BRITAIN: Labour goes into the final week of English local election campaigning against poll predictions of falling support and potentially substantial losses in London.
Despite damaging controversy over job cuts in the National Health Service - and a new row about the release of more than 1,000 foreign prisoners who should have been considered for deportation - the worrying sign for Conservative leader David Cameron is that it is the Liberal Democrats, and not the Tories, who may be the beneficiaries of the Blair government's declining popularity.
However, there was reassurance for all three major parties yesterday with pollster ICM's finding of just 2 per cent support for the far-right British National Party (BNP).
This contrasted with one poll last week suggesting support for the BNP as high as 7 per cent, and a new YouGov survey suggesting that an actual majority back BNP policies while many then disown those policies once they are associated with the party.
The public focus on the BNP followed the remarkable claim by cabinet minister and Blairite loyalist Margaret Hodge that as many as eight out of ten white voters in her Barking constituency in east London are threatening to vote BNP.
Other Labour MPs have similarly warned about a possible "revolt" by traditional Labour-supporting white working-class voters, despite polling evidence that the BNP is more likely to attract Conservative than Labour voters, as well as drawing support from the Lib Dems and the UK Independence Party.
Mr Cameron, has already called on voters in the local elections to support any party other than the BNP, accusing it of "thriving on hatred" and wanting to set one race against another.
With some 23 million people entitled to vote in next Thursday's London, borough and metropolitan council contests, yesterday's ICM poll for The Guardian suggested Labour support falling to the party's lowest level since its 1987 general election defeat - on 32 per cent, two points behind the Conservatives on 34 per cent, with the Lib Dems with a surprising 24 per cent.
The polling was conducted against a backdrop of damaging stories about deficits and job losses in the NHS, and the "loans for peerages" controversy now the subject of a police inquiry.
Tony Blair tried at the weekend to wrong-foot the Conservatives over crime, with a savage attack on critics who claim his government is authoritarian and a threat to civil liberties.
However he has since found himself on the defensive over health secretary Patricia Hewitt's claim that the NHS is enjoying its "best year ever", amid warnings of as many as 13,000 eventual job losses and the threat of industrial action by the public sector union, Unison.
Then, yesterday, home secretary Charles Clarke had to apologise for the fact that between February 1999 and March this year some 1,023 foreign-national criminals - who should have been considered for deportation or removal once their prison sentences were served - had been freed without further action.
The offenders included three convicted for murder, nine rapists and five convicted for sex offences involving children.
The situation came to light after the all-party Commons Public Accounts Committee asked questions about released foreign prisoners.
Mr Clarke conceded: "We simply didn't make the proper arrangements for identifying and considering removal in line with the growth of numbers that there were. That is a failure of the Home Office and its agencies for which I take responsibility."
Lib Dem leader Sir Menzies 'Ming' Campbell said it was "extraordinary" that so many people convicted of serious offences had simply disappeared.
"All the government's tough talk on crime counts for nothing in the face of this incompetence," he said.