The main stand at the town's famous racecourse was chosen for the count and it gave as much excitement as the final furlong of the St Leger.

Recounts, bundle-checks and then totting up second preference votes took a marathon eight hours to see Labour cross the winning post with a total of 25,364 votes - just 689 ahead in what turned out to be a runaway two-horse race.

Mr Davies had embarrassed Labour in Ed Miliband's back yard four years ago when he was the surprise winner of an election for executive mayor that had seen the candidate wearing a red rosette canter home well ahead of the field at the previous two ballots held in 2002 and 2005.

The blunt right-winger bounced into office with a cost-cutting agenda which included his own salary and what he called "politically correct" spending on the town's gay pride event and translation services for residents who could not speak English.

He was often outspoken and his farewell speech shortly after hearing he had lost did not disappoint as he took a last sideswipe at the way local politics works.

"I will tell you a couple of things that I will not miss," he said. "I will not miss the council meetings which were horrendous in the extreme for the most part.

"I will also admit for the first time publicly that I will not miss attending Sheffield City Region and LEP meetings which are as boring as it comes and I tell you Doncaster does not really need Sheffield."

As he left the stage one ecstatic Labour supporter tweeted: "The four year night Mayor is over".

But many in Doncaster clearly do not share that view. His avuncular, no-nonsense attitude clearly struck a chord.

Labour threw the kitchen sink at this election with Ed Miliband and virtually the entire shadow cabinet turning out to canvass and knock on doors for their candidate, but the party was pushed all the way to the finishing post by the sitting mayor, who stood for re-election as an independent with a tiny band of activists handing out leaflets for him.

New mayor Ros Jones vowed the town would be run differently now.

But will things be as simple as that?

The issues, which have seen Doncaster such a difficult town to govern, stretch back much further than the four-year term of Peter Davies.

Problems with the strategic management of its children's services department could see it become the first council in England to lose that responsibility.

It is six years since the local government standards watchdog the Audit Commission expressed its concerns about the town's ability to govern itself.

By the time Peter Davies was elected, Whitehall commissioners were installed to oversee virtually every decision taken by him, his cabinet and the council.

A few months before the election it was revealed that the commissioners would be in place for at least another two years.

It is going to be quite a task for the new Labour Mayor Ros Jones is to regain that political ground.

He sent back a two-word reply: "Scargill alive".

Since then the former union leader has remained inside his Barnsley home with the curtains drawn. The press have been camped outside but he has not uttered a single word in public on the death of the Iron Lady.

Others have not been so reticent.

In Grimethorpe on the evening of her death I popped into a pub whose landlord was once an underground worker and NUM branch chairman at the pit which once dominated the economy of the South Yorkshire village.

Bitterness not forgiveness

The pit is long gone, but the bitterness remains. There was a celebration party in full swing.

There was no forgiveness from a room full of ex-miners who will never cease to believe that Margaret Thatcher destroyed their lives by provoking the year-long miners' strike in 1984, then dismantling the coal industry.

But it did not take much effort to find a completely different view. Business leaders and Conservative MPs from Yorkshire were queuing up to sing the praises of someone they consider rescued Britain from economic oblivion when she took office as prime minister in 1979.

During a live programme on BBC Radio York I mentioned that Arthur Scargill had decided some years ago that if he outlived his sworn political enemy then on the day of her death he would refuse to comment.

A businessman taking part in the broadcast immediately piped up that he did not want to hear from a man who had done so much to create the sort of industrial strife that only a figure as strong as Margaret Thatcher was able to overcome.

The enemy within

And in a specially-convened House of Commons debate, Philip Davies, the Conservative MP for Shipley in West Yorkshire, said Margaret Thatcher had inspired him to become a politician.

He went on to say he deplored the fact that a rebellion by senior figures in her own party forced her to leave office in 1990. They were "people not fit to lick her boots", he said.

Even the fact that Parliament had been recalled from its Easter recess to debate the life of the 20th Century's longest-serving prime minister opened up wounds.

South Yorkshire Labour MP John Healey refused to attend saying it was an attempt by the Conservative party to stifle a considered debate on a highly-controversial figure.

He pointed out that the seven hours of parliamentary time allocated contrasted with the single hour MPs devoted to a discussion of Sir Winston Churchill after his death in 1965.

Ken Capstick, the man who exchanged those short text messages with Arthur Scargill, has a simple view on why even the death of Baroness Thatcher, so many years after she left office, will never soften her image in Yorkshire pit villages.

A striking miner himself and later the vice president of the Yorkshire area of the NUM, he told me: "Any community opposing the policies and views of the Iron Lady in her pomp was labelled the enemy within. That's an insult that will never be forgotten".

Greg Clark, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury and Minister for Cities, said how important it is for economic growth that local people take control of public spending in their areas.

It was virtually a word-for-word repeat of a short clip from an interview I recorded for the BBC with Richard Caborn back in 1995.

At the time Richard Caborn was the MP for Sheffield Central and an influential voice in the economic policies being put together by the relatively new Labour leader Tony Blair.

After Labour swept to power a couple of years later nine Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) were set up across England with their own budgets so decisions on how the money could be used to drive growth could be business-led and local.

Yorkshire Forward, the Leeds-based RDA, finished up with a budget approaching three quarters of a billion pounds and a staff running into hundreds.

The RDAs were one of the first casualties of the incoming coalition government's spending cuts and its drive against what many Conservatives dismissed as "unaffordable quangos".

