26/05/2014 BBC London News

Thank you. That is all from us for this evening. It is good night from

me, and on BBC One, we joined the BBC news teams wherever you are.

Good evening and welcome to the programme. Labour has doubled the

number of MEPs it has in the capital, winning half of the

region's eight seats in the European elections. Labour topped the poll,

taking one seat from the Conservatives, leaving them with

two. It was a bad night for the Liberal Democrats ` they've been

left with no London MEPs. And there was no change for UKIP and the Green

Party ` they kept one seat each. With a full round up of the results

and what it means for London, here's our Political Correspondent, Karl

Mercer. It was a long night at City Hall as London waited to find out

how the European votes had gone. Held up by a bit late `` by a

delayed count, they had to wait until the results were finally

announced at three o'clock in the morning. The results are as

follows... It was bad news for the Liberal Democrats, battered in

Thursday 's elections the European results were no better. Sarah

Ludford, losing her seat after 15 years. I think it is bad news there

is no MP from the Liberal Democrats. There are now 18 councils

in the capital without Liberal Democrat councillors, and the party

controls just one town Hall. As a party we have been here before. The

first time I was elected the party was up 3% in the national opinion

polls, but the party is resilient. In my London Borough of Sutton, we

have an overwhelming majority and others can learn from what we have

achieved. These results follow up the disastrous performance in the

race to become London mayor in 2012. Back then, Brian Paddick got less

than 45% of the vote. They will have lost a great deal of their activist

base, and that in turn makes it hard to win general election season next

year because councillors are closely related to having a decent activist

base. Once again, the winners were the Labour Party following up on

their strong showing in the borough elections. We are proud of the

result today. It is not an exceptional results, `` it is an

exceptional results. London once again bucked the trend but UKIP's

sole winner was in combating mood. The Conservatives lost one of their

MEPs down from three to two in London. People predicted a bloody

nose for the us, a year to go from the general election we are neck and

neck with Labour, it is a good result. With the UKIP threat not as

great in London, the Green MEP held on for another five years. I thought

tonight was going to be a close run thing so I wasn't sure about

returning to the parliament again. Thank you, London voters. A bit of

something for everyone in London with most claiming a victory of

sorts, apart from the Lib Dems of course.

Karl joins me in the studio now. A bad night for the Lib Dems ` what

else have we learnt? In a sense it is two election down, want to go,

because next year we will be talking about the general election. The Lib

Dems are in a bad place, the MPs in the capital at the moment will be

looking over their shoulder, thinking we have to work hard.

Labour will feel they have done well, and in areas like Brent,

Harrow, Haringey and Ealing, all with key marginal seats they need to

take next year, they did really well so they will be feeling bullish.

Sadiq Khan might be mentioned yet again, in terms of being a mayoral

candidate. The Conservatives will be saying their vote held up reasonably

well in London, they were not that far behind Labour. UKIP have said

they will stand a candidate in every constituency, but we didn't see in

London the same sort of search result for them in the rest of the

country. `` the same sort of surge.

Outside of the capital and the Liberal Democrats did manage to

retain their MEP in the south east region, which includes Surrey,

Berkshire and Buckinghamshire. This was despite a strong showing from

UKIP, where Nigel Farage was one of four MEPs elected. UKIP also did

well in the eastern region, which includes Hertfordshire and Essex,

winning three seats. The Greens will be disappointed as they just missed

out on a seat here even though they polled over 8% of the vote.

Meanwhile one borough has still not declared its final result from last

Thursday's local election. The count in Tower Hamlets was suspended at

three o'clock this morning and won't start again until tomorrow. The

delay has been caused because ballot papers for the Bromley South ward

have to be recounted. At the moment, Tower Hamlets First Group and Labour

have 18 seats each. The Conservatives have four. No party

has overall control. In other news, a man has appeared in

court charged with arson and murder after a 49`year`old man was stabbed

in his flat in New Barnet. At first, police thought Antonio Tommaso died

in an accidental fire. But a postmortem examination showed he'd

been stabbed and that his flat may have been set fire several days

later. Daniel Asubo, who's 30 and from Barnet, will appear at the Old

Bailey on Wednesday. The Thames Tunnel was once known as

the eighth wonder of the world. In Victorian times, hundreds of

thousands of Londoners flocked to see it, amazed at how they were able

to walk beneath the river. These days it's no longer a tourist

attraction. In fact the public rarely get to see it. Charlotte

Franks reports. Welcome to the eighth wonder of the world, this is

the first tunnel underneath the river anywhere in the world. This

underground passage is the birthplace of the tube system, it is

the Thames Tunnel which runs between Rotherhithe and Wapping and it was

designed and engineered by Marc Brunel and his son, Isambard. It

opened in 1843 with the screams of excitement and delight of 50,000

visitors. Built originally for horse and carts, the tunnel was to be an

alternative to the already overcrowded River Thames, but access

was too difficult for anything other than pedestrians so it soon became

more than just a means of getting from a to B. This was the world's

first underwater banquet hall, shopping parade and fairground.

Business men and women used the structure of the tunnel to their

advantage. These archways were shops, selling hundreds of items to

people walking north and south. They bought trophies ` after all you

would need proof that you had ventured beneath the River Thames.

It was a great feat of engineering, no one believed it could be made. It

was the first shield driven tunnel in the world but the process was

risky. Brunel came up with the idea of what a tunnelling shield, it had

workers in cells and they would do to our shifts and would have to come

off because the gas was so much they were almost collapsing. It is now

used by London overground trains carrying over a million passengers

every day, and a structure that people once thought was impossible

has left an important legacy. Now the weather with Georgina

Burnett. What a way to finish off the bank

holiday weekend and it is not looking too much better for the rest

of the week. We hold onto that showery rain tonight, quite a lot of

cloud around and underneath that, a fairly mild night with temperatures

only down to around 11 Celsius. We have rain pushing into the east

coast this time so we will have some showers spilling over from that in

eastern parts of London in particular. A cloudy day tomorrow,

but the best of the sunshine will be in the afternoon if there is any at

all, and that is when we will see temperatures up to 16 Celsius. Where

we hold on to the cloud, as you can see at Saint James Park, only 12

Celsius. We have a wet and cloudy week ahead, the temperatures will be

up in the high teens but only if we get sunny spells. Starting to look

better by the weekend. That's it. I'll be back later during the ten

o'clock news, but for now from everyone on the team have a lovely

evening. Goodbye. Good evening. If I were to conduct a

straw poll about the weather events today, I suspect we would get a

split decision. There were significant differences around, we

have sunshine and some warmth, but also this cloud and rain coming up

through the Channel into the north of England. On top of that, some

showers in the north-west, some of them thundery from Northern Ireland

and Scotland, so a real eclectic mix. This will drift away over