rejoicing until I know for sure but, as I said before, in 2008 LIvingstone's team knew well ahead of the official announcements. As did the bookies who started paying out in the afternoon.

Any predictions?

Predicting local election results is very difficult for obvious reasons: they are local and are affected by local considerations and individuals. Also, the turn-out tends to be quite low, which is unhelpful for those who like to see patterns.

The assumption is that there is a general and widespread dissatisfaction with the main parties, which these days means the Lib-Dims as well, and this will show itself in the vote. But how, is what few people know. Will there be a stronger vote for the small parties, for independent candidates or will more people simply stay at home, recognizing that local government in this country is a bit of a farce?

Then there is the problem of several cities having a referendum on whether they want a directly elected Mayor. One hopes that they will take one look at London and, especially, Tower Hamlets and vote against such a terrible notion in droves. But it is possible that they like the idea of having someone like Lutfur Rahman at the helm of an expensive but powerless body. If the turn-out remains as low as ever in those cities, then the chances are the proposal will go through and Leeds, Bradford, Birmingham will face London's problems: there will be another expensive layer of government that will not actually be in control of anything much but will be able to spend a lot of money irresponsibly and interfere with people's lives from time to time. A jolly prospect.

The Boss of EURef tells me that the suddenly revived Respect Party is likely to play havoc with the Labour-controlled Bradford council. I would be in favour of the big parties getting their noses bloodied if it were no Respect that profited from it.

Talking of which, what of UKIP? Hard to tell. For various reasons I have, as ever, been subjected to a barrage of over-optimistic predictions about that party's probable performance but that happens before every election and by-election and the necessary results have nor been forthcoming. Mind you, over-optimistic in this case means "we shall beat the Lib-Dims and come third". Even if that happens across the country it is hardly the most spectacular achievement after 20 years of existence, a goodish amount of publicity, a situation in which the Lib-Dim vote is, apparently, in free-fall with the electorate heartily sick of all major parties and the EU front-page news of the negative variety every day.

Almost twenty years ago at the Newbury by-election Alan Sked stood for the Anti-Federalist League, UKIP's predecessor and came fourth, something he pointed out forcefully when he made his speech. One would like to think there has been progress since then but, apparently, next to none.

I would prefer to see one of two results for UKIP: either a spectacularly good achievement, with lots of seats on councils and a number of votes across the country that would put them, if not first then close second or a result so poor that they would be forced to reconsider their policies, strategy and tactics (though it has been pointed out to me that nothing short of complete annihilation would make them do that). The chances are it will be neither but a kind of OK outcome with a few places gained and a few close misses with many more that can be called progression. There will then be much rejoicing and calls to "bring on the GE" as if they were on track to forming the next government.

There is talk that UKIP might win one or two places in the London Assembly but predictions for that highly expensive and completely powerless and purposeless body are hard to make for two reasons: most people have a very slender notion of its existence, let alone its activity and for good reasons as I know, having worked in the Great Glass Egg for nearly four years; and the voting is barely comprehensible with a Continental-style system of candidates from various rather large "constituencies" plus a top-up vote from lists.

The BNP will most probably lose its seat but what will happen to it and to other seats is hard to predict. I seem to recall that in 2008 most of the predictions for the Assembly turned out to be wrong.

Another complicating factor for UKIP is that somewhere along the line somebody made a terrible mess of filling in the required forms so UKIP candidates have been listed as "Fresh Choice for London". The ballot paper for the Mayor appears to have both names on it but I am not sure about the two for the Assembly. This may actually be something in their favour in that people who would not vote UKIP might put a cross against that fresh choice. Or it might confuse everyone even more.

One thing I can predict with a fair amount of certainty: if one or more UKIP (Fresh Choice for London) candidates do get into the Assembly, there will be an almighty row in the party within a couple of months and a split between those inside the Great Glass Egg and those outside.

Of course, what matters in London is the Mayoral election and that, practically speaking, boils down to a choice of Boris Johnson or Ken Livingstone. According to the Evening Standard it is too close to call but their polls are not clear in their indication, again for two reasons. One is that, as Damian Hockney, erstwhile Leader of the One London group in the Great Glass Egg, pointed out in a letter some weeks ago, the assumption seems to be that the turn-out will be over 50 per cent. This has never happened before and is unlikely to happen now. The other problem is that second transferable vote. All predictions are based on first vote only and while Boris is leading the gap is not enormous. What will happen with the second vote?

