Outside London, there were special circumstances, too, in the cases of the big city councils of Liverpool and, most recently, Sheffield. And when Labour lost control of Islington for the first time since defections put the SDP briefly into power in the early 1980s, in a sensational by-election turnaround just before Christmas, there were special circumstances cited there as well.

All of which may, to an extent, be true. Even in the homogenised political climate of today, there are still local differences that have a special impact on the outcomes of some local elections.

But at what point do we acknowledge that "special circumstances" are no longer special, and that they in fact form part of a pattern? What does it take to recognise that the Lib Dems have achieved what would have been almost inconceivable a couple of decades ago and established a series of urban bases for themselves in formerly solid Labour heartlands?

There is little comfort for left or right, "old" or "new" Labour in what has been happening in places like Islington, Liverpool or Sheffield. For those who want to blame Labour's electoral failings in these areas on the "loony left" effect, there is the uncomfortable fact that the so-called loonies weren't the ones who lost elections. Without exception, all of these councils fell to the Liberal Democrats only after their local ruling groups had first fallen to a new generation of Labour "moderates".

But if the left think that all that needs to be done to recapture power in these places is to return to the red flag-flying days of the mid-1980s, they are deluding themselves about their own failure when in office effectively to deal with matters most to people about local government -- the ability to deliver local services at least efficiently, if not always cheaply.

What we have witnessed in Islington over the past couple of decades, since a left-wing landslide sent the SDP tumbling to a 51 seats to one hammering in 1982, has been a gradual corrosion in belief in the ability of any shade of Labour to look after the interests of its constituents. The Lib Dem victory is not the result of demographic changes, as wealthier incomers have moved into its formerly slum-ridden streets. Rather, it is the consequence of the wholesale desertion of precisely the people who used to form the constitute the backbone of the Labour vote.

It's about council tenants despairing of ever getting their homes repaired, let alone improved. It's about working class voters having to watch their children move out of the area because there is no affordable housing for them locally. It's about those who can't send their children out of the borough to be educated having to put up with their sons and daughters being failed in a schools system that is now being privatised (by the previous Labour council) because councillors couldn't get themselves together sufficiently to do what they were supposedly elected for.

People have become sick to death of watching highly-paid council officers apparently incapable even of ensuring that the phones get answered properly, let alone sorting out the glaringly incompetent service provision. And, perhaps most of all, they've come to feel that the Labour Party no longer cares about them, the ordinary man and woman struggling to get by, but that it's happiest dancing the Dome away with its well-off new friends from the business and entertainment worlds.

My old friend and veteran Islington councillor, Pat Haynes, has taken me to task for my pre-millenium column in the local Highbury and Islington Express, when I took perhaps one cheap shot too many about the council. "The only safe time to kick a man is when he's down," he's written to me. "But it's not fair, and it's not cricket."

Now I know that Islington and these other councils have many Labour achievements to add to their well-publicised failings. But if the Labour Party doesn't wake up to the fact that working class voters are beginning to desert it droves, we are going to be in serious trouble indeed when the national political climate turns sour. I have long since lost count of the number of long term, diehard Labour supporters who've told me that, for the first time in their lives, they are thinking of voting Liberal Democrat. This past few weeks, it has been the health service that for many looks like becoming the straw that breaks the camel's back. Wake up and smell the coffee, comrades.