Voters punished Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives in local elections that exposed deep public anger two years into an austerity government that has brought plenty of pain but little gain, results showed on Friday.
Cameron hopes a likely win for his party’s larger-than-life London mayoral candidate, incumbent Boris Johnson, will deliver some positive headlines. But the bigger story was the damage to his own broader electoral prospects.
“People are hurting, people are suffering from the recession, people are suffering from a government that has raised taxes for them and cut taxes for millionaires. I think that’s what we saw last night,” said Ed Miliband, leader of the opposition Labour Party, which was the big winner.
With results of Thursday’s elections declared in 99 out of 181 councils being contested across the country, Labour had gained 470 councillors while the Conservatives had lost 279 and their coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, had lost 129.
“These results, while it’s never a good feeling to lose councillors, are well within the normal range…of mid-term results for government,” Conservative foreign minister William Hague told the BBC, putting a brave face on the results.
But the scale of Labour’s gains could complicate Conservative efforts to win an overall majority at the next parliamentary elections in 2015 as a strong local presence is an important platform on which to build success at national level.
Having failed to win an outright majority in the last parliamentary polls in 2010, Cameron needs to do better next time for his party to have a chance of forming a government without back-up from the beleaguered Liberal Democrats.
NAPOLEON
The coalition government has stumbled from one blunder to another this year, with a deeply unpopular budget adding two years to Britain’s tough austerity drive and cuts in taxes for the wealthy at the expense of the elderly.
Britain slipped back into a recession last week, nearly two years on since the Conservatives and their Liberal Democrat partners took power.
“Cameron needs a radical change in his style of leadership. Until now he has tended to treat the party as his possession rather than recognising that he is only first among equals,” wrote Conservative internet activist Tim Montgomerie in Britain’s Times newspaper.
“You can only act like the party’s Napoleon…if you win elections. You can’t if you don’t,” he said.
Cameron’s best hopes for some good news lay in London, where pre-vote polls pointed to re-election for Johnson. Results are due later on Friday.
The London race was a contest of big personalities between Johnson, an upper-class eccentric with a comic talent, and Ken Livingstone, Johnson’s Labour predecessor as mayor and a stalwart of the London left for three decades.
The outcome of the showdown between the two mavericks, will provide some light relief for the Conservatives. But the London result does not reflect any wider trends and Johnson’s personal popularity will also show up the broader party’s problems.
With turnout a record low at 32 percent, Labour had won control of 22 councils including Birmingham, Britain’s second-biggest city, and the Welsh capital Cardiff, previously the Liberal Democrats’ flagship council.
“BORIS IN EVERY CITY”
For the Liberal Democrats, whose support has collapsed since they went into government for the first time, the local election results in England were the worst in their history. The number of Lib Dem councillors dropped below 3,000 for the first time.
According to a BBC projection, results so far indicate a 39 percent share of the national vote for Labour, up 3 points since the last local elections in 2008 when they were in government and fared very badly. The Conservatives were seen down 4 points on 31 percent, with the Lib Dems unchanged at 16 percent.
As well as the council elections, three cities including London were electing mayors while 10 others were holding referendums on whether to have elected mayors – one of Cameron’s cherished policies aimed at boosting local democracy.
On the eve of the polls Cameron said he wanted to see “a Boris in every city”. But voters in Manchester, Bradford, Coventry and Nottingham rejected the idea of an elected mayor and the omens did not look good for Cameron in Britain’s second largest city, Birmingham, where referendum results were not yet out.
Crunch results still to come included council elections for the whole of Scotland, a traditional Labour heartland where the pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP) was expected to perform strongly. In particular, Labour was struggling to hold onto the city council in Glasgow, its spiritual home.
The coalition parties, both weak in Scotland, were certain to seize on an SNP triumph in Glasgow, should it materialise.
Pundits have also questioned whether Labour’s lead in the council polls will translate into parliamentary election success in 2015, arguing Cameron still has time on his side.
