Prime Minister Tony Blair faced the final electoral test of his decade in power on Thursday, a vote that could set Scotland on course for a referendum on independence from Britain.
Blair’s Labour Party is expected to suffer heavy losses in the elections to local councils, the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly because of discontent over the Iraq war, political scandals and the performance of public services.
Poor results would provide a bitter farewell for Blair, the Labour Party’s longest-serving prime minister, who is expected to announce next week he will leave office by July.
The local council elections will measure Conservative leader David Cameron’s progress as he attempts to rebuild his centre-right party to challenge for national power again.
”Labour needs a good kicking. They are too proud, they’ve been in too long and they think they can’t do any wrong,” said John Fraser (71), who runs a Christian community centre in the northern Scottish city of Aberdeen.
Fraser, who does not want Scotland independence, said he voted Labour last time but picked the Conservatives on Thursday.
Polls suggest a nationalist party that wants independence from Britain could oust Labour as the main party in the Scottish Parliament, ending 50 years of Labour dominance in Scotland.
That could allow Scottish National Party (SNP) leader Alex Salmond to rule in coalition in Scotland and put in practice his plan for a referendum on independence in 2010.
A survey of 1 137 voters in Scotland by market research agency YouGov showed Salmond’s party would win 45 seats in the Parliament, making it the biggest party ahead of Labour on 39.
Headache for Brown
Labour backs England’s 300-year-old union with Scotland and had hoped to defuse independence calls by setting up Edinburgh’s Parliament in 1999 with limited powers over Scottish affairs.
An SNP breakthrough would leave Finance Minister Gordon Brown, a 56-year-old Scot who appears certain to succeed Blair as prime minister, with the headache of how to manage relations with an SNP-led Scottish executive.
The Conservatives held power nationally for 18 years before Blair won the first of three election victories in 1997, and they are set to do well in the local council elections in their prosperous heartlands in the south of England.
But they are having difficulty extending their reach into northern cities, such as Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, which have no Conservative councillors at all.
In the southern English town of Dartford — one of Cameron’s top target seats and an area viewed as a bellwether for the general election — the mood was mixed.
”We come from a working-class background in south London and try to look critically every time we vote,” said Don Welch (72). ”The Labour party, in spite of some its failures, has got a social conscience and that’s what gets my vote.”
The Conservatives lead Labour nationwide by up to seven points in opinion polls. But most show them short of the 40% threshold seen as essential if they are to stand a real chance of winning the next parliamentary election, expected in 2009. — Reuters