Sort've OT, but while we're on county councils, what're people's thoughts about this May and the county elections? How are things gonna go?
Labour will make significant gains basically everywhere and will take control of most of the remaining county councils where such a thing is plausible under non-extraordinary circumstances. I suspect that matters between the National Government parties may be surprisingly fluid. UKIP will probably lose most of their current unty councillors, though (who knows) might pick up elsewhere.
I don't quite know about that... Taking the recent Police commissioner elections as current (if rather turnout and LibDem poor) examples, the Tories could end up holding non-safe counties like Staffordshire , Leicestershire and Northamptonshire, and Yorkshire East Riding.