IN THE North-East, it was a night to be an Independent with a pocketful of postage stamps. And if you couldn't be one of them, it was best to be a Lib Dem.

Thursday night's elections are a continuation of what was started last year by Ray Mallon and Stuart Drummond when they were elected as Independent mayors.

It is as if the people of the North-East have tired of a living under a one-party Labour state and are gradually plucking up the courage to air their disaffection.

They won't go the whole hog and vote Tory, but they will put their cross in a halfway house on behalf of an Independent. And if there's no Independent, a Lib Dem will do.

In fact, the Lib Dems' victories grab the headlines. They overthrew a Labour administration in Durham City which has become the municipal equivalent of Cleveland Police in recent years: always in the headlines for the wrong reasons.

And the Lib Dems cleaned up in York, which Labour had controlled for 20 years. Yet it wasn't just Labour who suffered there. The Conservatives - who nationally did very soundly for their beleaguered leader, Iain Duncan Smith - were wiped off the face of a council that 20 years ago they controlled.

Perhaps the Lib Dems' most astonishing success was in Shildon, County Durham, where they ousted Labour from the town council completely. Undeniably, Labour has spent money transforming the town recently, but local people believe they are paying for it with what they say is the highest council tax rate in the country.

Most intriguing, though, were the gains made by Independents. It was Independents who inflicted the big personal defeats on Labour.

It was an Independent who punished Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council leader David Walsh for trying to find a safe seat in Eston - although with the steel industry in crisis, east Cleveland can barely afford to squander Mr Walsh's talents so vengefully.

It was an Independent who unseated the leader of Sedgefield Borough Council, Brian Stephens, and it was an Independent who unseated Linda Byrne and stopped her taking over as mayor of Sedgefield borough.

In Stockton, the Independents have reduced Labour's majority to one after a blood-curdling bout of in-fighting known locally as Griffingate.

Griffingate led to a breakaway Independent group in Thornaby which won eight seats, and it is rumoured that Billingham - another satellite town that feels Labour doesn't look after it - may now form its own independence movement.

There were little Independent successes wherever you looked. In Hartlepool, for example, a pro-nuclear power station Independent even managed to unseat a veteran Labour candidate.

It is difficult not to wonder whether this is the beginning of a trend.

Even so, the biggest success of all was the postal voting system. All North Yorkshire used traditional walk-in voting; all North Yorkshire recorded lower turnout figures. All south Durham used the post; all south Durham recorded turnouts of 50 per cent or more.

And while this turnout boosted the Independents in their battles with Labour, it also prevented the hate-filled British National Party from gaining a foothold.