Local elections: Ukip delivers first tremors of political earthquake
Nigel Farage weakens Labour's grip in north as Tories lose control of flagship councils and Lib Dem vote collapses
Nigel Farage poses for photographs near Biggin Hill, south of London, before voting in Thursday's local elections. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images
Ukip has delivered the first tremors of the political earthquake promised by
Nigel Farage as the party weakened
Labour's grip in its northern heartlands and caused the
Conservatives to lose control of at least eight flagship councils.
Labour pulled off coups by winning David Cameron's favourite London council, Hammersmith and Fulham, and Cambridge, as well as looking set to take Merton and possibly Croydon. But outside the capital, it struggled to make expected gains in key targets such as Swindon and Portsmouth, while losing Thurrock to no overall control because of a surge in Ukip votes.
Farage also ate into Conservative strongholds, causing the party to lose control of eight councils, including Maidstone, Southend-on-Sea, Castle Point, Basildon and Brentwood - the constituency of
local governmentsecretary Eric Pickles.
By 6am on Friday, with 100 of the 172 councils up for election in England and northern Ireland still to declare, the Tories had lost 93 seats, Labour gained 74, the Lib Dems lost 72, Ukip gained 84, the Greens gained one and other parties were up seven.
The results of the European parliament elections, which also took place on Thursday, will be announced on Sunday.
The biggest collapse in the share of the vote appears to be for the Liberal Democrats, which lost Portsmouth council.
Ukip did not appear to have broken through in London, where it was polling in single digits, but the party experienced a huge surge to more than a third of the vote across some wards in Essex and big cities such as Sunderland, Birmingham and Hull, where it previously had little or no presence. In Rotherham, Ukip is the official opposition after winning 10 seats and ousting several prominent Labour councillors including the deputy leader of the council.
Wakeup call for Labour
John Healey, Labour MP for Wentworth and Dearne, said: "It's a message for all the political parties: wake up. People are angry. They are saying they aren't hearing enough of what they feel in what we are politicians are saying."
He added: "For me today was compounded when I was out knocking on doors and one man, a lifelong Labour voter, said to me: 'John, I'm voting for Ukip today. You all need a kicking'."
In Labour target seats further south and east, such as Portsmouth, a strong Ukip vote was destroying the party's hopes of making more than 400 council gains.
The leader of the Labour group in Portsmouth, John Ferrett, said Ukip's performance was "causing mayhem". The party also suffered a major blow in a key election battleground after the Conservatives held on to Swindon council, days after Ed Miliband embarrassingly failed to recognise the name of the party's group leader in the borough.
But the man in question, Jim Grant, insisted that Miliband's gaffe had not had an impact on Labour's disappointing showing in the Wiltshire town.
"That's a big media event, I don't think it has affected what has happened here. I'm a big fan of Ed but we've all got to work harder to get our message across."
Labour had hoped that the council would at least slip into no overall control. In fact, the Tories ended up with 30 seats to Labour's 23 and the Lib Dems four.
Both the Conservatives and Labour will have to think deeply about whether they can win back the Ukip vote, with some rightwing Tory backbenchers urging Cameron to think how they can reunite the centre-right through some form of Ukip-Tory pact.
Early results this morning indicated Miliband will face intense criticism over the next 48 hours, including over his personal performance and his appeal to working-class voters. The inquest will focus on whether his campaign strategists realised early enough that Ukip posed a threat to Labour as much as to the Conservatives.
Labour MP Graham Stringer, a longstanding critic of party leaders, issued a savage attack on the quality of the Labour campaign saying it was "unforgivably unprofessional", and asked why his aides had been unable to tell Miliband the price of bread.
Liberal Democrat wipeout
The Lib Dems began bracing themselves for a poor performance, in a sign of how the burden of pain is being shared across Westminster. The business secretary, Vince Cable, admitted it was going to be a difficult night for the junior party in the coalition.
He said the Lib Dems would take a "kicking" for being in government as he appeared to distance himself from Nick Clegg by saying that the party leader had decided to focus the Lib Dem campaign on the EU. Speaking on Sky News, the business secretary said: "The party leader took the gamble of fighting a European election on the issue of Europe, which is a very unusual thing to do in the UK. We'll see."
Cable said that all the main parties would suffer poor results. But he added: "We are in government. We take a kicking for the things that government does that are unpopular. It does reflect on us."
He said he had not been comfortable about forming a coalition with the Tories. "We put personal preferences aside and deal with it professionally … We have done massive things in government, we have risen to the challenge."
One longstanding critic of Clegg, the former Lib Dem MP Lembit Opik, called for him to go as the very first results showed the party's vote had collapsed, even though it was holding some wards in Lib Dem constituencies in Birmingham and Redcar.
Lynne Featherstone, the Lib Dem international development minister, said Ukip's "stunning success" was a protest at the dissembling of the political class. She added: "We are so guarded and so on message that we have lost our humanity. We are the whipping boy of the coalition."
The established parties will have to endure a drawn-out agony as the trickle of overnight
local elections results turns into a flood, while the European election results are not due until Sunday night.
Tories look towards Newark byelection
Cameron, once thought likely to face the most turbulent backbench response of the three party leaders, was increasingly confident that the Conservatives would not turn in on themselves, but would instead focus on winning the Newark byelection on 5 June, caused by the resignation of former Tory MP Patrick Mercer, in a bid an attempt to show that the Ukip bubble could be burst.
But the prime minister will have to endure the possibility that Ukip will be able to claim on Sunday night that it has achieved their main political objective of winning the poll in the European parliamentary elections.
Local elections: Ukip delivers first tremors of political earthquake | Politics | theguardian.com