So is this another chance for the opposition to wag their fingers at a coalition economic U-turn?

Well, as with all government announcements throughout modern political history, it is always a "new initiative" even if it does sound like the embarrassing recycling of a previously discarded policy.

This latest attempt at devolving power and spending away from Whitehall comes as a result of Lord Heseltine's report "No Stone Unturned" commissioned by the Chancellor George Osborne and published just before Christmas.

There are significant differences between the Heseltine approach and the former Labour government's RDAs.

Firstly, the word "regional" is never used. The power and the budgets would be administered "locally" by the 39 business-led Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) set up as a "more efficient" replacement for RDAs by the incoming coalition government. .

Secondly, the LEPs will not have what was dismissed by Conservative politicians in particular during the 2010 General Election as the "bloated" budgets of the old RDAs.

Déjà vu again?

The plan is for each of the LEPs to be allocated £500,000 to draw up a strategic plan for growth. In 2015 the government will then put all the money it currently spend in the regions into a "single local growth fund" which will allocate funding based on the individual plans.

Another bit of déjà vu for me. Back in 1994 I reported on the then Conservative government's launch of a similar combined pot of public spending which was to be administered by locally-based civil servants.

Anybody remember the Single Regeneration Budget? Thought not.

The Yorkshire MP's proposals provoked tens of thousands of people to post comments on the Facebook and Twitter sites of Look North, his local BBC regional TV news programme. It was by far the most feedback on any single issue in the programme's history.

Now the Tory MP, who represents the seat of Elmet and Rothwell near Leeds, has decided to withdraw the bill he introduced in the House of Commons at the time, but this is far from the last we have heard from him on the matter.

Mr Shelbrooke told me he has widespread support from ordinary people and has been unfairly portrayed as a right-wing Tory who believes idle scroungers should be stopped from living a life of unearned luxury.

His view is that benefit claimants will be far better off if they are unable to buy what he calls "NEDD items"- things that were, in his words, "non-essential, desirable but often damaging".

He also feels that there has been a lot of deliberate misinterpretation of his proposals particularly by benefits campaign groups and Labour politicians.

"I made it clear this would apply to all claimants in work and out of work, and would cover all benefits other than disability payments and the basic state pension," he told me.

"Yet time and again I have seen criticism based on how this will degrade the lifestyles of groups that I specifically exclude from my proposal."

This week his bill was due to be debated again by MPs but when I rang him for a progress report he told me it had been withdrawn for technical reasons.

Bills proposed by backbench MPs rarely have a chance of becoming law unless taken up by government or opposition and allocated time for full debate and votes by MPs.

Without that backing, Mr Shelbrooke says he had no alternative but to pull the plug on his bill but believes there is so much support for it from "the man in the street" that he will relaunch his campaign in the spring.

And the idea is not without powerful political admirers.

The Pensions and Benefits Secretary Iain Duncan-Smith revealed that his department has been looking at the possibility of issuing a card rather than cash for benefits, but only to what he called "problem families" who are having difficulty managing their finances.

"Glad to see @DenisMacShane is not to be charged. Decent guy. Good sense prevails"

I had never heard of the person who posted the information in the first place but it had come to me because it had been re-tweeted by someone I have followed very closely for a long time.

That re-tweeter was Denis MacShane himself.

It took one phone call to Scotland Yard's press office to discover that Denis MacShane the disgraced former Labour MP for Rotherham in South Yorkshire, still has questions to answer.

By coincidence, on the same day those tweets had been posted, police had taken a decision to reopen a 22-month criminal investigation dropped last summer because at that time no evidence of fraud had emerged.

Within weeks, after consistently declaring his innocence to that police inquiry, Denis MacShane admitted in a letter to MPs on the Parliamentary sleaze watchdog, the Standards and Privileges Committee, that he had submitted bogus invoices in order to claim around £7,500 in expenses.

Mr MacShane, who has paid the money back, said he had made no "personal gain" but admitted that he had been "foolish" and should take responsibility for his actions by standing down.

Clearly, the man who was once Tony Blair's Europe Minister, had no idea of the enormity of the scandal he had sparked off or the consequences he faced.

In its later report the Standards Committee called it the "gravest case" it had ever investigated.

It demanded an unprecedented 12-month suspension from the House of Commons.

In fact, the punishment handed down by his fellow MPs left him with little alternative. In November 2012 he resigned the safe Labour seat he had held for 18 years.

Angered by this new evidence obtained by the Standards Committee, Philip Davies, the Conservative MP for Shipley in West Yorkshire, demanded the police reopen its investigation.

But there was a problem. All evidence to Select Committees is given under the cloak of parliamentary privilege. It cannot be used in a court of law.

That was not good enough according to Philip Davies, who said: "If someone has committed an offence then they should face the full force of the law and to be protected by parliamentary privilege is most unsatisfactory."

In the three months since Denis MacShane stood down police and the Crown Prosecution Service say they have studied the Standards Committee's report and as a result detectives will re-examine the evidence.

Neither has given precise information on how that decision has come about but a clue comes from the chairman of the Standards Committee, Kevin Barron, the veteran Labour MP for Rother Valley which is right next door to the Rotherham Constituency.

"Denis MacShane's letter to the committee cannot be disclosed under parliamentary privilege" he said. "But perhaps the same cannot be said about the invoices themselves."

Denis MacShane has made no comment on these latest developments. Not so much as a tweet.

