Separatists gain in Scotland,Tories gain in UK

Voters in Scotland,Wales and Northern Ireland elected members of regional legislatures in Thursday’s vote,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 so that smaller parties could be better represented in the national parliament.

In local elections across Britain,the Liberal Democrats,the junior partner in Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative-led coalition government,lost more than 300 council seats.

There were fresh calls for party leader Nick Clegg,who is also Cameron’s deputy,to step down after the Liberal Democrats lost control of local governments in Bristol,Hull and Stockport,and were no longer the largest party in 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 a few dozen 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.”

The parliamentary election system votes were still being counted Friday,but earlier polls suggested that voters would reject change.

Despite its worst showing in 80 years in Scotland,the Labour Party was close to securing a majority in the Welsh Assembly.

And in Northern Ireland,election workers began counting assembly election votes Friday,with 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 term. ”We’ll take it forward to increase the powers of our parliament.”

Henry McLeish,who led a Labour-Liberal Democrats coalition government in Scotland a decade ago,said Salmond now had a free rein to hold a referendum.

”Let’s have the argument about it,” McLeish said.

One question likely to be asked is how Scotland could have coped by itself with the near collapse of two gigantic banks based in Edinburgh: the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group,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.