Graphic: Labour councils at risk

Labour faces the possibility of being all but wiped out in the South in next month’s council elections, putting a swath of its parliamentary seats in jeopardy at the general election.

Gordon Brown will launch the party’s local and European election campaign today in Derbyshire, one of Labour’s last four counties, all of which could fall on June 4.

Although the four in jeopardy are in the Midlands or the North the Prime Minister will be equally worried that Labour councillors could disappear from a string of counties in the South.

Labour has seen its local government base fall alarmingly since the mid-1990s, when Tony Blair led the party to substantial gains all over the South. In 1996 it had 10,929 councillors and the Tories only 4,276. This has now reversed, with Labour having 5,279 and the Tories climbing to 9,884.

Only three district councils in the South and South East, outside London, are controlled by Labour — Stevenage, Luton and Slough — after a haemorrhage of support from Kent to Cornwall in the past five years.

Local government experts predict that the party could also lose the few seats that it holds in county councils across the South, with Labour on course for its worst results in 30 years.

Buckinghamshire is already a Labour-free council after one councillor defected to the Liberal Democrats last year and the other resigned. But other counties along the M4 corridor and south of the M25 could also lose their rump of Labour councillors.

In Surrey Labour has only two council seats out of 80, in Wiltshire three out of 98 and in Somerset, Hampshire, Dorset and Devon it has four from totals of between 45 and 80.

Tony Travers, local government analyst at the London School of Economics, predicted that Labour would soon be without any activist base in the South. It would find it almost impossible to reverse that in the next five to ten years in either Westminster or town halls. Labour’s demise in the South, he said, would be as drastic as the Conservatives’ freefall in the North in the 1980s and 1990s when they lost the campaigning base vital to get into Downing Street.

“The Tories still have no council seats in Liverpool and Newcastle and only one in Manchester and they have taken over a decade to even start building up an activist base in the North,” Mr Travers said. “Labour is set to experience the same problem and could all but disappear in the South for years.”

Labour’s most marginal parliamentary seats are mainly in the South and would be almost certain to go if the party fails to improve on its present standing. Those requiring the smallest swings to fall include Crawley, Croydon Central, Harlow, Hove, Romsey, Southampton North and Gillingham, Dartford and others in Kent.

Today, however, Mr Brown will be focusing on keeping Labour’s strongholds further north. The Tories are pinning their hopes on seizing Lancashire, Staffordshire and Nottinghamshire from Labour control.

Labour is hoping to hang on to Derbyshire, which would require a 12 per cent swing to switch to the Tories but only 5 per cent to fall into no overall control. The party is also putting a huge amount of effort into campaigning in Lancashire, the Tories’ most likely prize on June 4.

Polling analysts predict that Labour could lose as many as 250 seats, more than half the number it is defending, with the Tories gaining more than 200. The Liberal Democrats, who are expected to win or lose a couple of dozen seats could, however, lose control of two of the three counties they hold in the South West — Cornwall, Devon and Somerset.

The debacle over ministerial expenses could boost the chances of the minority parties, such as the Green Party, UKIP and the BNP, whose affairs have not been covered in recent newspaper revelations.

On the same day as the European and council elections, town hall mayors will also seek re-election in Hartlepool, Doncaster and North Tyneside.

Next month’s local elections will cover 27 county councils and seven unitary authorities, most of which have recently been restructured. The seven are Bedford, Central Bedforshire, Bristol, Wiltshire, Cornwall, Shropshire and the Isle of Wight.

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