Britain's Blair faces last electoral test

London, May 3: Prime Minister Tony Blair faces the last electoral test of his decade in power today, a vote that could set Scotland on course for a referendum on independence from Britain.

Blair's Labour Party is expected to suffer heavy losses in the elections to local councils, the Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly as the Iraq war, political scandals and discontent with public services cost the party support.

The result could be a bitter farewell for Blair, the Labour Party's longest-serving prime minister, who is expected to announce next week he will leave office by July.

The local council elections will measure Conservative leader David Cameron's progress as he attempts to build his centre-right party into a force that can challenge for national power again after 10 years in the wilderness.

''I think its going to be a bad night for Labour,'' Wyn Grant, politics professor at Warwick University, said, predicting Labour could lose several hundred council seats.

But the main focus will be on Scotland, where opinion polls suggest a nationalist party that wants independence from Britain could oust Labour as the biggest party in the Scottish parliament, ending 50 years of Labour dominance in Scotland.

That could allow Scottish National Party (SNP) leader Alex Salmond to rule in coalition in Scotland and put in practice his plan for a referendum on independence in 2010.

An SNP breakthrough would be a setback to Blair, who backs England's 300-year-old union with Scotland. Labour hoped to defuse calls for independence by setting up the Edinburgh parliament in 1999 with limited powers over Scottish affairs.

Headache For Brown

It would leave finance minister Gordon Brown, a 56-year-old Scot who appears certain to succeed Blair as prime minister, with the headache of how to manage potentially difficult relations with an SNP-led Scottish executive.

A poll in the Guardian newspaper on Wednesday showed the SNP lead over Labour narrowing in a sign that Labour attacks on the SNP's independence plan were having an impact.

It also showed a majority of Scots opposed independence.

In the local council elections, the Conservatives -- who held power nationally for 18 years before Blair won the first of three election victories in 1997 -- are set to do well in their prosperous heartlands in the south of England.

But they are having difficulty extending their reach into northern cities, such as Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle which have no Conservative councillors at all.

The Conservatives lead Labour by up to 7 points in opinion polls but most show them falling short of the 40 percent threshold seen as essential if they are to stand a real chance of winning the next parliamentary election, expected in 2009.

Blair is expected to announce he is stepping down a day or two after Protestant and Catholics begin sharing power in Northern Ireland next Tuesday, drawing a line under three decades of violence in the province.

That will open the way for a seven-week Labour leadership contest, but Brown is expected to face no serious challenger.

Reuters>