TODAY is "Super Thursday" - an historic election day loaded with political portent like no other.

And yet, strangely, one of the day's biggest tests will be of how many of the 30 million people entitled to vote actually do so.

Overall, only a third may bother. Why is there this apathy?

Consider what destinies hang in the ballot boxes today.

With more than 13,000 seats on 362 councils across Britain being contested at the same time that the people of Scotland and Wales vote to elect the parliaments that their countries have not had for centuries, today amounts to the biggest-ever mid-term trial that any government has faced.

And for Labour the fact that the town hall seats being fought for are those last contested in 1995 when, with 47 per cent of the vote, it achieved a spectacular victory over the embattled Tories who managed only a disastrous 25 per cent, this amounts to a test of its ability to cling to that high-water mark and to the councils it took control of.

But, much more than this, it will be a telling investigation of the Tories' resilience as, fielding a record number of candidates and contesting 78 per cent of the council seats, they need to gain 1,600 of them to get back to where they were before the debacle of four years ago.

Yet, with party managers predicting gains of 800 seats and them needing at least 1,000 to match their share of the vote last year, the results will be a yardstick for how well the party is doing under William Hague - and could be the trigger for a leadership contest this summer if no clear improvement is revealed.

Little wonder, then, that the Labour leadership - relying heavily on national issues for the local campaign while the Tories point to the taint of sleaze and waste in Labour-run town halls - is urging its supporters not to be complacent and allow the Tories to creep back. But while voters in England have no say in the polls for the devolved Scottish and Welsh assemblies, they ought to have an interest, as one question that hangs over the outcomes is whether today heralds the start of the fragmentation of the United Kingdom - though the evidence of disinterest in Wales, first for devolution itself and, now, for the country's "national" elections suggests that prospect may only ever stem from Scotland.

Meantime, whatever verdict is delivered on itself today, the government ought to hasten its efforts to dispel the local-elections apathy that threatens to make Super Thursday less than superlative.

One way would be to relax much of the power and financial control that central government has grabbed from the towns and cities and which makes many voters conclude that their vote in local elections carries little influence. A dose of devolution of that sort - along with all seats being contested at once, so that control of councils becomes less entrenched - would be a start.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.