Labour suffered an almost unremitting amount of punishment in the English local election results yesterday.
The losses of 19 councils and 298 seats were not as bad as the nightmare scenarios painted privately by the party on the eve of poll, but they were serious enough to rattle British prime minister Tony Blair and backbenchers, who stepped up calls for him to go.
The party came third on share of the vote with 26 per cent - as bad as 2004 - although ahead of the Liberal Democrats on seats. "If it weren't for the fact that two years ago the Labour Party had done equally badly, we would be talking about an unprecedented disaster," the elections expert John Curtice told Sky News.
The council results revived the spectre of the kind of north-south divide that bedevilled Labour in the 1980s and early 1990s, when the party had virtually no MPs (outside inner London) southeast of a line from Bristol to the Wash.
London voters appear far from grateful to Labour for helping secure the 2012 Olympics - quite the reverse - and George Galloway's Respect party continued to reap the benefits of anger directed against the government over the Iraq war by making gains in Tower Hamlets.
With 23 million people entitled to vote, turnout was estimated down three percentage points at 36 per cent. "Labour risk haemorrhaging support in London and the south rather in the way the Tories did, when they were in power, in the north. I think they need some serious analysis about how the London results were so bad," Tony Travers from the London School of Economics said. He speculated it was caused by "quality-of-life" issues such as transport, crime and the cost of living.
Mr Travers said it was a mirror image of the Tories' problems in the north. It could also present a problem for a future Labour government led by Gordon Brown, a Scot whose appeal is thought to lie much more with the party's Celtic and northern bases.
There were problems in parts of the midlands and the north for Labour. Derby, Stoke-on-Trent, Bury and Redditch slipped out of their grasp. Labour lost six seats in Barrow, five in Newcastleunder-Lyme and four in Warrington.
In Stoke the Labour council leader, Mick Salih, lost his seat and promptly resigned from the party, which he said was a "Tory party in disguise". Several figures on the left blamed New Labour policies for turning voters away, not least to the British National Party.
Bob Crow, Rail Maritime and Transport union, said: "It is clearer than ever that New Labour is turning working-class voters away in droves because it is trying to out-Tory the Tories.
- (Guardian Service)