May 02, 2008	Friday	Rabi-us-Sani 25, 1429

LONDON, May 1: Voters went to the polls on Thursday in local elections in England and Wales seen as a key test for embattled Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

The polls include a high-profile contest for the mayor of London, where incumbent Ken Livingstone of the governing Labour Party is facing a stiff challenge from maverick Conservative member of parliament Boris Johnson.

Some 13,000 candidates are fighting for more than 4,000 seats on 159 municipal councils in England and Wales as well as the 25-member London Assembly.

Labour has seen support plummet to its lowest since Margaret Thatcher’s heyday in the late 1980s since Tony Blair stepped down last June, and the local polls are seen as a harbinger for general election within two years.

The capital is a big political prize: its mayor controls an annual budget of more than 11 billion pounds and his decisions affect 7.5 million Londoners plus millions more who visit.

“I think its going to be very close. We have got to get all the voters out.

What we don’t want is people voting for a change for the worst,” said

Livingstone, arriving to vote near his home in northwest London.

Victory for the Conservative Party over Livingstone would be a symbolic boost for the centre-right Tories at a time when they are riding high in the opinion polls.

A third consecutive four-year term for Livingstone, however, could reassure centre-left Labour that their recent dip in form is only temporary and they can recover before the country goes to the polls sometime before May 2010.

Brown has himself recognised that the government has faced a hard time as the impact of the global credit crunch begins to bite, hitting the housing market and economic growth, alongside rising food and fuel prices.

Political analysts predict that Labour will do well to better their performance the last time the seats were contested in 2004, when they came third in the national vote equivalent with a 30 per cent share of the vote.

There was widespread opposition to the use of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to prop up the Northern Rock bank, which collapsed in the wake of the global credit crunch and was later nationalised.

The government’s abolition of the 10 per cent tax threshold has also caused outrage in the Labour ranks, with claims the party had abandoned its core principles of helping the most needy in society.

The London poll contest has proved the most high-profile, focusing sharply on the personalities of the two charismatic candidates.—AFP