There again, the predictions were misleading last time. On the basis of the first vote it seemed too close to call for a long time but the second vote gave Boris a decisive victory. However, that was not declared till Friday evening yet by then Ken's minions had cleared their offices and packed their belongings, having summoned the removal firms, presumably, on Friday morning. So they knew more than the exit polls had told the rest of us.

The next time I write about these elections I may well be in the position of having to acknowledge that I was wrong or nearly wrong. We shall see.

Really, it is not hard to work out

Once upon a time we had general elections and we had local elections and people knew more or less how they worked and who was responsible for which part of our lives. Either way, one could be absolutely certain that the government in whatever form took on far too many responsibilities, which it could not carry out but which involved appointing lots of people in unnecessary jobs, raising taxes, regulating whatever they could and making it clear that we could not make proper decisions for ourselves. But, at least, the system was more or less comprehensible.

How times have changed. Governments, in whatever form, still claim too many responsibilities and we are trusted ever less with the making of decisions but there are several more layers around and many more elections, run on very different lines. In fact, the situation resembles that in certain Balkan countries where there seem to be some kind of elections every few months and nobody quite knows who is being elected to what and according to which method.

London is particularly difficult because we now have a Mayor, who has very few powers though a great deal of money at his disposal and, therefore, a great deal of patronage. There is also an Assembly that has no powers at all, not even to control the Mayor in any real sense; it is, in fact, a very expensive talking shop whose procedures are less well known than those of the European Parliament (another layer that needs to be elected in a completely different way from any other layer).

The GLA elections, which are coming in about three weeks see the largest number of spoilt ballot papers even though the turn-out is never more than about 35 per cent, because of the sheer incomprehensibility of the process. Thus, the Mayor is elected by a single transferable vote with every voter getting two votes to share out between the various candidates. That's quite difficult enough for an electorate that is used to first past the post but there is the extra complication of the Assembly that is voted in partly by FPTP and partly by a top-up system. So, one votes (if one bothers, which one may not as it is such a pointless organization) for an individual in the particular constituency (not to be confused with the boroughs) and also for a party.

After all that and with all the hype that is going on around the KenandBoris show, one must repeat that the Mayor of London has very few powers and those that he does have come from legislation that was passed by Parliament in 1998 and amended in 2007. In other words, those powers are strictly defined and limited by Parliament and cannot be changed neither by the Mayor nor by the Assembly nor by the people of London, should they be asked. (They were asked in the first place whether they wanted a Mayor and an Assembly and the usual thing happened: more than 60 per cent did not bother to turn out and those who did voted overwhelmingly in favour.)

This needs to be remembered and, despite the various difficulties I enumerated above, it is not hard to do so. Why, then, do we get hacks producing articles such as the one in today's Torygraph by the hackette Sue Cameron, entitled The Cities Are Taking Over?

According to this rather ignorant analysis, Labour MPs are set to abandon their seats in droves because they will want to be elected to be Mayors or new Police Commissioners. The Labour High Command is unhappy because that would mean unwelcome by-elections that they might lose.

Why do these people allegedly want to abandon their cosy little nests in Westminster? Because, if you please, power is about to seep to those elected Mayors and Police Commissioners and we shall end up with a quasi-American situation (or the French situation) where local authorities, elected mayors and police commissioners and other suchlike individuals will have far more power than Whitehall.

Really? Let's think about it a little. The powers of all these elected officials, as I said above but it is worth repeating, are very strictly defined and limited by Westminster with the legislation written by Whitehall. Elected mayors or police commissioners will not be in charge of the budget as a good deal of the money will still be decided on by the government and will not be raised locally. Most of the little that will be in their remit, as we can see in London, they have no real control over as there are numerous statutory obligations laid on them by Westminster, Whitehall and Brussels, in whatever order and which they have to fulfil. In what way is power seeping away to the cities? If any of the referendums produce directly elected mayor, the only thing that will achieve is another layer of highly expensive and largely impotent government plus some more elections.

Not that the candidates know the facts any better. I have already written about the independent candidate, Siobhan Benita, whose policies were concerned entirely with matters that were outside the Mayor's remit. Out of some misguided sense of loyalty to the eurosceptic cause I have kept quiet about the UKIP manifesto, which also consists of policies that had nothing to do with the Mayor's remit. But this has now been noted by the Metro newspaper, which has stated quite frankly that UKIP cannot deliver on any of its policies because none of them are matters over which the Mayor has any say. The candidate has agreed with that judgement. It might be a good idea for hacks on supposedly grander newspapers to learn a few of those facts. Surely, it cannot be that hard.