Friday, May 6, 2011

Separatists win in Scotland, Lib Dems sink in UK

Associated Press= EDINBURGH, Scotland (AP) — The Scottish National Party won a majority in Scotland's parliamentary election and its leader promised Friday to hold a vote on independence from the U.K., while in Britain, the Liberal Democrats suffered a massive defeat.
Voters in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland elected members of regional legislatures on Thursday and hundreds of local council seats were at stake around Britain. A national referendum was also held on whether to change Britain's parliamentary election system.
While results were still incomplete Friday, the SNP became the first party since Scotland's regional government was formed in 1999 to win a majority of the 129 seats in the Scottish Parliament. By midafternoon, the SNP had won 65 seats, a bare majority; Labour had 29, Conservatives nine and others five.
Voters appeared to approve how the Scottish National Party has led a coalition government over the past four years and also backed programs to preserve free university tuition and to give the elderly free personal care.
In local elections across Britain, the Liberal Democrats lost 450 council seats even as ballot counting continued. That was a massive defeat for the junior partner in Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservative-led coalition government, and sparked fresh calls for the resignation of party leader Nick Clegg, who is also Cameron's deputy.
The Liberal Democrats lost control of six local councils including Sheffield, Clegg's own town.
"We have taken a real knock last night. But we need to get up, dust ourselves down and move on," said Clegg.
The Conservatives gained nearly a hundred council seats. Cameron, who marked his first year in office on Friday, said his party had "fought a strong campaign explaining why we took difficult decisions to sort out the mess we inherited from Labour."
Inflation has been surging in Britain, despite sluggish growth and harsh spending cuts that are slashing government jobs and hiking university tuition fees.
The parliamentary election system votes were still being counted Friday, but earlier polls suggested that voters would reject changing the system in which the candidate with the most votes wins the seat.
The Liberal Democrats had supported the Alternate Vote system, where voters rank candidates in order of preference. The winner is the first candidate to secure a majority, either in the first round of counting or in succeeding rounds by picking up votes as the lowest-ranked candidates are eliminated.
Despite its worst showing in 80 years in Scotland, the Labour Party just missed a majority in the Welsh Assembly, winning 30 of the 60 seats.
Elsewhere, votes were being counted Friday to determine whether Northern Ireland is led by a British Protestant as usual or by an Irish Catholic for the first time. Final results expected Saturday.
Analysts said Labour's campaign theme that a vote for the Scottish National Party was a vote for independence had backfired.
"I voted for the SNP this time, but I'm not in favor of independence." said Alex Burns, 44, from Edinburgh. "Scotland would have gone bankrupt if it had been outside the U.K. during this economic crisis."
Opinion polls since the 1990s have found support for independence hovering at around 30 percent.
"The SNP have been shown trust by the people in a way no party ever has before in a Scottish election," party leader Alex Salmond said, promising to bring an independence vote in the next four-year term. "We'll take it forward to increase the powers of our parliament."
One question likely to be asked is how Scotland would have fared by itself with the near collapse of two gigantic banks based in Edinburgh: the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group, which were both part-nationalized following the worldwide credit crisis in 2008.
Professor Susan Deacon, a former Labour minister, welcomed the prospect of a referendum.
"It is a nonsense to say that a vote for the SNP is a vote for independence, Labour overplayed that and lost over that point," she said.
guardian.co.uk

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