Is M-way corridor road to power?

Votes will be counted on the Friday across West Yorkshire.

It is not by mere chance that the Conservatives held a series of "rolling launches" along the M62 in West Yorkshire for their election campaign.

The party has a hand on power in all four metropolitan authorities in the so-called "M62 corridor" of Leeds, Bradford, Kirklees and Calderdale.

In Leeds they have a unique power sharing deal with the Lib Dems - taking turns to provide the council leader.

In Kirklees and Calderdale all three parties are just about evenly matched.

In the council chamber in Leeds the Tories and Lib Dems have a deal where one party provides the council leader for six months and then hands over the keys of office for the rest of the year.

Not a single one of the numerous hung councils across England have a similar "turn-and-turn-about" deal.

Town halls

It is a frustrating arrangement for Labour which ran the city for generations and is still by far the largest group with 43 of the council's 99 seats.

What keeps them out is combining the Lib Dems 23 councillors and the Conservatives 22. Both the coalition parties said they were seeing increased popularity and expect to keep Labour out of office again.

In Kirklees and Calderdale all three of the major parties are just about evenly matched in terms of seats - that blocks Labour out of any chance of a seat in the leader's office in Huddersfield or Halifax town halls.

The party will not form an alliance with any of the other two. In both councils the Conservatives take the key leader and cabinet positions because they have more seats than their Liberal Democrat coalition partners.

Tall order

The Conservatives said they had hopes of winning an outright majority in Bradford. But that is a tall order with the current state of the parties.

In terms of seats Bradford is much more of a two-horse race with a Conservative group of 32 councillors and Labour slightly larger with 39.

For the past few years the Conservatives have run a minority administration with the support of a much smaller group of Liberal Democrats.

The Conservatives would need to take an extra 14 seats on 1 May for a majority and believe the current popularity of party leader David Cameron at national level could swing it their way.

But in Bradford itself the Conservative administration might not have the same level of popularity.

It has been under fire for a promised major redevelopment of the city centre which resulted in a huge pile of rubble from demolished buildings on prominent display for years as numerous deadlines for it to be removed and building to be done went by.

Across the county the British National Party will be fielding candidates as will the Green Party, the UK Independence Party and the Alliance for Green Socialism.

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