The 2018 local elections should be seen as a deflating but necessary learning experience for the Labour party, and a bullet dodged by the Conservatives. Labour has some genuinely impressive sets of results – Trafford stands out, as does Southport (part of Sefton), where Labour carried off several seats in previously barren territory; Plymouth was more nip-and-tuck, but Labour is back in power.
However, most of the targets were missed – the hard ones in London and some arithmetically easier ones outside – and there was embarrassing slippage in the Midlands in particular: the loss of Derby and Nuneaton and Bedworth will sting. The Conservatives can point to an achievement that is the mirror image of Labour’s salvage operation in the 2017 general election – retaining more than they can have expected to in places where their vote is trending downwards, such as wealthy inner London, while making headway in the places where they can expect to gain.
The Conservatives failed to bring over all that much of the leave-voting, Ukip-curious section of Labour’s core vote in 2017, thanks to a campaign that reminded much of that core vote why it does not love the Tories, and Labour’s own astute manifesto and campaign in the general election.
However, the local elections did produce some exceptionally strong Conservative performances in just these sorts of areas. Sunderland set the scene early on, with a seven-point swing to the Conservatives. It may be that the Conservatives in their post-Brexit garb will automatically benefit from any discussion of immigration, even if it is prompted by a scandal of their own making, but this cannot be the whole story.
Before election day, it looked plausible for Labour to win control in North East Lincolnshire, the council that covers Grimsby and Cleethorpes. Ukip had done very well here in 2014, winning several normally safe Labour wards, but Labour fought back and won them by large margins in the May 2016 local elections and presumably in the general election in 2017. Some of the Ukip councillors had defected to the Conservatives and seemed unlikely to win – but they did.
It is not just in Grimsby that the political map has been redrawn. In my home town of Southampton, where I have followed elections since the 1980s, the results were unprecedented. There was no net change, but out of 16 seats three went in each direction between Labour and the Conservatives. The Tories won white working-class estate seats, knocking out the Labour council leader in the process, while Labour picked off the suburbs near the university and Southampton’s inner middle-class residential area. The 2018 results almost inverted the colours of the city’s wards in an “even year” in the 1980s.
Part of the explanation for the oddness of the local election results, and the contrast to what happened less than a year ago – from Wandsworth to Grimsby – must lie in the difference between the sort of people who turn out to vote in local and general elections. Local election turnout runs at about half the rate of a general election, and that voting pool exaggerates the usual skew that one finds in turnout – local voters are even older and less transient on average than general election voters.
In an environment where age and cosmopolitanism seem to define political allegiances, the party that has the support of the young and footloose is at a disadvantage in low-turnout elections, as the Democrats have found in repeated mid-terms. This should not encourage Labour to think that all will be well in a general election – one has to do a lot of work to level up the turnout, and Labour failed even with its mass membership and a government that looked on the ropes. An ominous cloud on the horizon is the voter ID trial that was tested in several (not very challenging) local authorities this year, which will entirely predictably make this problem worse in future.
The other problem for Labour in these elections was one that was frequently forgotten – that most recent polling has shown the Conservatives a bit ahead (perhaps five points) and Labour at best pulling level while doing worse on questions like leadership and economic management. Back in 2014 when most of these council seats were last fought, Labour was a point or two ahead.
It is not surprising that the pendulum swung a little towards the Conservatives in 2018, and more dramatically in places where their support could be expected to increase. What was more surprising is Labour’s failure to benefit from much of an upward current in London. The task was hard, as Labour had done well in the capital in 2014, but the 22-point lead in the general election encouraged confidence that proved cruelly misplaced. Expectations were allowed to run too high in public.
The results in Wandsworth, for instance, were good but not quite good enough. Around the outer edges of London things were worse for Labour, not just in Barnet with its particular sensitivity to the antisemitism controversy but also in Hillingdon, where the Conservatives made net gains. The one borough in which the Conservatives were massacred in a revenge of the metropolitan remain voter was Richmond, where the beneficiaries were the Liberal Democrats who won at least a seat in every Richmond ward but one. The landslide swept in four Greens, beneficiaries of an unusual “progressive alliance” electoral pact, but left Labour in the cold.
The local government scene in England was never going to be transformed in these elections – there was not much swing territory being contested, and the movement in national opinion was too small to do much. Even if Labour had done as well as it might have in London, there was also little extra that was feasible to win there. But the psychological impact for Labour, 11 months on from June 2017, to have dreamed and been disappointed, could be destabilising.
For the Conservatives, there must be a feeling that they have got away with it, and normal service is being resumed after the unexpected reverse in the general election. They would be unwise to take too much comfort from this, because these are volatile times. The results of the May 2016 local elections, the other side of the EU referendum, already look – literally – antediluvian, and those of May 2017 when the Conservatives polled so well were themselves overwritten a month later. With so many potentially realigning moments ahead in the next few months, the tectonic plates could easily shift again.
• Lewis Baston is a writer on politics, elections, history and corruption, and director of research at the Electoral Reform Society