The drab 1970s concrete markets complex and adjacent shops and offices were among dozens of abandoned or failing commercial and industrial sites across the country bought up by the previous Labour government's Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) over the past two decades.

Local councils believed they would be given the land for redevelopment and expected that to be the case even after the incoming coalition government abolished the RDAs in 2010.

So earlier this year when Barnsley's Labour-led council put together a consortium with commercial partners to start a £125m project to bulldoze and rebuild the town centre it got a shock.

"We were told in no uncertain terms that we would have to pay the full market value for the land or it would be sold off to somebody else," council leader Steve Houghton told me.

"It was vital for the future of a development which will boost the economic prospects of the town. We had no choice but to pay."

In 2010, along with all the other RDAs' assets, the Barnsley's market complex was transferred to a new government organisation, the Homes and Communities Agency.

Councils have since been spending millions buying back some of this property to develop and many of them are now claiming this means the taxpayer paying twice for the same land.

Conservative and Liberal Democrat politicians have a different view.

"I don't think the taxpayer would be impressed if the land was simply given away for free," Conservative MP for Selby and Ainsty Nigel Adams told the BBC's Sunday Politics for Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.

"You have got to remember that some of this land was bought years ago and will have increased in value. That would be an unfair windfall for some councils."

David Ward, Bradford East's Liberal Democrat MP, pointed out that many of the properties had been bought up by the RDAs simply because the only alternative was to abandon them to years of dereliction.

"I have long taken an interest in the future of the old Odeon Cinema in my constituency. It has been offered to Bradford City Council for just a pound," he said.

"But it has already had £100,000 spent on it and still needs more investment. Many other sites could even have a negative equity value. I don't think councils would want all those to be passed on to them."

The Homes and Communities Agency for Yorkshire confirmed that it was not allowed to give councils the property, but denies any of the money has been reimbursed to the Treasury,

"So far we have re-invested every penny from sales into sites we are developing ourselves or in partnership with commercial businesses or in some cases other local councils," the agency's Yorkshire executive director David Curtis told me.

He showed me around the Tower Works, an historic Victorian manufacturing site in Leeds which had been left as a dilapidated site in the 1990s.

Here the agency has spent £5m turning it into starter units for small businesses in the media sector.

Back in Barnsley and York that undoubted success story is cold comfort to two cash-strapped local councils paying millions for property they thought the taxpayer had already bought.

Now her planned sale is provoking a national outcry and the lady is certainly not going quietly.

This week there was even a debate in Parliament and Culture Minister Ed Vaisey made it very clear he is not happy about the move.

'Old Flo' is really the Henry Moore masterpiece Draped Seated Woman which the West Yorkshire sculptor made as a tribute to the ordeal suffered by Londoners as they huddled in shelters during the lethal air raids of World War II.

Moore had been living and working in the East End himself through the Blitz so he thought the figure should be seen by the people who shared that experience.

In 1962 he sold the 1.6 tonne bronze to the City of London County Council at the knock-down price of £7,500 and 'Old Flo' was put on display on an East London council housing estate.

In 1999, tormented by vandalism, she temporarily moved to the tranquillity of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, but it was always assumed a safer permanent public home would be found for her back in East London.

That was until earlier this year when Lutfur Rahman, the directly-elected mayor of Tower Hamlets, the modern day council for the area, announced he wanted to sell the bronze for an estimated £20m to boost the borough's cash-strapped budget.

He claims the council cannot afford to transport, site and insure the masterpiece, so it would be better to auction it off to the highest bidder.

However, even his own local councillors and the Tower Hamlets MP say he is wrong. They worry it could finish up in a foreign collection and the both the Museum of London and a University College have offered to provide a permanent home.

In the end a legal challenge over its ownership could end the argument. Moore sold the work to the old City of London County Council. It was replaced by the Greater London Council, which itself was dissolved in the 1980s.

So is the fact that its original display site was on land now owned by the modern Borough of Tower Hamlets enough to give its mayor the right to sell it off?

For the first time Culture Minister Ed Vaisey has stepped in saying any auction cannot go ahead until that dispute is settled.

In this week's parliamentary debate called to discuss the future of the Moore masterpiece he revealed he had taken the unusual step of directly explaining his view to Christie's, the auctioneers commissioned to start the sale process.

The minister admits the final decision on the statue's future is in the hands of its legal owners and government has little power to intervene.

But now the sale has been put on hold until that ownership dispute has been resolved it is looking as though 'Old Flo' will be staying in her temporary country home in West Yorkshire for some time to come.

The MP for West Bromwich is on a crusade to ensure the recommendations of the Leveson Inquiry are not ignored by the government.

That comes as no surprise.

He was a leading member of the Culture and Media Select Committee whose investigation ultimately led to the setting up of the Leveson Inquiry in the first place.

As a result he says every other MP on the committee became the target of a no-holds-barred campaign to discredit their personal reputations by the News of the World.

"As soon as we started asking questions about hacking the word went out to get anything on us. Were we gay, having affairs or alcoholics?" he told the meeting in Sheffield last week.

"We were all followed; our dustbins rummaged and detailed intrusive checks made on our personal backgrounds.

"How can elected members of parliament be treated like this simply because we were carrying out our democratic duties?"

Legal curbs

He agrees that a reformed Press Standards Commission should have statutory powers to curb the excesses of the press.

"It was the collective failure of public institutions that allowed journalists to believe they could get away with hacking the mobile phone messages of a missing 13-year-old child," he said.

