Britain’s got talons

Next Thursday, voters in the UK’s 12 European constituencies, 27 shire counties and seven unitary authorities will go to the polls in the most extraordinary circumstances. There is, as Martin Vander Weyer argues on page 25, no shortage of local issues to exercise us in the county council elections, just as the unratified Lisbon Treaty ought, in theory, to loom large in the European elections on 4 June. In practice, of course, this so-called ‘Super Thursday’ will be something altogether different: the first true snapshot of public fury at the MPs’ expenses scandal, and a measure of how deep that crisis really is.

Labour is bracing itself for a punishment beating that will make last year’s drubbing — in which it suffered its worst local election results in 40 years, was forced into third place and lost London to Boris Johnson — look like a light swipe with a feather duster. Even those close to Gordon Brown fear an electoral meltdown that will, quite simply, make his continued occupation of Number 10 untenable.