Bristol City Council could be left leaderless because of

in-fighting between the three main parties.

The catalyst for this turmoil is plans for funding of a

possible incinerator at Avonmouth which the ruling Labour group

wants to push through at a major debate next month.

The problem is that Labour, which currently has 25

councillors, relies on the Conservative group, which has 13

councillors, for support to implement its policies but the

Tories are unhappy about Labour's plans for an incinerator.

With the Lib-Dems, currently the biggest single party in the

70-seat council with 31 councillors, unwilling to take on the

running of the council, there is the prospect that the council

will have no party prepared to take the lead come the full

council meeting on September 9.

Days or even weeks of stalemate could follow if the three

main parties failed to agree who should run the council –

leaving its officers effectively in charge.

A similar crisis developed in May 2003. It only ended when a

coalition between the three main parties was formed to take

over the authority. This collapsed after just over a year and

was replaced by a minority administration.

Officers insisted at the time that services were not

affected by the political chaos.

The current row is over the policy of three members of the

West of England Partnership – Bristol, North Somerset and South

Gloucestershire councils – to make a bid for interest-free

funding from the Government at the end of October.

Labour believes it would be irresponsible not to seek the

private finance initiative cash – possibly worth half the £180

million cost of an incinerator.

It insists no decision will be made for another two years on

what sort of technological solution to the region's waste

problems will be chosen.

In other words, an incinerator is only one of a series of

options. It may never happen.

But opponents – the Lib Dems, the Green Party, Friends of

the Earth – want the incinerator option written out of the

story altogether.

And now, it seems, they could find some support from a

surprising quarter – the council's 13 Conservative members.

One of them, Spud Murphy, is already known to be opposed to

an incinerator because of fears over toxic emissions and the

likely high volume of lorry traffic to and from the plant.

But until recently the Tories generally appeared to support

the Labour policy of keeping all options open. Now, in what

other parties are calling a U-turn, Mr Eddy has been quoted on

a party website welcoming the chance to thrash out the issues

on September 9.

Mr Murphy told the Bristol Evening Post this week that he

knew people in Avonmouth, Lawrence Weston and Shirehampton were

against an incinerator.

These areas are at the heart of the redrawn Bristol

North-West constituency, which the Conservatives are determined

to wrest from Labour at the next general election.

Ethos Recycling, in Kingsweston Lane, Avonmouth, is

currently pioneering a "pressure-cooker" method of treating

waste, called gasification-pyrolysis.

All three main parties favour this experiment, but Labour

warns that the technology is untried at the kind of scale

necessary to handle all or even a large part of the 180,000

tonnes of residual household waste the West is likely to be

throwing out each year over the next two or three decades.

Bristol Lib Dem spokesman Gary Hopkins says pyrolysis would

be cheaper and cleaner than incineration.