UK Local Election Results.

[Arthur_Parker]

Interesting results with Labour coming in third place, largely due imho to broken promises and spin about the Iraq war.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3796497.stm

How bad is it for Blair?
 
Analysis
By Nick Assinder
BBC News Online political correspondent  
 
Only the most pessimistic of Labour managers had expected it to be quite this bad.
With about half the local council results in, the party was heading for one of its worst ever performances.

Tony Blair was facing the real prospect that his leadership will now be a matter of serious debate amongst Labour MPs as they consider the consequences for their own seats in a general election.

The BBC's projections suggest Labour will be forced into third place, in terms of share of the vote, behind Michael Howard's Tory party and the Liberal Democrats.

It will be the first time a governing party has been forced into third place.

And while the prime minister will be gloomily pondering the results, Michael Howard will be claiming he has scored precisely the win he needed to help the Tories build towards the general election expected in a year's time.

It may not have been enough on its own to suggest he could actually win that election.

Central figure

But he had been looking for signs the Tories could get back into the cities and for a "building blocks" performance. And he appears to be on course to get that.

The smaller parties, including the UK Independence Party and the Greens also improved their performance although there was no advance for the BNP.

Party bosses will be waiting for the full results later on Friday, but it was highly likely the trends emerging overnight will be continued.

And by far the most significant result is for the prime minister - even over and above the performance of the Labour Party itself.

Because, as far as many are concerned, it was Tony Blair who was at the centre of this mid-term disaster.

The prime minister knew he was going to be hit, largely because of his position on the war on Iraq and its fallout, but he probably did not expect this poor a showing.

Howard's hope

If he was looking for any crumbs of comfort he will be disappointed. It appeared discontent with him - or at least his decision to go to war with Iraq - was a major factor in the Labour vote.

Ministers immediately attempted to suggest this was all simply a bit of traditional mid-term blues with voters delivering a strong protest vote.

They will insist that the Tories failed to make the sort of breakthrough they needed - particularly in urban areas - to suggest it could win a general election.

And, while Mr Howard will undoubtedly be celebrating his performance, critics will suggest he still has to prove he can do what William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith failed to do by scoring that long-awaited breakthrough.

Similarly, it will be argued - even despite a second place finish in terms of votes - that the Liberal Democrats did less well than they might have hoped, particularly as they had been banking on picking up large numbers of anti-war protest votes.

And of course the news might be better for the prime minister from the London Mayoral results later on Friday where Labour's Ken Livingstone could win. And if opinion polls are true Sunday night's European Parliament results could see UKIP transferring the spotlight to Mr Howard's leadership.

But, in the face of a government defeat of these proportions in the local elections, such grabbing at straws must ring pretty hollow.

All eyes will now turn onto the Labour Party to see whether panic sets in and if these results mark the start of something more significant for the prime minister.

If backbenchers do panic, then things could yet get very much worse for Tony Blair - who was out of the country as the results came in.

There had already been reports that he was ready to stand down if he proved a electoral liability.

Whether he can then get away with simply brushing aside these results as mid-term blues or whether they will spark a leadership crisis in Westminster will be the big question.

[daveNYC]

Standard wisdom in the US is that the incumbent (in the white house) party loses seats in a mid-term election.  Is the same true in the UK when there are local elections, but not general/national level ones?  Or do general and local elections never coincide, so no parallel can be drawn?

[Arthur_Parker]

No, it's the same over here, tactial voting takes place to show displeasure with the current administration.  However the scale of the defeat is unheard of, worst ever results for Labour.  The general election is still liable to go to Labour but a lot of labour MP's will lose their seats so Blair might be removed by them beforehand to reduce the damage.

[eldaec]

While the press is mostly convinced it's all about iraq (and certainly the labour party is desperate to believe that so they have an excuse to get rid of Blair) - it doesn't seem to tally with the detailed results.

If it was just about Iraq then the pro-Saddam parties (Lib Dems, Greens, Respect) would have been the beneficiaries instead of the Tories and the UKIP. Instead the Lib Dems actually managed a net loss in councils controlled.

People who vote Labour don't protest vote for the Tories.

And if the story was mostly about Labour voters staying at home in protest then it's hard to see why turnout rose so much even in non-postal regions.

To me the results simply look like patience running out in a lot of English provincial towns, and in the suburbs of the conurbations. To put it another way, David Brent is now voting Conservative.

The other interesting thing is the results showed a small but significant demographic shift. The distribution of Labour and Tory voters around the UK, combined with an awkward set of boundaries meant that on the voting distribution at the last election, the Tories would have needed 43% of the popular vote for an overall majority of 1 (which iirc is more than any Thatcher, Major, or Blair government acheived), wheras Labour only need 37% (the 97 and 01 'landslides' were no such thing in terms of the popular vote, which was just as close as Major's 'skin of his teeth' 92 victory). I suspect when the numbers are crunched, the change in voting patterns might shift these numbers a couple of % in the Tories favour.

None of this is likely to be enough to put the result of a general election in doubt though. (The share of vote numbers don't really matter on a local poll, since it's only a specific section of the electorate, and the swing here wasn't enough to threaten Blair)