Local Labour: as bad as it could be

Unsurprisingly, it became the party’s worst local election performance, eclipsing even the double whammy of 1967 and 1968, as well as the 1977 debacle.

Labour has now slipped behind the Liberal Democrats in England in terms of council seats held, and its advantage in councils is down to single figures. Two-thirds of Labour seats were lost.

There was a collapse in vote share, averaging a decline of 12 percentage points. The four remaining Labour-held counties did not even slip into no overall control but moved directly into the Conservative column. Staffordshire’s Labour group fell at a stroke from 32 to just three.

Even the Conservative meltdown of the mid-1990s saw them hanging on to a single county.

In 20 of the remaining 27 county councils there are now fewer than five Labour councillors sitting on the opposition benches. Prime minister Gordon Brown responded to this obliteration of his party’s local government base by reshuffling his Cabinet and expressed his willingness to listen.

Defeated Labour councillors might want to send their own messages. Those in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, where the efforts to achieve 4* ‘improving well’ status in the comprehensive performance assessment appeared to count for little with voters disillusioned with the government, were particularly bitter.

The destruction of a party’s local government base is, of course, more than a matter of mere numbers. Councillors form the bedrock of local activism. Labour could well find, as the Conservatives did a decade ago, that when thecall comes for assistance in fighting the next general election, the response is muted.

The pendulum has swung, though, and it is the Conservatives’ turn to bask in Labour’s discomfort, happy in the knowledge that most of their own targets were exceeded. Deposing Labour in Derbyshire, Lancashire,Nottinghamshire and Staffordshire was expected, but taking control in all was a real bonus.

They also have a clear majority in Warwickshire, and will expect to be able to determine affairs as the largest party in Cumbria, too. The Conservatives also regained the mayoralty in North Tyneside, which had they had lost to Labour on general election day in 2005.

On another front entirely the enemy was the Liberal Democrats, who suffered from false expectations after gaining control in Bristol overnight. In the shires, however, they suffered punishment for incumbency, being hit by controversy over local government reorganisation and by Conservative promises of a two-year freeze on the level of council tax.

Somerset was expected to fall, but the Conservatives also captured Devon before demoralising Nick Clegg’s party by becoming the largest group in the Liberal Democrat bastion of Cornwall.

The leader put a brave face on it, labelling these defeats a bit of a setback, but hailed the performance in Bristol as “a complete transformation of city politics”. He will be only too aware though that many of the dozen Liberal Democrat parliamentary seats in the far south-west look in mortal danger.

As their overall seat gains moved past 100, then 200 and nudged towards 300, the Conservatives could be confident that their long, slow recovery in local government was complete. Nearly seven in every 10 shire county
electors have a Conservative councillor; the party has more than half of all the councillors in England; and it is close to an overall majority in the determination of the Local Government Association’s boards and committees.

To celebrate, Cameron’s entourage struck out for Devon, rallying the troops before decamping for a repeat performance in Lancashire.

The LGC political control map will likely take pride of place as a now deep blue backdrop for ‘webcameron’ broadcasts.

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The only irritant, it seemed, was that the small number of voters deserting the Liberal Democrats (vote share two points lower than in 2005) and the many more who discarded Labour did not fully transfer to the Conservativecause, whose own vote rose only by four percentage points.

The Conservatives brushed this aside as an irrelevance, but it perhaps shows that while there is little sympathy for a splintered Labour Party there is no tidalwave of support ready to sweep the Conservatives back into power with the level of vote share that the party enjoyed in the 1980s.

The beneficiaries of the vote-switching were candidates representing the other parties, principally the Greens, UKIP and BNP, encouraged to stand by the overlap with the European Parliament election, as well as micropartiesfighting on specifically local issues.

It is intriguing to learn that in wards contested by all three main parties, in one in seven cases all three lost vote share as support switched to the ‘others’ — a plague on all your houses.

At the county level there are some dramatic leaps in fortune. Yet again Staffordshire leads the way in volatility. There, support for other parties increased by 18 points compared with 2005, but Buckinghamshire, Lancashire and
Worcestershire are not far behind.

While across all authorities almost one in five votes went in favour of the smaller parties, the return in seats did not fully reflect that.

The Greens now have seven seats in Norfolk while UKIP continued to advance across parts of Staffordshire.

The BNP won a single seat in each of Hertfordshire, Lancashire and Leicestershire, despite contesting more than 400, including all 75 in Essex.

The tradition of non-party representation continues to thrive in Cornwall, where 32 Independents were elected to the new 123 member unitary authority in addition to three councillors from the Cornish nationalist party, Mebyon Kernow.

Meanwhile in Doncaster, the English Democrats’ Peter Davies pulled off a spectacular victory to secure the mayoralty, with neither Labour nor the Conservatives making it to the second stage of voting. It was the party’s firstelectoral success.

Stuart Drummond in Hartlepool was re-elected for a third term, and there, too, the run-off was between two Independent candidates. The backlash against the established parties continues.

The principal reason for moving the county elections to June lay in the hope that more voters would be encouraged to engage with the European poll. Turnout could not match that for the three previous rounds of county contests, held on general election day, but interest lay in whether dissatisfied voters might boycott the occasion.

It seems that those who normally participate in local elections did so again, with turnout approaching 40%, reverting to levels last seen at the 1993 election.

As in 2004, however, areas with only European Parliament contests were far more reluctant to go to the polls.

It is a fair bet that, whoever is in government, the local elections scheduled for May 2014 will again be moved in an attempt to save Britain from languishing at the foot of the European turnout league table.

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