International

Labour massacred in local polls

LONDON: Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s 11-month-old leadership was unravelling on Friday after the Labour Party suffered its worst defeat in local elections in 40 years setting the Tories on course to win the next general election in 2009/2010.

And more bad news was predicted for Labour as pollsters suggested that its incumbent London Mayor Ken Livingstone was struggling against his upstart and gaffe-prone Tory rival Boris Johnson. The outcome was likely to be known late in the evening, local time.

While the full scale of Labour’s rout would become clearer only after all the results are known, the message from the two-thirds of the votes counted until Friday afternoon was that the voters had decisively rejected the party. It had already lost more than 200 seats, including many in its traditional heartlands, with its share of the vote set to plunge to an all-time low.

This prompted comparisons with the Tory meltdown in the 1995 local elections under John Major whose government lost the general election two years later.

While Tory leader David Cameron called it a “big moment” for his party as it appeared to overhaul its own expectations after making inroads into a number of Labour strongholds, an embarrassed Mr. Brown admitted that it had been a “bad” result and that his government had “lessons to learn.” Elections were held for 4,000 seats in local bodies across England and Wales.

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