No clear victor in Scotland vote

Britain’s Labor Party was facing one of its toughest election challenges in a decade today, after voters delivered what is widely seen as a last referendum on Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government.

Early returns from Thursday’s vote offered few hints of a decisive outcome in a contest likely to determine the future of the Scottish independence movement and provide a window on Britain’s political future after Blair.

Nationalist parties were challenging Labor’s dominance in its traditional heartlands of Scotland and Wales.

And Labor, which two years ago carried Blair to what he had thought would be a full third term, was also fighting a strong challenge from the Conservative Party for local councils across England.

The Scottish National Party has pledged to hold a referendum on independence by 2010 if it succeeds in dominating the 129-seat Scottish Parliament. But with no party jumping to a clear majority, it appeared that any victor would have to form a coalition government.

The nationalists were trailing Labor in early returns marred by tallying problems in Scotland, yet their trends looked better than those for the governing party, prompting both sides to express optimism.

“There is a wind of change blowing through Scottish politics, that is evident, at least, from the results that we have seen so far,” Scottish National Party leader Alex Salmond declared early today after he captured a seat held by the center-left Liberal Democrats with 48% of the vote.

Jack McConnell, the Labor first minister in Scotland, said his party’s early gains made SNP predictions of victory premature.

“I think that is an indication that the signals in advance of this evening from Alex Salmond that they were on course for a tremendous victory were a little bit presumptuous,” he said.

The unpopular Iraq war, sluggish reform of the National Health Service, rising crime among youth and a scandal over peerage appointments have contributed to Labor’s troubles, though the party was fighting back, making substantial investments in public services and buoyed by a robust economy.

With incomplete returns, the Conservative Party was slightly ahead of Labor in England, though not in the opposition’s key target areas, in the north.

“From the results in so far, it would seem that Labor are doing quite a lot better than the worst predictions,” said James Hulme, an analyst with the New Local Government Network, a London-based think tank. The Conservatives, he said, had failed to make significant inroads in key Labor bastions in the north such as Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle.

The SNP had won 13 seats to Labor’s 28 with about a third of the seats counted in Scotland. With a gain of six seats so far, the SNP was potentially poised to be the biggest vote-getter. But Hulme said Labor was still likely to be within range of forming a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, shutting out the SNP, much like the present government in Edinburgh.

Roughly 39 million voters were eligible to cast votes for seats in the Scottish and Welsh assemblies, local councils in Scotland and about 10,500 seats on 312 local councils in England.

Although the regional balloting does not directly affect the national government, it comes just days before Blair is expected to announce the timetable for his departure, and lays the political groundwork for his successor. Any loss of local council seats means a loss of grass-roots party activists for the general election, expected in 2010 or sooner.

Attention during most of the campaign has focused on Scotland, where a steady SNP lead in the polls raised the possibility of mustering political support for independence, an outcome that could put billions of dollars of North Sea oil revenue into play and threaten the 300-year-old union that ultimately created the United Kingdom.

Finance minister Gordon Brown, a native Scot considered the most likely new Labor Party leader and prime minister, spent much of the past weeks on his home turf,

Labor campaigned furiously in favor of maintaining the union and the party’s domination of the Scottish government, and had narrowed the SNP’s lead in the polls by Thursday.

Appealing to voters on the eve of the balloting in his hometown of Kirkcaldy, Brown urged fellow Scots to “come home to Labor” and reject the nationalists’ demands for an independent Scotland outside the United Kingdom.

“With unity and not conflict, with shared purpose and not confrontation, with a focus on education and schools for the future, not on constitutional wrangling, we can ensure we can spend our time focusing on what really matters for Scotland,” Brown said.

The Conservative and Liberal Democratic parties have come out against independence for Scotland, as have a majority of Scots, in opinion polls.

The Scottish National Party, however, has shot to popularity as much by pledging to oust the Labor-led government in Edinburgh as by raising the independence card.

Tom Farmer, a prominent Edinburgh tire entrepreneur who supported the SNP, said fellow partisans were dissatisfied with Scotland’s limited autonomy, established in 1999.

“I think what people were hoping for was a small country that would be lean and light, quick and nimble, that would make things happen very quickly,” he said. “But that hasn’t happened.

“What we’ve seen is a tremendous growth in the bureaucracy and the cost of managing the country,” he said.

But Salmond expressed confidence as the balloting was set to begin.

“This is also the first time in 50 years Labor’s hegemony has been seriously challenged in Scotland,” he said. “Labor do not have a divine right to rule; it is the voters themselves who will decide the future path for Scotland.” The Conservative Party, meanwhile, has viewed the election as a barometer for the next general election, when its young, charismatic leader, David Cameron, is expected to attempt to wrest control of the national government from Labor for the first time since Blair and his party swept to victory in 1997.

Polls show the Conservatives as many as 7 percentage points ahead of Labor if a general election were held today, and Tory leaders were attempting to make new inroads Thursday in traditional Labor territory.

“It’s time to stand up and say, ‘We’ve had enough of Blair and Brown; we’ve had enough disappointment.’ It’s time for change and it’s time for hope,” Cameron said at a campaign stop in the southern English coastal town of Brighton before the election.

The Liberal Democrats were taking some hits in very early returns but were still seen as a possible coalition partner to whatever party takes the largest number of seats in Scotland.

Labor leaders from the beginning said a poor election showing was not an unexpected result of a midterm election, especially for a party that has been in power for 10 years.

“Typically you may have a party in government not doing very well at local elections but then bouncing back at the general election,” Jack Straw, leader of the House of Commons, told the BBC early today.

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kim.murphy@latimes.com