15 May, 2017
That score is much lower than the current opinion polls, which have put the Conservatives on 46 per cent - 17 points ahead of Labour. She warned voters that 27 European Union member states were lining up against Britain to win a deal that "works for them".
Prime Minister Theresa May's party gained more than 300 extra council seats and at least two mayoralties in England, mostly benefiting from UKIP losses.
Signs also suggest that the Labour Party has endured big losses across the country, while UKIP looks virtually spent as an electoral force after the Brexit vote.
"We have got what we wanted, but unfortunately we have been in a sense the victims of our own success", UKIP deputy chairwoman Suzanne Evans told Sky News.
The Labour leader described the results as "mixed" and insisted they were "closing the gap" on the Conservatives.
Theresa May will be returned to power with a large Tory majority in the general election on June 8 but she is likely to head a very Right-wing government, political analysts said today on the basis of local government and mayoral polls which were held yesterday in large tracts of England, Wales and Scotland. The party even lost control of the city council in Glasgow, Scotland's biggest city and once the staunchest of Labour strongholds.
In 2013, Labour won 39 seats and formed a majority with the Liberal Democrats who won 6 seats.
In Wales, Tory gains were more modest at 25 seats and independents took another 41, while Labour lost 67 but remained by far the most dominant party.
Eric Kaufmann, a politics professor at the University of London, said her tough stance seemed to be paying dividends with a realignment towards her party.
"If there is an increasingly confrontational attitude between Westminster and Brussels, the [local election] results today suggest that Theresa May is the political victor domestically of that process", said Al Jazeera's Phillips. Most of these councils, the vast majority, are still to count.
Anthony Wells of pollsters YouGov pointed out that the Labour party was just three percentage points behind Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives in the 1983 local elections, but trailed by 16 points in the general election that followed just a month later.
The results marked the biggest gains by a ruling party in a local election in the United Kingdom in almost four decades.
In a highly symbolic victory, Conservative Ben Houchen became the first elected mayor of Tees Valley, in Labour's north-eastern heartland, beating Labour's Sue Jeffrey by more than 2,000 votes in the second round of counting.
There, the Conservatives' Andy Street, formerly the director of upmarket department store chain John Lewis, claimed a narrow win.
In Tees Valley, Conservative Ben Houchen won after a run-off against Labour's Sue Jeffrey and Conservative Tim Bowles was declared the victor in the West of England.