His audience were in no mood to disagree. They came forward with a stream of their own ideas that went way beyond the Leveson recommendations.

They suggested the licensing of newspapers; journalists forced into compulsory membership of a professional standards body and legally enforceable sanctions against anyone straying from acceptable standards of taste, decency and truth.

It was at this point, as a professional journalist for more than three decades, I floated my own contributions to the debate.

They sank without a trace.

I pointed out that, after being exasperated by what it called the "frequent abuses" of the press, Parliament had introduced licensing in the past.

That was in 1662 when it passed the Licensing of the Press Act. A century later it was repealed and has never been repeated. Britain has rightly been proud of its open and free press ever since.

The list of countries with a history of licensing and regulating newspapers in the past makes uncomfortable reading: Stalin's Russia; Franco's Spain and apartheid South Africa to name but three.

Matt Flinders, the Professor of Governance at Sheffield University, abandoned his normal conviviality to put me in my place.

"The very idea that statutory regulation will lead to Britain being transformed into the equivalent of Mugabe's Zimbabwe is laughable," he said.

His deep concern is that the constant scathing criticism by the press of anybody in the public eye is dangerously suppressing democracy.

"Only people with skins as thick as a rhinoceros will stand for public office," he said.

"That is not what I consider to be good for a healthy democracy. We need a wide range of people from all sorts of backgrounds as MPs and councillors. The press are blocking that from happening.

"We already have regulation of the broadcasters and nobody sees that as a problem."

Tom Watson, who stood up to the ferocious campaign to discredit him before the truth over hacking came out was clearly the night's hero. Who was the zero? Remember there was only one in the room with a press card.

There is no way I could possibly say that about Simon Copley.

That's because he's an ordained clergyman who was so angered at the scandal of his local MP Denis MacShane wrongfully claiming expenses that he's putting himself forward as the "honesty candidate" to replace him.

The likeable clergyman is out to make a point but even he was surprised to find a national bookmakers giving him better odds for the South Yorkshire seat than either of the two candidates standing for the coalition parties.

"I don't usually bet but it might be worth a flutter," he told me.

It's unlikely the bookies are going to lose their shirts. Neither Conservatives nor Liberal Democrats have come anywhere near winning this seat in the eight decades it has returned a Labour MP. They came second and third in the 2010 general election but they were a very long way behind.

Labour inherits a 10,000 majority, but is still taking no chances.

The party's national executive engineered what it called a "clean break candidate". It refused to shortlist a local Labour councillor and provoked an unprecedented walkout by supporters of a local Rotherham councillor who had been seen as the favourite to become the candidate.

That embarrassing split lasted just a few hours, with the rebels now saying they've made their point and are out supporting Sarah Champion who has made her name in the town as chief executive of a local children's hospice.

Even so, Labour is pouring in support with no fewer than eight MPs turning up for a single campaigning event - including all three winners from by-elections held just 48 hours earlier in Manchester, Corby and Cardiff.

UKIP and Respect are also fielding high-profile women as their candidates.

But Respect will still be relying heavily on its winner from the Bradford West by-election earlier this year. Former Fleet Street journalist Yvonne Ridley, who has stood for the party in the past, will be described on the ballot paper as the Respect (George Galloway) candidate.

UKIP has chosen its regional organiser Jane Collins as candidate. She hit the headlines in 2011 when she unexpectedly came second in a by-election in the neighbouring Labour stronghold of Barnsley. UKIP's vote across the country has been growing but the anti-EU party has yet to win anything in Yorkshire since its seat in the European Parliament in 2009.

The far-right BNP is fielding the candidate who took 10% of the vote in the 2010 general election against Denis MacShane. But anti-immigration candidate Marlene Guest is struggling under a double handicap.

A large chunk of her party's activists have defected to the English Democrats over the past few months and, of those that remain, not a single one would agree to be filmed pushing pamphlets through letterboxes.

The rest of this long field is made up of the English Democrats, a Trade Union Socialist, another independent and someone calling himself Clint Bristow, who has not described himself as anything on the official nomination papers.

He's Brian Bristow, the South Yorkshire organiser of the far right campaign group the EDL.

The Electoral Reform Society has forecast as few as one-in-five of the electorate will bother voting.

That could be a tad optimistic judging by the reaction I got on the streets of Barnsley with less than a week to go before the polls opened to choose the £85,000-a-year commissioner for the South Yorkshire force.

Few of those I buttonholed in the town's outdoor market had any intention of voting. I did not find a single one who could tell me the name of a candidate.

It is not as if Barnsley is one of those places where voting has gone out of fashion.

At the parliamentary by-election just 18 months ago 36% of voters turned up at the polling booths or sent in their postal ballots.

That was considered a very low turnout at the time but could now be a dream scenario for the PCC candidates across the entire country.

Barnsley's bewilderment was increased when I asked my randomly-selected shoppers if they had any idea that they will be able to put two crosses on the ballot paper.

Eyes glazed over as I explained the "Supplementary Vote" system which will be used to vote in our commissioners.

"If nobody gets more than 50% of the vote on the first ballot then the top two candidates will go to a run-off. That's when the second preference votes come into play. Of course, you don't have to make a second choice if you do not want to support any of the other candidates," I explained.

By this point most people had staged their own run-off, suddenly remembering they were in imminent danger of missing their bus. I suspect even the ones who had come to town by car gave me the same excuse.

