Local Elections Seen as Test for Popular British Premier, Party

With everything to gain and nothing to lose, Britain’s beleaguered Conservatives enter local elections today hoping to put a crimp in Prime Minister Tony Blair’s record popularity.

Most analysts say this year’s results in 166 local authority districts can only make Conservatives look better, while Blair’s Labor Party faces voter complacency and charges that the group has become overmighty.

Also today, Londoners will vote in a referendum to give the capital its first mayor, the latest move in a constitutional shake-up by Blair.

Today’s vote in the local districts presents difficulties for each big party.

Twenty years of defeats have left the Tories running just 23 local authorities across the nation, compared with 250 in 1979. The Conservatives also did badly in 1994, when the council seats up for election today were last contested.

A year ago, Labor ousted the Conservative government.

“We expect to see the Conservatives do very poorly,” said Patrick Dunleavy, professor of government at the London School of Economics. “But they will do better than they did in the spring of ’94. So there will be conflicting messages.”

Blair’s party faces supporters who might not bother to vote.

“The main enemy of the Labor Party is not any renewed enthusiasm for the Conservative Party but complacency among Labor voters,” Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott said Wednesday.

Both the Conservatives and the Labor Party face strong challenges from the Liberal Democrats. Labor controls 92 of the districts being contested, the Liberal Democrats 21 and the Conservatives seven.