THE crushing defeat of labour in the county council elections was a reflection of people's antipathy towards the government, the party's former Wycombe branch chairman has said.

Labour were pushed into fourth place behind Ukip in this week’s ballot with only 5.9 per cent of the vote.

The Conservative party retains overall control of the council with 46 seats in just under 50 per cent of the share while the Liberal Democrats came second with 11 seats and 28 per cent.

John Barlow, now the Labour agent for Wycombe, said: " I have no doubt that when people vote locally they think nationally whatever goes on a national parliamentary level as a major influence at local level.

“The Labour Party has difficulties at the moment and that was reflected on the door step when we canvassed voters.”

He said voters had left Labour in no doubt the strength of feeling against them.

“If anyone says it’s not a bad result for Labour then they’re insane aren’t they? There’s no point looking at it any other way - it’s a really bad result,” Mr Barlow said.

“Grassroots labour membership - they’re the ones knocking on doors doing all the hard work.

"When people like that hear that MPs are on the fiddle and they know if they did it in their job they would get the sack you start wondering why are you bothering?”

Mr Barlow said although he hoped the reason for the result was not because every party in power reaches a natural end point where people want change, he conceded that this this may partly to blame for Labour’s poor showing.

“If you look at it over the long term there’s an up and down of the two major parties.

"There's been 12 years of labour and there was 18 years of conservatives so you can see a block of Tory and a block of labour.”

He said the rise of Ukip did not come as a shock.

“It doesn't surprise me because people have been looking at MPs over the last few weeks and I think the small parties are a way of registering a protest.”

He does not believe it was unfair that candidates the county council were judged by their national counterparts' actions and said "that's life".

He added he expected a high number of spoiled ballot papers would be revealed - if these were counted - as another way voters decided to express dissatisfaction.

"I wouldn't mind betting has been as a substantial increase and I totally sympathise with that," he said.