So not that many heard me continue.

"If the candidate you put as first choice gets through to the run-off then your second preference is not counted. All the other second preferences are added to the totals of the top two candidates and the winner is the one with the most votes."

Across England just North Yorkshire and Staffordshire will be using the traditional "first past the post" system where the winner simply has to have the most votes. That is because just two candidates are standing in those areas.

I had just one Barnsley shopper who stayed around long enough to ask me the obvious question.

Why are we using this system?

Well, the theory is that a "Supplementary Vote" system makes it fairer for a smaller party or an independent candidate to have a chance of winning.

For public elections it has been used just once in Yorkshire. It resulted in the then little-known English Democrat Peter Davies being elected as Mayor of Doncaster in 2009.

How will they deal with the increasingly loud calls to discipline, suspend or even sack their chief constables?

West Yorkshire's Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison is under scrutiny for his role 23 years ago in the police operation at the Hillsborough disaster and its aftermath.

Sir Norman, who was a senior officer with neighbouring South Yorkshire at the time, says he did nothing wrong and his conscience is clear.

At the same time David Crompton, the relatively new chief constable of South Yorkshire, faces strong criticism from MPs over allegations that his force has ignored evidence of the widespread grooming and sexual exploitation of young girls by organised gangs.

He admits the force has made mistakes in the past but has been finding it difficult to convince a powerful committee of MPs that the force is improving.

Police and Crime Commissioners will have the power to take action against poorly performing chief constables - including replacing them.

As far as members of the Hillsborough Family Support Group are concerned that is exactly what the new commissioner for West Yorkshire should do with Sir Norman Bettison.

Trevor Hicks is one of them. The businessman from Giggleswick in North Yorkshire lost his two daughters Sarah, then 19, and 15-year-old Victoria in that fatal crush.

He told me that he has spent the past two decades "being disbelieved" as one of the most vocal advocates of the group.

The families have always claimed fans had been cynically blamed for causing the disaster, and a systematic cover-up had shielded gross mismanagement by the police.

Now official paperwork locked away for all that time has proved the families right.

Trevor believes a new investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission will show Sir Norman Bettison, at the time a senior officer in the South Yorkshire force, is one of those responsible for those years of injustice.

It's a charge Sir Norman utterly denies.

"I'm glad Norman Bettison has realised his position is untenable", he told me when we met outside the Houses of Parliament a couple of hours after the Attorney General had announced he was asking the High Court to quash the "accidental death" inquest verdicts on all 96 victims.

For Trevor Hicks that was a vindication of the campaign by the families but it is far from the end of the matter.

"I want to make sure he does not escape scot free. I will keep campaigning until he goes and is stripped of his knighthood," said Mr Hicks.

David Crompton, the South Yorkshire chief constable, was recently under the steely glare of Keith Vaz, the Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee of MPs.

Summoned to appear at its October meeting, he was told in no uncertain terms that the committee was finding it difficult to accept his reasons for the force's poor prosecution rate for the shocking crime of grooming and sexual exploitation of young girls by organised gangs.

As the meeting went on he became visibly more uncomfortable.

Mr Crompton has been ordered to write a report and give a better explanation.

That should be landing on Mr Vaz's desk within days of South Yorkshire's first Police and Crime Commissioner taking office.

It will be interesting to see what happens after that.

It has colourful and high profile candidates in Labour veteran Lord John Prescott and outspoken UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom.

Yet on paper the Conservative Matthew Grove has a slender head start with a cushion of 25,000 more votes polled for his party's candidates across the police authority area at the 2010 General Election than Labour accumulated.

Previous party political voting history could have less impact in these elections. Both of the independent candidates declared so far say police and politics should not mix.

Walter Sweeney was once a Conservative MP in a Welsh Constituency. The youngest candidate, 32-year-old former soldier Neil Eyre, has never stood in any election in his life.

The Liberal Democrats have also had internal debates on whether they should take part in an election for a post many members say should never have been created in the first place.

The Leeds teenager had been offered a two-year apprenticeship as a technician with the National Health Service to start in September.

Sheridan himself admits he has never been amongst the most academically gifted students.

But both he and his teachers were confident that he could achieve the marks in his GCSE examinations to qualify for the college course that was an essential part of the apprenticeship.

He got all the marks he needed in his crucial Science, Mathematics and English exams but his dream was still shattered.

With no warning the examination board AQA decided to increase the level of marks it required when it awarded grades for its GCSE in English.

His "C" became a "D" and his offer of an apprenticeship was withdrawn.

"I feel angry," he told me as he sat alongside his worried dad Mark at their home in the Middleton district of Leeds.

"I got the marks but then they changed the grading. It's unfair."

Sheridan is not the only one holding that view.

"Students deserve to get the grade that they've earned," says John Townsley, the tough talking head of two West Yorkshire academies.

He believes AQA awarded too many "A" to "C" grades when some students from the same age group chose to take their GCSE English exams earlier than their classmates in January.

As a result those sitting the papers in the summer had to get higher marks to gain the same grades.

"We believe that they have been robbed of that opportunity through the maladministration and unprofessionalism of one of the key awarding bodies," he told me.

John Townsley's angry analysis of this GCSE fiasco must have echoed around the corridors of the Department of Education 200 miles away in Whitehall.

But so far Secretary of State Michael Gove has not commented.

In the past the Education Secretary has been quick to use John Townsley as an example of a "superhead" whose leadership can dramatically improve state schools.

