Ken Livingstone has blamed the previous administration for the shock loss in the recent local elections. He said that he always expected the party to perform badly in the borough even if there hadn't been a national swing against Labour.

He was asked during a recent press conference whether he thought the large number of defeated Labour candidates in the local election had spent the weekend cursing him for going ahead with the unpopular tram project.

Ken replied: 'If the only council we lost in London last Thursday had been Ealing you might be able to make that claim but Ealing went as did most of the other councils in London.'

He did praise the work of the Council under the outgoing leader Leo Thompson but pointed the finger of blame at her predecessors saying, 'Over the last year Ealing under its new Labour leader had actually started to improve and turn around the council which frankly wasn't very good in terms of its performance locally. I just don't think she [Cllr Leo Thomson] had enough time to turn around a legacy of poor local governments that had built up in previous years.'

 

Referring possibly to unease he sensed when visiting Acton Town Hall to face questions from residents, he said: 'I know that whenever I visited Ealing broadly people were deeply unhappy with the competence of the Council on a whole range of issues and so I wasn't surprised to see Ealing lost. It's one of those I predicted, even when I thought we might do quite well, that might run against the tide because they had made a lot of enemies locally.'

The Mayor has been quoted as saying that he would ditch the tram project if it was proven to be unpopular locally but it appears to be his current contention that Labour's loss in the election was not due to a protest vote against the tram.

May 19 2006