Ed’s inbox – May 6th

By Mark Ferguson / @markfergusonuk

If Ed Miliband could only read five blogposts each day, he’d read these ones…

The Tories: fear them, hate them by all means, but be in awe of their genius – jonesblog
By Owen Jones

For many Labour supporters who woke up this morning, this is what ‘schadenfreude’ was introduced into the lexicon for. The smell of toast Lib Dem wafted through their windows up and down the country. In the year since Britain fell back under Tory domination, the most passionate vitriol has been reserved for the Lib Dems: it’s the sense many had that, after all, you expect to be screwed by the Tories, but the Lib Dems should really know better.

That’s suited the Tories just fine. They have ingeniously crafted the Lib Dems into human shields, allowing them to absorb rising popular anger at the Government’s onslaught against the welfare state. – Read more.

Admit it, Labour dropped the ball – Liberal Conspiracy
By Sunny Hundal

One of the cardinal rules of politics is always, ‘know thy enemy’. But who was our enemy? Across the country Labour activists said they were going to vote No2AV because they wanted to punish Nick Clegg. It was even a centre-piece of their campaign?

Why? Because its easy to distract lefties from the real enemy. Since last year most of the fire has been on the Libdems for their betrayal. Fair enough, they paid a heavy price for it last night. But the Tories are relatively unscathed and they are the real enemy. They have always been the real enemy. – Read more.

BNP destroyed at local and Welsh Assembly elections – Political Scrapbook
By Matthew Zarb-Cousin

A disastrous night for Nick Griffin saw the BNP lose 8 councillors, and poll just 0.8% in Wales. The schadenfreude is underlined by Griffin’s pre-election claim that the BNP has a “tremendous chance of winning a Welsh seat”:

“Unless there’s enormous fraud, we’ve got a seat down here.” – Read more.

Vote 2011: Scottish Labour needs to find out what it’s for – Left Foot Forward
By Daniel Elton

The only positive for Labour in Scotland is that the shock of the disastrous election results may spur the party into real reform. They have had enough warnings. For years, the problems of Scottish labour have been known. A defensive party, whose main message is to scare with the Tory bogeyman or the Nationalist bogeyman; a conservative party, that lacks vision and innovation; a drab party, that doesn’t seem to want to celebrate Scotland. – Read more.

Lessons all round, but apart from Scotland good news overall for Labour – Scarlet Standard
By Emma Burnell

Ok, let’s get it out of the way. Scotland was a disaster. I don’t know enough about Scottish politics, but looking at the statistics, while our vote held up, unlike in England, those leaving other parties weren’t attracted to Labour at all. Not one bit. That’s an enormous worry for Labour in Scotland. There will need to be real questions asked and we need to be ready for uncomfortable answers. As I said, I don’t know the arena well enough to have any clue what those answers are. Ed has already announced a full root and branch investigation and I hope the activists in Scotland hold him hard to that. The harder part will be implementation of the recommendations. Especially if they show answers that would make the English and UK wide Party uncomfortable. That will be a tricky set of negotiations for someone and for once I’m glad that someone won’t be me! – Read more.

Our suggestions for Ed’s inbox are limited by what we read – so if you’ve seen a blogpost that should be in Ed’s inbox, let us know.