Blair’s Labor Party Suffers Heavy Losses in Local Elections

Voters in England on Thursday turned apparently innocuous local elections into a stinging rebuke of British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Blair’s Labor government, whose popularity was dented in 2003 by its support for the Iraq war, has faced a barrage of criticism in the last week over the bungled release of foreign convicts, hospital staff cuts and his married deputy’s acknowledgment of an affair.

By 5 a.m. today, with more than three-quarters of votes counted, Labor had lost 231 of the seats it held among the more than 4,300 contested -- many more than the 100 or so it had been resigned to shedding. The party suffered particularly heavy losses in London, a traditional stronghold.

The biggest gainers were the opposition Conservatives, on their first electoral outing under new leader David Cameron, who was keen to prove that his party was on the way back to power. The Conservatives gained 239 seats.

Far-right anti-immigration parties, boosted by the emergence of violent crime committed by foreigners as an election issue, were among smaller parties that also gained ground.

In what appeared to be an attempt to deflect attention from the scale of the reversal, Blair moved forward a planned Cabinet reshuffle that had been expected next week.

His Cabinet colleague Geoff Hoon, leader of the lower house of Parliament, told BBC television that he expected the reshuffle to take place today.

But Labor lawmaker Frank Dobson was quoted on Sky News as saying that any ministerial swaps now would only be “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

Local councils run municipal services -- schools, parking, garbage collection, town planning -- and voting patterns generally reflect local concerns. But with tensions high on the national political stage, Thursday’s poll was seen more broadly as a referendum on the prime minister’s future.

“I voted Conservative,” 45-year-old David Phillips, a lawyer, said as he left a polling station in Camden, North London, which with neighboring Islington lays claim to being the spiritual home of the “new” Labor that Blair modernized in the 1990s. “I wouldn’t vote Labor. I used to think they were either incompetent or corrupt. Now I think they’re both.”

The local election campaign was overshadowed by a flurry of controversies at the national level.

Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott acknowledged having an affair with one of his secretaries. Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt was booed by nurses worried about staff cuts in the subsidized National Health Service. Home Secretary Charles Clarke has spent more than a week fighting demands from opposition leaders that he quit because more than 1,000 foreign convicts were released without being deported and some broke the law again.

Blair has pleaded with voters not to let nine days of bad headlines obscure Labor’s record over nine years in government on issues such as schools, healthcare, the economy and policing. But, as results were tallied, it became clear that voters had not heeded him.

Analysts agreed before the vote that a loss of more than 150 seats would be a hard shock for Labor to absorb.

Nine years after taking power, Blair is facing not only growing disillusionment from the country and a challenge from Cameron, but also a simmering rebellion within his own party. A growing number of Labor lawmakers are calling for the prime minister to make good on his promise last year to stand down before the next general election, expected in 2008, making way for his longtime Labor colleague and rival Gordon Brown, chancellor of the exchequer.

Speculation on how sweeping Blair’s reshuffle would be filled the morning papers. The Guardian daily said Prescott would lose his departmental job running communities and local government but stay on as deputy party chief and deputy prime minister in return for shouldering much of the blame for Labor’s bad night. It also suggested Clarke might be asked to swap jobs with Education Secretary Ruth Kelly.

It was left to an apologetic London Labor election coordinator, Tessa Jowell, to convey national politicians’ regrets to their local colleagues.

“The headlines of the last two weeks have made it very difficult for us and created a noise that has made it very difficult to get over our local election message,” she said. “I am very sorry if local activists feel that they have been let down.”