Voters handed British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour party a string of embarrassing defeats in municipal elections, seen yesterday as a rebuke to the outgoing leader in his final days in office.
Overall, Labour lost fewer seats than some expected, but the party was still fighting a battle for Scotland against a party promoting independence. David Cameron's Conservatives won hundreds of seats, but fewer than they hoped for in northern England.
A tight contest in Scotland, where Labour has won every election for the past 50 years, saw the Scottish National Party (SNP) -- which has pledged a referendum on independence by 2010 if it wins power -- gaining ground as officials continued to count ballots.
Around 10,000 local council seats were contested in Thursday's elections in areas of England outside London. In Scotland, voters chose representatives for the Scottish Parliament, which sits in Edinburgh and deals with Scotland-only issues. And in Wales, voters elected their national assembly, located in Cardiff.
liability
Blair -- who has said he will formally announce next week he will resign as prime minister -- has claimed three national poll victories since 1997. Some activists concede the unpopular Iraq war and a domestic cash-for-honors scandal have made him an electoral liability.
He said Labour's result was better than expected.
"You always take a hit in the midterm, but these results provide a perfectly good springboard to go on and win the next national election," Blair said.
With results from 133 of 312 English councils counted, Labour had lost 237 seats and control of six councils, while the opposition Conservatives gained 368 seats and control of 22 more councils, to a total of 92. The third-place Liberal Democrats had lost 195 seats and lost one council to a total of 14.
"A great set of results and I think we can really build on them and really go forward, and I think that's exciting," Conservative leader David Cameron said yesterday morning.
After 56 of 60 Welsh assembly seats were declared, Labour had lost seats but still held twice as many as second-place Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party.
In Scotland, with 94 of 129 parliamentary seats called, Labour had won 37 seats and the SNP had 34.
Election officials said they planned an investigation into tens of thousands of spoilt ballot papers recorded in Scotland, fearing people may have been confused by a complex voting system.
`midterm blues
"Overall, what we're seeing are the midterm blues," ex-foreign secretary Jack Straw told BBC television. "That's just a fact of life."
Labour's performance was marginally improved on results in last year's local elections and better than polls had suggested -- though still among its worst-ever election performances.
The Conservatives made some advances -- but failed to gain a single council seat in the northern city of Manchester, deemed a key test of the party's revival and ability to win favor in Labour's traditional heartland.
Leighton Vaughan Williams, political analyst at Nottingham Business School, said the Conservatives had not shown enough progress to suggest they would sweep the next national poll -- expected in 2009.
SNP leader Alex Salmond won a seat to the Scottish parliament for the first time, in the northeastern district of Gordon, telling voters he would combine the role with his duties as a lawmaker in London's House of Commons.
"I am absolutely confident that when these results are counted," Salmond said. "We shall all have to accept that new politics is dawning in Scotland."
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