TONY Blair's New Labour Government will have been in office for two years this May and according to the opinion polls, its love affair with the electorate shows no sign of waning.

It's a different story when it comes to actual elections which have been fought for vacant councils seats. These show the Tories and Lib Dems faring better than their opinion poll ratings and Labour doing significantly worse.

Mr Blair's second anniversary will be marked by the biggest test of political opinion since the general election when thousands of council seats will be up for grabs and the headlines will all say that the Tories are gaining ground.

This is because the Tories could hardly fare worse than they did the last time these seats were contested which was when John Major's Government was at the nadir of its popularity. The question for the pundits will be what size the recovery will be, for if they are still getting less than a third of the vote, it will be remarkably low for a mid-term opposition party.

The question for non-party political democrats like me is whether the actual percentage of people voting reaches a third. Although councils have a remarkable influence on many aspects of our lives, interest in them is low and local election turnouts are barely half of those achieved during general elections.

Ifind it astounding that when millions of people worldwide are still fighting for the right to vote at all, so many of us can stay at home and not even bother to go out and spoil the ballot paper if we don't like any of the candidates on offer.

In Brighton and Hove, we will at least have the added attraction of a referendum on the Albion and whether or not they should go to Falmer. That could persuade a few thousand more people to go to the polls and if so, it's likely to lead to other contentious issues going before the public as they do in many American states.

The electorate may not be excited at the prospect of polling day in only just over two months' time but the politicians most certainly are. I see them scurrying around the streets, delivering leaflets through doors and calling round at homes wearing their best smiles.

There's a lot at stake in these contests. Depending on the swing of the political pendulum, many may suddenly lose the power and minor perks of office they have been used to for the last few years.

No wonder that the political temperature's getting as hot as it would be inside one of the refuse incinerators which have been a central feature of the campaign in many parts of Brighton, Hove and East Sussex. There has been feuding between Labour and the other parties on this issue and even splits within Labour itself on how it should be handled.

The proposal for an incinerator at Shoreham Harbour first came our way through a leak last year which provided us with a classic local scoop. Since then we have received several other pieces of privileged information, mainly from secret sources.

Most are welcome and we have no qualms about publishing them since they often reveal information only kept from public gaze because it is politically embarrassing. But we did not use one on a prominent councillor who took some time, through an oversight, to pay his child's fees at the civic creche.

This was a below-the-belt attempt to smear the politician and involve his child as well.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.