I have to admit that local elections in the UK baffle me. I have no idea why you have political parties at that level - we don't have political parties at the municipal level in Canada, except for Montreal and Vancouver, but the parties there aren't "real" parties - meaning they have no relation at all to any provincial or federal parties - they exist in those cities.

If you insist on having parties at the municipal level, they should be totally separate from the national parties. It makes no sense to be campaigning on the same issues when local gov't basically doesn't really do anything but implement what is dictated to them from above, yeah? The ideal of having any of our federal party leaders stumping around campaigning for local councillors here in Canada is just bizarre. Even provincial premiers don't get involved in local politics. Federal politicians don't even get involved in provincial politics, for the most part, and the provincial and federal wings of parties are quite separate entities that campaign on totally different platforms since they do totally different things and have totally different areas of responsibility. In actual fact, there is often a lot of hostility between the federal and provincial wings of the same party.

But yeah - assuming that how people vote for a town council has any bearing on how they'd vote for a national government is just weird. As for turnout being really low - par for the course isn't it? Local election turnout here is always abysmal because people know town halls have no power - they're under provincial jurisdiction. And since there was no national election going on - where real change might be possible - is it really that surprising no one came out to vote? Changing a local council will have no impact on overall national policy, so...