English Ed to shed his Celtic baggage?

Apart from John Coulter's occasional idiosyncratic offerings (written, thankfully, in a very different style to his Irish Daily Star rants) I rarely dip into The Tribune. So, thanks are due to Toque for pointing me in the direction of this article from Dan Hodges.

This fact jumps out:

Patrick Diamond and Giles Radice have just published Southern Discomfort Again, an analysis of the political cleansing of Labour from southern England at the 2010 general election. It makes for sober reading. In the south-east, south-west and eastern regions, Labour won only 10 out of 197 seats. In the south of England and the Midlands as a whole, Labour now holds only 49 out of 302 seats.

Incredible, perhaps explaining why (as I surmised here) we're starting to see a much more devolved party with Miliband than existed under Brown?