Now Leeds City Council has joined head teachers and teaching unions to discuss taking legal action.

That view is spreading.

North Yorkshire County Council issued a statement saying there was "something wrong" with the GCSE English results this year.

The official watchdog Ofqual, the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation, has launched an investigation.

On its website AQA, no stranger to controversy, insists it was not the only examination board to raise the marks required for GCSE English grades this summer.

"Our boundaries changed by between 0 and 3 marks in order to maintain national standards," it states.

AQA points out that across the country the proportion of the 280,000 or so gaining a grade "C" or above fell slightly from 64.8% to 63.7%.

It is a statistic that has put a shadow on young Sheridan Sidlow's working life before it has even started.

All this at a time when there has been a worrying increase of young people Not in Education Employment or Training - the so called, NEETS.

The August figure for the Yorkshire and Humber Region issued by the DHSS shows a record 138,000, almost a fifth of all under 24 year olds, are now in this position.

I was interviewing him against a back drop of largely drunken men waving banners and chanting foul-mouthed racist abuse at a rally organised by the far-right English Defence League in the West Yorkshire town of Keighley.

"Tony", who admitted he was giving me a false name, had a ready answer when I asked if their language and behaviour was acceptable for a Saturday afternoon political rally in a town where many British Asians live.

"That is really unfair," he told me.

"It's not about race. It's not about colour. It's about culture."

"Every time you get a big group of people together you'll get every side of the spectrum from mild and moderate to guys who are drunk who might hijack it to say something that it's not."

The articulate 20-something is a spokesman for the tiny far-right British Freedom Party which is the political arm of the EDL.

Only about 150 had turned up from across the north of England but, even with this relatively small number, West Yorkshire Police took no chances.

Uniformed officers lined the route from the railway station to the small, open green between a church and the town's covered market where it had been agreed that the rally could take place.

More officers, including mounted police, ensured the event stayed where it was supposed to be.

Even then it took many more, including mounted police, to snuff out several violent attempts to break out onto nearby streets.

At least two arrests were made.

Many of the EDL supporters were also ordered to pull down their trade mark hoodies and ski masks which hid them from the watching police cameras.

"Tony Smith", the Bradford organiser of the EDL's political arm - the obscure British Freedom Party - eventually admitted his surname was Sutcliffe and that they were forced to protect their identities.

"I believe that's because people are scared to be labelled racist; to lose their jobs; to have their neighbours associate them with something that they're not.

"So in some instances the alcohol and the frustration take over. They can be labelled a demon, a Nazi, a racist - that's not the case."

Clearly, many take a different view.

On the same day as the Keighley rally it emerged that Leeds City Council had sacked one of its staff who had been exposed by a national newspaper as an EDL supporter and prominent contributor to far-right web pages.

Chris Knowles, who worked in the school governor support team in the children's services department, told the BBC that he not broken any laws and his dismissal breached his civil liberties.

In a statement Leeds City Council said that after an investigation it was found that his views were incompatible with the multicultural policies which every member of staff has to follow.

The EDL was spawned in Luton in 2009 but over the past two years West Yorkshire, with its high proportion of British Asian families, has been targeted for its marches and rallies.

A couple of weeks earlier I had filmed at a much bigger EDL in Dewsbury.

The movement's joint national leader Kevin Carroll addressed well over 500 supporters.

He too flatly denied the EDL is racist.

"We are concerned about our culture being overrun by Muslims," he told me in an interview for BBC Look North.

"It's not about skin colour. We just want the growing influence of the Muslim faith to stop. What is racist about that?"

The Dewsbury rally resulted in six arrests for alleged public disorder offences as EDL supporters tried to break out of the cordon.

It also led to a policing bill estimated at half a million pounds.

Kevin Carroll intends to capitalise on his mounting experiences of police operations.

He has announced he will stand as the British Freedom Party candidate in November's elections for the Police and Crime Commissioner for Bedfordshire.

His manifesto boasts he will put a stop to what he claims is the "two-tier" favouritism of Muslims by the authorities and an immediate reversal of cuts to police funding.

Abolitionists would take a completely different view if it was their son, daughter, mother or father who had been brutally murdered.

Richard McCann begs to differ. Richard, now in his mid-40s, is the son of Wilma McCann.

In the early hours of Thursday, 30 October 1975 she became the first victim of the Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper.

Richard was five at the time and losing his mother in such tragic circumstances came close to destroying the rest of his life.

It was as an adult that he picked himself up and is now one of the country's most successful professional inspirational speakers.

Thirty-five years later I met him at a public debate broadcast as part of BBC Radio Leeds' Crime and Justice Week.

Richard told me that despite his loss at the hands of one of the country's most notorious serial killers, he could never support bringing back hanging.

"For me life should mean life as in a whole life sentence as in the case of my mum's killer," he said.

Peter Sutcliffe is in prison and it is thought he will never be released.

"But I 100% don't believe in capital punishment. If we go down that route then we are on the level of the killers."

As far as most voters are concerned he is probably in a minority.

According to the latest opinion polls, over 60% of those questioned would like to see capital punishment reintroduced in the United Kingdom.

A significant minority of MPs agree.

One of them is Philip Davies, Conservative MP for Shipley in West Yorkshire. He is a staunch supporter of capital punishment.

This week cameras from the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Sunday Politics programme followed him to Florida.

Just three years before the UK was gearing up to make abolition of capital punishment permanent in 1979, Florida was voting to reintroduce it.

