Tedious Thursday.

On Thursday (5/5/16) voters across the UK went to the polls in a range of local elections.

Some of these such as the Scottish Parliamentary and the Assembly elections in Wales and Northern Ireland are worth taking note of. However with all three bodies being wholly subservient to the national government it is hard for a normal person to get excited about them. In fact in Northern Ireland it's actually a rule that the election will result in a draw and the main Protestant party and the main Catholic party will share power.

Across England there were also 89 local authority elections. I don't want to dismiss these as unimportant. However they are so hyper-local that in order to get excited the issues involved you really do need to actually live in the very small areas where the elections are taking place.

The election that everybody is talking about though is the London Mayoral election. This strikes me as odd because of all the elections taking place on Thursday the London Mayoral race is by far the least important.

I have lived in London for the best part of 30 years. I also have what I suppose you would call a particular interest in politics. However for the life of me I still cannot work out what the Mayor of London does. In fact having an interest in politics it seems to me that the job was only invented to prevent Northern Ireland's Protestants objecting to the peace process and the creation of the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Officially the Mayor of London controls a budget of GBP17bn (USD25.5bn) that he must get passed by the London Assembly/micro-Parliament of which there is no guarantee he controls. However without any real tax raising powers the Mayor's budget is entirely dependent on the amount of money the national government decides to give. With a Conservative government and a Labour Mayor this can get extremely nasty.

A large part of the Mayor's budget is spent on welfare payments such as Housing Benefit. These are set nationally and enshrined in law. As such it's really a case of the Mayor being told how much of his budget is going to be spent on welfare.

Another large part of the Mayor's budget goes on healthcare. In the UK this is controlled by what are known as Primary Care Trusts (PCT's). These not only operate outside of the control of  local government but largely outside of the control of the national government. Therefore at best the Mayor gets to negotiate with the PCT's over healthcare. The Mayor is not their sole source of income and again there are legal minimums. As such the PCT's are very much the dominant party in those negotiations.

The Mayor also has some control over London's Metropolitan Police. However the UK is very clear about the police and the Courts being independent of political interference. As such the Mayor's role is really only to negotiate with the Police Commissioner as the junior partner. In practice it's often a case of the Police Commissioner simply handing the Mayor a bill which the Mayor is legally obligated to pay.

In terms of the small day-to-day duties such as refuse collection and licensing the sale of alcohol or the playing of music for entertainment these all remain the responsibility of the local authorities in control of the London Boroughs. I think the Mayor has the power to overrule the local authorities on local planning issues but only when the project in question can be viewed as being of benefit to all Londoners.

So basically the Mayor of London controls the city's underground rail (Metro) system known as "The Tube." That is it.

To put it in perspective Boris Johnson who remains the Mayor of London until at least Monday (9/5/16) managed to hold down not one but three other jobs while being Mayor. This included being an MP in the national government.

Due to the Freddie Grey case I am still following the Mayor of Baltimore, Maryland, US on Twitter. It seems that much of her - or person who controls her Twitter account - time is spent gossipping about things they've read on Twitter. However she continues to wield significantly more power than the Mayor of London.

On Thursday there was a big meeting of city Mayors from across the globe to discuss how they could respond to the threat of climate change. Well that was the first hour. The rest of the day was spent bullying the Mayor of London over how little power they hold.

I could continue making jokes about how insignificant the job of Mayor of London for a very long time. After all there are kids in filthy refugee camps in warzones who are fully entitled to point at the Mayor of London and laugh at how powerless he is.

Despite all this the Labour Party in its infinite wisdom decided that the London Mayoral election was the election they wanted to win at the expense of all other elections going on in the country.

As we've sadly come to expect from the Labour Party they set about this task in their usual grubby and undemocratic manner.

London has roughly 1.3 million Muslim voters the majority of whom can trace their heritage back to either India, Pakistan or Bangladesh. So the Labour Party simply nominated as their candidate Sadiq Khan who is a Muslim and the son of a Pakistani father. If you were to sum up Labour's election strategy in a single phrase it would be;

"All Muslims are thick as pig sh*t. They'll vote for one of their own no matter who he is."

As it turns out Sadiq Khan did - technically this morning - win the election with 1.3 million.

The fact this exactly matches my back of an envelope estimation of how many Muslim voters there are in London causes me to somewhat the validity of the entire process. After all if there is one election result you could simply make up without affecting the lives of voters in any way it would be the London Mayoral election.

I should point out though that London is traditionally a Labour leaning city. The defeated Labour candidate in 2012 still received 990,000 votes. As such there is a significant constituency who will vote for the Labour candidate regardless of who they are.

Added to that there is a significant proportion of young, white British voters who often attend the city's universities. Looking over Twitter and other social media it is clear that many of them have voted for the Muslim candidate because they think they're striking a blow against Donald Trump in the US or against the white Mummies and Daddies who gave them their comfortable home counties upbringing.

Therefore I think we can rest assured that there are at least 200,000 Muslim voters in London who were not stupid enough to fall for Khan's bigoted campaign. Or at least realised that the London Mayoral election really isn't worth the effort of voting in.

Khan's main challenger - Zac Goldsmith for the Conservative Party - didn't really contest the election at all. He did though reach out to London's Hindu and Sikh voters. This ignited a lot of the religious/racial tensions that are common in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

It also drove Khan's radical Muslim supporters into an absolute fury. Sadly not understanding the argument many white Londoners mistook their screams of racism as legitimate allowing Khan to portray himself as an anti-racism candidate.

Once the Labour activists screams of racism had reached fever pitch the Conservatives dropped the anti-Semitism bomb on them nationally.

This was not intended to alter the outcome of the London Mayoral race which wasn't viewed as a lost cause some much as not a cause at all. The intention was to hurt Labour in the 92 other races nationally where the voters tend to be older, wiser and less likely to view anti-Semitism as a positive.

What screwed the Conservatives over was their Chancellor (Finance Minister) George Osborne and his 2016 Budget which I covered here; http://watchitdie.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/the-uk-budget-2016.html

That introduced plans to remove all schools from local authority controls. Schools are one of the few things that local authorities have control over and many voters are very happy with the way their local schools are being run. As such this policy caused those who would have switched from Labour to Conservative to change their mind and some Conservative voters to stay at home.

With the national picture beginning to emerge as yesterday went on the Conservatives announced that they were scrapping that policy. It fell to George Osborne to respond to the result of the London Mayoral election on behalf of the party.

Nationally it seems that the competing campaigns have succeeded only in cancelling each other out with "No Change" being the big result of the day. Labour did slip into third place in Scotland although that was part of a well established downwards trajectory for the party. Interestingly Labour lost ground to the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in Wales where the Labour Party was born. That seems to be further evidence of the party being rejected by Britain's working class voters.

In London people in the borough of Barnet were denied the right to vote after huge numbers of names were purged from the register of voters. Barnet has a significant Jewish population. With the eventual winner seeming to take great pride in the anti-Semitism and bigotry of his supporters the fact Britain's Chief Rabbi was denied his legal right to vote looks really bad.

Even without the racial element of the scandal events in Barnet provide more than ample grounds for the election result to be challenged in Court. Based on previous experience a Court investigation could well find that as many as 40% of postal votes cast for Labour are fraudulent. That would force the result to be vacated and the election re-run with Khan and the Labour Party barred from participating.

Alternatively we could all just get on with out lives once again forgetting that London's got a Mayor let alone what his name is.

13:225 on 7/5/16 (UK date).