Introducing my new BBC page

YOUGOV are quoting a Plymouth Uni projection that on their poll published today for the May local elections that the Tories will lose 1,000 council seats and the LibDems 800, that Labour will win an outright major in the Welsh Assembly and that the LibDem vote looks like collapsing completely for the Scottish Parliament, although the PR system north of the border will mean they will still probably have an MSP or two.

Also the poll on AV shows the YES campaign faltering and the NO vote overtaking it.

If this poll is anywhere near correct, this will leave the LibDems virtually annihilated from control of councils having elections and a spent force in the Nations.

With the loss of the AV vote, Nick Clegg will have undone all the progress the LibDems have made since the low point of Jeremy Thorpe, whilst a whole swathe of True Blue councils will be won by Labour.

The only hope then for the Coalition is that the economy comes good before the General Election, because the massive increase in Labour councillors and control of councils will give Miliband a much bigger foundation to build on, whilst the traditional powerbase of the LibDems in local government will have gone.

Also the "localism" Bill will hand Labour the flexibility in local government that it didn't have in the 1980s when rate capping and central control was a brake on their ability to defy the government - "shot in foot" time, I'd say...

The day after the decimation of LibDems in local elections and the probable lost AV vote, Clegg is going to be a pariah in what is left of his own Party and I cannot see him surviving much longer - if he is ditched, then the Coalition is in real danger and it will be down the tight arithmetic of the House of Commons whether Cameron can survive a confidence vote.

Miliband is still free to formulate policy in the post-Brown era, has few hostages to fortune and a following wind to take on the vested interests in the City, with much of the dirty work in terms of spending cuts out of the way.

Clegg must be either incredibly naive, incredibly stupid or incredibly arrogant - or all three. In a single year he will have smashed the LibDems representation in the country, ended the debate about electoral reform for a generation and handed Labour control of the country on a plate, with all the mud sticking to the Coalition for the spending cuts and madcap ideas about NHS reform, betrayal on student fees and getting the UK embroiled in yet another middle eastern war.

The electorate are already men