Britain Rebukes Blair in Local Votes

Labor Party Edged Out in Scotland, Hurt in Council Elections in England

LONDON, May 4 -- Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labor Party suffered considerable losses in local elections held Thursday, but the numbers fell short of the disaster that many analysts and polls had predicted. The setback, coming in the final days of Blair's decade-long tenure, was viewed here as a rebuke to the prime minister.

In Scotland, the Labor Party, which has dominated for half a century, fell behind the surging Scottish National Party, which picked up 20 seats in the 129-member local assembly. The SNP, which has promised a referendum on independence from Britain, won 47 seats to Labor's 46.

"Never again will the Labor Party think it has a divine right to government," SNP leader Alex Salmond said, celebrating the victory by the once-fringe party. He said Labor, which had dragged Britain into the unpopular Iraq war, had lost the "moral authority" to govern.

Still, the SNP's margin of victory was slim, and in Wales, Labor lost ground but remained the largest party. In elections for the 10,000 local councils in England, projections put the opposition Conservative Party's share of the vote at 40 percent, with Labor's at 27, slightly above its result in the last local elections but still representing a loss of seats.

"Everyone said we were going to get hammered, there was going to be a rout, but it didn't turn out like that," Blair said. "You always take a hit in the midterm, but these results provide a perfectly good springboard to go on and win the next national election."

Blair is widely expected to announce next week that he is resigning as head of the Labor Party and to set a summer date for his departure as prime minister. Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer, or finance minister, is the front-runner to become the party's next leader. If Brown is elected by the party membership, he will become prime minister when Blair steps down. A general election must be held sometime before mid-2010.

The Scottish election, which had garnered the most attention, was marred by voting problems. As many as 100,000 votes were discounted because of confusion caused by a new ballot system. Voters had two papers to complete, one for the Scottish Parliament and one for local municipal councils, and were to mark X's on one and numbers on the other. Many people marked them incorrectly.

In Edinburgh, a man with a golf club attempted to destroy some ballot boxes, and fog grounded helicopters being used to airlift ballots from remote islands.

"It hasn't been an ideal outcome," said Clark Dunn, a spokesman at Britain's Scotland Office who was interviewed by telephone after what he said was nearly 48 hours awake.

The independent Electoral Commission said that because of the "high number of rejected ballots," it planned to conduct a review of the Scottish elections.

In at least two constituencies, the number of ballots rejected was greater than the number of votes that the winning candidate received, according to an election official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Michael Dyer, a senior lecturer in politics at Aberdeen University, said in an interview: "It's conceivable that someone could contest the results, but not likely. None of the parties are calling foul." The war in Iraq "played a big part" in the SNP's win, he said. "The war has been absolutely awful for the Labor government."

Conservative leader David Cameron called the electoral outcome "exciting" and a "great set of results." Menzies Campbell, leader of the Liberal Democrats, called the results a "mixed bag."

Special correspondent Karla Adam contributed to this report.