Britain's Brown punished in local elections

By Katherine Baldwin and Sumeet Desai

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's ruling Labour Party suffered its worst local election defeat on record on Friday, forcing Prime Minister Gordon Brown to rethink his strategy to avoid losing the next national election.

Labour was braced for an even bigger drubbing as pundits and even government ministers predicted the party would lose the prized London mayoral post to a resurgent opposition Conservative Party. The result is expected late on Friday.

Contrite Labour ministers and lawmakers said the government had failed to address Britons' fears of rising food and energy prices, higher mortgages and a possible housing market slump.

The question now is whether Labour can recover before the next general election, due by mid-2010 at the latest, or whether the tide has turned towards the Conservatives.

"People are sending a clear and strong message. There's a lot of dissatisfaction. If we deal with it we can turn things around, if we don't we'll go down," Labour lawmaker Geraldine Smith told Reuters.

Brown enjoyed a brief honeymoon with voters after he took over but he has since been beset by economic turmoil, industrial unrest, administrative blunders and an image problem.

With almost all the results counted from local councils in England and Wales, Labour had lost 310 councillors and the Conservatives had gained 252, a damning verdict in Brown's first electoral test since he succeeded Tony Blair in June.

The Conservatives had won a 44 percent share of the national vote versus 24 percent for Labour and 25 percent for the Liberal Democrats, according to BBC predictions -- Labour's worst share of the vote since comparable records began in 1973.