DownWithTyranny!: U.K. Voters Reject Conservative's Dark, Dysfunctional Austerity Vision

Ed Miliband sounds almost good enough to come over and give a pep talk to American voters in Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan or any number of places that have been taken over by deranged right-wing fanatics in state legislatures and governors' mansions. The leader of Britain's Labour Party just won something like 800 additional seats in town halls all across the country. The local elections this week was very much a referendum on the Conservative Party austerity programs and their junior partner, the Liberal-Democrats, were practically wiped off the map.

As expected, the Scottish National Party made huge gains in Scotland, where they already held a plurality in the Holyrood (Scotland's parliament) and will now rule with an outright majority-- and will be able to force through a referendum on independence. The SNP bested the Conservatives and Labour and pretty much wiped out the Lib-Dems, who are viewed almost everywhere as untrustworthy appendages of the hated Conservatives.

The SNP's landslide was substantially due to a Scotland-wide collapse in Lib Dem support in protest at its coalition in London, with hundreds of thousands of voters switching to the SNP.

The Lib Dems lost former strongholds in North East Fife, the seat held at Westminster by former UK party leader Menzies Campbell, and in Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch, where the previous UK leader, Charlie Kennedy, holds the equivalent Commons seat.

Polls have consistently shown that the economy and the austerity program (social safety cuts) were, far and away, the most important issue to voters. Results Thursday show that voters in Britain, like voters here in the U.S., believe there are viable alternatives to over reaching, reckless cuts that conservatives are rushing through while they are still able to maintain power. Voters understand that the cutbacks in the U.K. have caused economic stagnation and hard time for the vast majority of British families although, again like here, the top 2% are doing better than ever. And like here, Thursday's voters sent a message that tehy're not happy with the Conservative/Lib-Dem coalition robbing ordinary people to pay for a mess made by banksters, especially while those banksters-- and their political protectors-- are still benefiting from their malfeasance. And like the lame Democrats Inside the Beltway, Labour struggled to focus the message away from right-wing and corporatist framing and towards "investment is what will bring the economy back and make for a more equitable society."

Meanwhile Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg is struggling to figure out what to do next. His party lost more than 500 council seats across England alone, and more than 700 nationally. a staggering rejection of the party.

In the first sign that Clegg understands he needs to do more to distance his party from its coalition partners, he argued in a change of tone that one role for his party would be protect the country from a return to the unfairness of Thatcherism. He is implying that the ideology of an unalloyed majority Conservative administration would be well to the right.

The Lib Dem federal committee will meet shortly to set out the specific ways in which it expects the party to do more to differentiate itself from the Tories in line with a lengthy motion passed at the party's spring conference in Sheffield.

Senior party figures almost universally predicted the party was now entering "a transactional business relationship" with its coalition partners-- a phrase first urged on the deputy prime minister by Vince Cable, the business secretary, last autumn.

Many Lib Dem activists have been demanding distinctiveness and a willingness by their leadership to spell out what they have stopped, as well as what they have achieved, by being in coalition. Clegg will explain more about his approach to coalition politics in a speech next week.