MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

UK protest vote dumps Labor and Tories take London

Gordon Brown has confirmed Tories are ready for the come back

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is under pressure from his party to restore his credibility after delivering Labour's worst election results in at least 40 years. In his first electoral test as PM, Mr Brown lost nine councils and 333 seats and saw Labour's Ken Livingstone edged out of power in London after eight years.

The Prime Minister is expected to take to the airwaves over the next few days to accept blame for Labour's poor showing and assure voters that he is ready to make good on his promise to "listen and lead". Results confirmed May first forecasts with Labour becoming the third party, behind 44% for the Conservative opposition led by David Cameron and the Liberal Democrats 25%, in Thursday municipal council elections in England and Wales. Brown has clearly paid a heavy price not only for the credit crunch but also for the unpopularity of economic policy, like the elimination of the minimum tax bracket which hurt the poorest earners. Senior Labour figures acknowledged that the party needed to change to pick itself up off the floor after its drubbing, which Cabinet minister Ruth Kelly described as "a terrible result for Labour - worse than anyone in government expected". Minister for London Tessa Jowell, who ran the Livingstone campaign, said Labour had to "get out of the Westminster village" and re-engage with ordinary people's worries about the impact of economic downturn on their families. Health minister Ivan Lewis warned: "The danger is after a long period in government, you look like a new elite - you don't look like the voice of the people in Westminster, you look like the voice of Westminster to the people. "We have got to be the party that speaks to the concerns of hard-working families and relates to their everyday pressures... The message is, not just to Gordon Brown but all of us at Westminster, that we have to shape up." Labour's 24% projected share of the national vote would cost up to 200 seats if repeated in the general election expected in 2010. Justice Secretary Minister Jack Straw tried to make the best of the "May massacre" or Brown's "bloody nose" from the electorate ss the defeat was described by the British media. Mr Straw said that voters had wanted to "punish" Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Labour for scrapping a 10p tax rate. "Those it has affected, it has affected adversely and those people are understandably very upset about why it is that a Government that has cared and continues to care very much about lower-paid people should be doing this". "What we have to do is actually maintain the strategy that we have followed because it is a strategy that has produced much more effective management as a whole over the last 11 years," he said. While he insisted that Labour could go on to win the next General Election, he appeared to indicate that Mr Brown would now wait until the last possible moment in 2010 to go to the country. "I am very clear that the situation in two years time will be different from where we are today" he said adding that "there are plenty of Governments that lost the degree of vote that we lost in London and then went on to win a General Election after that. "When you come to a General Election what people are doing is applying themselves directly to who should form the next Government and I think the choices will be very different from what has unquestionably been partly a protest vote in the mid-term".