The Liberal Democrats have lost control of Bristol City Council at the Council House this evening after the Tories joined with Labour to vote to reject a minority Lib Dem administration led by new leader Steve Comer.
The central issue during an ill-humoured debate, predictably, was home care. Comer rejected Labour demands to call an immediate halt to any further privatisation of the service and instead, as predicted by The Blogger, offered Labour the opportunity to run the city and halt the privatisation themselves.
The Tories, despite generally being in favour of such outsourcing, for their own mysterious political reasons supported the Labour position and effectively voted the Lib Dems out of office.
It is now thought Labour will form a minority administration propped up by the Tories and move immediately to end the privatisation plans. This will rip-up the Parrott Report, the long-term strategy for social services they developed and unaminously accepted before they left office in 2005.
As The Blogger said a few days ago:
… whilst the Labour party are at liberty to reverse their own policy derived from their own report they may find that doing so plunges the city council’s social services back into a financial black hole…
More on this tomorrow.