'Super Thursday' sets stage for EU referendum anxiety

WITH only weeks before the June 23 "in-out" European Union (EU) referendum, Britain held "Super Thursday" ballots with landmark results. The welcome election in London of Labour's Sadiq Khan, the first Muslim mayor of a capital city in the Western world, grabbed the headlines, but underlying this is a bigger story about the fracturing of politics across England, Scotland and Wales which could yet have a key bearing on the forthcoming referendum outcome.

For Labour's victories in the Bristol and London mayoral elections - the latter in which Mr Khan gained the biggest individual political mandate in British history - plus the party's strong performance in the Welsh Assembly elections, was counterpoised by the robust showing of the Scottish Independence Party (SNP) in the Scottish Parliament ballots to win a historic third team, plus the better-than-expected performance of the Conservatives in Scotland too. The results indicate that the once-monolithic character of British politics is continuing to break down, yielding a potentially significantly more unpredictable political landscape.

And the febrile mood of the electorate, where Euroscepticism is a persistent undercurrent, serves as another warning to Prime Minister David Cameron that pro-Brexit forces could win the EU referendum, setting off a political earthquake with potentially far-reaching political and economic consequences for Britain and beyond. One sign of the continued electoral potency of anti-Brussels sentiment were the gains in England and Wales by the UK Independence Party (UKIP) which won its first-ever seats in the Welsh National Assembly, its first seats in the London Assembly for a decade, and also made gains in other English Council elections.