Since then 73 murderers have been put to death in Florida. Two of them were executed by lethal injection this year.

The Yorkshire MP visited death row at the Florida State Penitentiary.

He even recorded an interview in an electric chair, now a museum exhibit, which was once the main method of execution.

"I feel remarkably comfortable about sitting here," he told Sunday Politics reporter Spencer Stokes.

"You have to think what those people have done to be sitting in this chair and I feel remarkably cool and confident that this is the right system of justice."

First, I went to Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire to interview the Floods Minister Richard Benyon. He confirmed the government is cutting spending on flood defences by 6% over the next four years.

Then I rang the Association of British Insurers to see whether that has any effect on its "statement of principles" - a temporary agreement with government to keep on issuing cover in flood-hit areas where they have suffered massive claims.

The statement runs out in June 2013 and talks are at a critical stage to hammer out a replacement agreement.

The answer was blunt. They want "effective spend on flood defences to manage the risk".

I topped the whole thing off with comments from the prime minister in a report for BBC Sunday Politics for Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.

David Cameron, also visiting flood-hit West Yorkshire, warned he would "robustly negotiate" to ensure insurance companies "did what it says on the can and provide insurance for floods".

As politicians and insurance companies wrangle, the fears of concerned residents caught in the middle are growing.

One of them is Jason Taylor of Darfield, near Barnsley. He showed me waterproof door covers and air bricks just installed at his home by contractors paid for by the Environment Agency.

It has been a long time coming. The ground floor of Jason's modest terraced home was virtually smashed to pieces by flood water five years ago. His insurance company paid out £51,000 to put it all back together.

Now Jason cannot afford to get flood cover.

"Just one company even gave me a quote," he told me. "They wanted £1,100. How on Earth can I afford that?"

Before the floods the average cost of home and contents insurance in his street was around £200.

The insurance companies say the Environment Agency has to reduce the risk of flooding by building more flood defences.

In Jason's case, the Environment Agency put the risk of the nearby River Dearne bursting its banks as a "one-in-75 year event" just after the floods.

Five years on things have got worse. It is now estimates it as a "one-in-25 year event".

Labour says the position is far worse than the government admits.

At a 'floods crisis summit' organised by the party in Hull, Shadow Environment Secretary Mary Creagh said the figures have been massaged. She puts the budget cuts at nearer to 30%.

Hull's three Labour MPs say replacing the insurers' statement of principles is essential.

Hull was hit so hard in 2007 the city's Labour MPs claim insurance companies would stop issuing cover without it.

On his tour of Hebden Bridge, Richard Benyon insisted negotiations are progressing well and an announcement is expected "soon".

The master orator blew Labour away in a West Yorkshire heartland it had held for 40 years to win by an astonishing 10,000 votes.

There was not much false modesty on display as he stood on his open-topped bus at the victory rally and announced it was the "most sensational by-election victory in political history" and it would herald a "Bradford Spring".

But his promises that the city would be swamped by Respect councillors in the May local elections resulted in just five joining the 90-strong council chamber.

By any standards it was a good performance from candidates who had never stood for election before.

One even took the scalp of the veteran Labour leader of the council, Ian Greenwood.

But they failed to achieve their ambition of holding the balance of power.

What few of the headline writers seemed to notice was that Labour was also making gains away from the inner city wards where Respect has its strongholds.

Labour finished up with 45 of the council's 90 seats and the party picked up where it left off by governing with the support of the three Greens in the city.

It has had to find a new leader in former Cabinet member for regeneration, David Green, but it is clear that as far as he is concerned it is business as usual.

"Respect is like all the other smaller parties, including the Liberal Democrats who now have just a few more councillors," he told me when I interviewed him for the BBC's Daily Politics programme.

"We will be listening to what they say but we will be running this city based on the Labour manifesto on which we fought the election."

Ruqayyah Collector, who took the city's Central ward for Respect admits she is "disappointed" that her party did not finish up with more councillors.

"We will be the awkward squad," she told me.

"Our role will be to ask the questions that out constituents feel need answers."

This isn't the first time George Galloway has made the headlines with Respect.

After 22 years as a firebrand left wing Labour MP in Scotland he was famously kicked out of the party for denouncing its policies on Iraq.

He founded Respect and in 2005 he squeaked home in London's Bethnal Green and Bow seat with his now familiar anti-war campaign.

He was in the news again a couple of years later by making what many thought was a somewhat misjudged appearance on Channel 4's Celebrity Big Brother.

George Galloway himself had a completely different view of the value of his time in the Big Brother house.

On the face of it Bradford has been a re-run of Bethnal Green and Bow because Respect also won seats on the local Tower Hamlets Council.

George Galloway's hope is that it will not end in the same way.

In 2010 he abandoned his paper-thin majority and switched to the neighbouring Poplar and Limehouse seat. He came in a humiliating third.

Respect now has just two councillors left in the 51 member chamber at Tower Hamlets Council.

This week she is the Conservative Party poster girl with her picture dominating the party website with her congratulations to the Queen on her Diamond Jubilee.

But how long will David Cameron keep her as Co-Chair of the party and Cabinet member after a 10 day period where she has made two embarrassing public apologies and became the subject of two separate investigations into her conduct?

She will have a lot of explaining to do before she can feel comfortable again in either role.

The former Sayeeda Warsi has had an incredibly fast elevation to the heights of government.

