Politics: Labour heads for little local difficulty

Fran Abrams and David Walker look ahead to Thursday's council elections

LABOUR is preparing for a string of defeats in some of its safest "heartland" councils this week as the Tories try to claw back seats they lost while at their lowest ebb four years ago. The party fears bad news in areas it formerly regarded as rock-solid territory, including Lambeth, Liverpool, Sheffield and Doncaster.

Thursday's elections could prove depressing to Labour despite its popularity. Some polls show a 4 per cent swing to the Government since last May, but that may not be enough to prevent the losses. All seats in the 32 London boroughs are up for re-election, as well as those on the Isle of Wight. A third of seats fall vacant in the 36 metropolitan councils, including Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester, in 88 shire districts ranging from Basildon through Oxford to Worthing, and in nine unitary councils including Bristol, Stoke and Swindon.

A leaked memo to a minister recently described Sheffield, where Labour holds 55 seats to the Liberal Democrats' 31, as "a heartland area with a possibility of loss in 1999/2000."

In Lambeth, which has been beset by corruption scandals, the Liberal Democrats are already the biggest party, with 25 seats to Labour's 22. They hope they may win overall control. Labour might also cease to be the biggest party in Liverpool, where losses have left it with 49 seats to the Liberal Democrats' 41. Labour will retain power in Doncaster, where it holds 58 out of 63 seats, but expects losses as a result of the "Donnygate" councillors' expenses scandal.

The Conservatives hope to regain control of London boroughs such as Barnet, where they are still the largest party but without a majority, and Croydon, where Labour holds power with 40 seats to their 30. They also hope to win back Kingston, Redbridge, Brent and Waltham Forest.

The Liberal Democrats point out that even if the Conservatives were to win back 500 seats that would only put them on the same footing as in 1990, when Margaret Thatcher was beset by poll-tax protests. Polling experts do not believe their performance will be anything like that good.

John Curtice, deputy director of the Centre for Research in Elections and Social Trends, said recent by-election results suggested the Conservatives could gain 200 seats, but the true figure might be nearer to 100. "If Labour comes away from this losing less than 100 seats I think they would be delighted. If they got more than 40 per cent of the vote they would be able to claim to have done better than any previous government has done at this stage of the electoral cycle in the last 20 years," he said.

If there were a swing against the Tories, they could lose even such rock- solid bastions of local Conservatism as Bromley, where they now have a majority of four seats.

Christopher Chope, Conservative Party vice-chairman with responsibility for local government, said his party's canvassers were receiving encouragement on the doorstep.

"I have always hoped that more people would vote on local issues than national ones. That in the end is what local elections are about," he said.

A Labour spokesman said his party would do far better than the Conservatives had done while they were in power. "They had the three worst sets of local election results ever in 1994, '95 and '96. We think ours will be very respectable," he said.

There was also a warning last night that a low turn-out in the simultaneous referendum on a London mayor and assembly would damage the mandate of the figurehead official. The turn-out was widely expected to be even lower than the 40 per cent average for council elections, even in London, but the campaign group London First said anything less than 50 per cent would send a signal that Londoners were uninterested in the future of the city.