Big Defeats For Conservatives

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29820, 12 May 1962, Page 11

Bi g Defeats For Conservatives

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copyright) LONDON, May 11. The resurgent Liberal Party and the Labour Party gained sweeping victories at the expense of the Conservatives and independents in town council elections throughout England and Wales yesterday. • In a nation-wide swing to the left, the Conservatives, on the basis of nearly complete results, lost 531 seats and the control of 36 town councils. They gained only 13 seats.

The municipal elections have been followed with especial keenness this year, for pointers on how the country might vote in the next General Election, in 1963 or 1964. Liberals who recently

shocked the Government by capturing its strongly-held Orpington (Kent) Parliamentary seat and nearly winning another at Blackpool—spearheaded yesterday's assault with a gain of 339 seats for a loss of only 12. The Labour Party was fast on their heels with gains of 335 seats for a loss of 75.

Independents shared in the beating suffered by the Conservatives, losing 122 seats for a gain of 53 The Liberals’ mass intervention in yesterday’s contests with 1583 candidates gave the municipal elections a new character.

Hitherto regarded as part of the anti-Socialist front which controls about 70 per cent, of British local government. the Liberals emerged as challengers in their own right both to the Conservative and Labour parties. Labour, on the score of yesterday’s balloting alone, recouped, with a few seats to spare, its 322 loss of seats in the 1959 elections, when the same groups of council vacancies were last contested.

Labour also scored a prestige victory in the balloting for the total re-election of the 28 London metropolitan boroughs by capturing Wandsworth. the only borough south of the river Thames which was controlled by Conservatives. Yesterday's results recalled the big slides of 1947, when the Conservatives gained 652 seats, and 1952, when Labour increased its strength by 640 seats.

In recent years, the exchange has more often been in the region of 250 seats either way, except for 1960 when Conservatives gained 403.

Conservative prestige with voters has Slumped consistently in the recent series of Parliamentary by-elections, and many of the party’s supporters had feared that the municipal elections would herald further reverses.

The present fall in the Government's electoral stock is widely believed to stem mainly from the unpopularity Of its current economic policies—income restraint and a recent neutral budget—with a section of voters.

The sweeping defeat of the Conservative Party was splashed across the front pages of national newspapers today in blazing banner headlines.