She could easily have been consigned to the ranks of would-be MPs after a spectacular failure to win her home town seat of Dewsbury in 2005.

After a badly-advised campaign the young solicitor not only failed to take the key West Yorkshire marginal but became one of the few Conservative candidates in the entire country to reverse the national swing towards her party.

Despite that, new party leader David Cameron elevated her to the House of Lords and she was one of the first names on his 2010 list of potential Cabinet members in 2010.

That really came as no surprise to journalists like me who had followed her political career since she was first selected as a candidate.

She worked hard to shrug off the disappointing electoral defeat and turned herself into a highly effective, tireless attack-dog for the Conservatives, without losing any of her natural amiability.

But her move to high office did not shelter her from a series of high profile public blunders leading to questions about her judgement.

Even before the dust had settled on the 2010 election she gave an interview to a leading political periodical claiming the Conservatives had failed to win an outright majority because Labour had retained several marginal seats through "electoral fraud".

Despite repeated requests she had never named the constituencies or put forward any evidence.

Two years on and the House of Lords Standards Commissioner is now investigating allegations that she claimed overnight expenses for a few weeks in 2008 when she was actually staying rent free in a friend's house.

She flatly denies the charge but it has to be asked how a former professional lawyer could even put herself in a position where suspicions are being raised.

Then came those embarrassing apologies.

First for the "oversight" of not telling the House of Lords authorities that she is receiving rental income from a flat she owns in London.

Then for failing to mention to the Cabinet Office that she was on business with a relative who joined her on an official visit to Pakistan.

David Cameron has asked his special advisor on ministerial interests to report.

There might well be an innocent explanation for these admitted lapses by a phenomenally busy Cabinet minister and senior party manager.

But if Baroness Warsi has so much trouble sorting out her own affairs there are plenty now asking how she can manage those of both her party and her country.

In 1895 it was where 21 clubs met to form the professional Rugby League allowing players to be paid for the first time.

This week there was another groundbreaking meeting about how much a high profile group is worth.

For the first time a 40-strong official 'Citizens' Jury' gathered to deliver a verdict on the pay and pensions of MPs.

MPs can draw little comfort from the results of their deliberations which can be summarised as follows:

MPs should not be tightening their belts just yet because the Huddersfield citizens' jury verdict is not in any way binding.

However, it will be a powerful piece of evidence for the new body which has been set up to decide how much MPs will be paid in future.

IPSA, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, emerged from the reputational wreckage of the scandal of MPs' expenses.

Self-regulation, with MPs themselves voting on expenses, pay and pensions was clearly not going to be acceptable any longer.

Since 2009 IPSA has set up a more transparent framework for MPs' expenses and is now looking at putting in place a formula for future levels of MPs' pay and pensions.

"For the first time in history the public will have a voice on MPs' pay," I was told by Ken Olisa.

He is one of the five-strong board of IPSA which will make the final binding decision next spring.

"That is why it is important we ask as many of them as possible to participate."

Huddersfield will play a pivotal role in this because it is the only town in the North picked to hold a citizens' jury.

Just one other will be held in the south of England.

"Why Huddersfield?", said Ken.

"It has a strong liberal tradition; it is an important community in West Yorkshire; and its profile is a good cross section of society."

This is the BBC's Question Time - but not as we know it.

The entire production of Schools Questions and Answers has been researched and fixed by a team of teenagers.

The broadcast is put together using the same equipment and technicians as the BBC's longest running television political discussion programme, but is being broadcast as a live webcast on the internet.

Cardinal Heenan Catholic High School in the Leeds suburb of Chapel Allerton won the chance to produce this "junior" version of Question Time by being one of the winners of a national competition run by the BBC.

After sitting through the event I think the term "junior" ought to be ditched.

The panel certainly found it no less probing than the long-running original version.

The Yorkshire teenagers had a clear agenda that pulled no punches: the iniquities of email and online "snooping"; unaffordable higher education and why is the political elite made up of "toffs"?

"I think they do sometimes take into account what young people say," said 16-year-old Henry Theakston.

"But not enough. They are mostly focused on the older generations. We, and people slightly older than myself, tend to feel a bit lost."

Henry Theakston, one of the team from the school whose presentation to the BBC won it the chance to put on their own programme, was speaking to me just before he became the school's representative on the panel.

He was in powerful company.

Sitting alongside him was George Galloway, the new Respect MP for Bradford.

Rising Labour front bench star and Leeds West MP Rachel Reeves; Anna Soubrey, the outspoken Conservative back bencher for Broxtowe in Nottinghamshire, and senior Liberal Democrat MEP for the North West region Chris Davies made up the rest of the panel.

Veteran BBC Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark chaired the meeting. She was full of enthusiasm for schools to take part in the competition and watch the programme.

"I think it's important that it is a webcast as well. We should be using all sorts of technologies to have programming that can reach all schools," she told me.

"The idea that it's live around the country with more than 200 schools taking part is fantastic.

"I think politicians have got a long way to go to energise the youth vote."

The need for action was highlighted by the Hansard Society just a few days before the webcast when it published its latest Audit of Political Engagement.

The educational charity was set up in 1944 to promote parliamentary democracy in the UK and has regularly reported on the issues of falling political interest in the young.

A MORI poll for the society reveals just 39% express any interest in politics.

Only 27% say they are "certain to vote".

Just before the May 2012 local government elections the government's Electoral Commission warned that 56% of 17-25 year olds are not even registered to vote.