So here’s my take on the local election results. Contrary to what the media would have us believe, I don’t think they’re all that dire, though we must be realistic and accept that they’re not great news either.
It’s important to bear in mind that the recent elections were actually several different sets of elections all occurring at the same time — they don’t all use the same voting system, they’re not all for the same kind of position, they’re not all equally important, nobody was voting in all of them, etc. I’ll break it down a bit here.
First, a bit about what I’ll be talking about and how I’ll be talking about them. I’m mostly using the BBC’s figures, which should all be up to date — some of the results being shared were preliminary ones from before all of the results had come in, and were therefore inaccurate as a guide to the overall outcome.
I’m going to try to give a range of figures that tell us different things; for instance, I might say both the end result in terms of seat distribution and the vote share, or the vote share and the seats gained or lost. There are lots of arguments to be had about what is the ‘best’ measure of success or failure in some of these elections, and I won’t get into that but will try not to give a one-sided picture.
When I say ‘prior seats/councils/mayors’ and give a percentage below, what I mean is the number expressed as a share of the number of that thing that the party had going into the election that were up for election again. For instance, if the tories controlled 100 councils, of which only half had elections (in other words, 50) and they lost control of 1 council, that would be 2% of their prior councils, since 1 is 2% of 50. This is a useful way of looking at things because if you hold 2 seats and lose 1 that’s a much worse result than if you hold 20 seats and lose 1. Similarly, when I say Labour ‘doubled their prior mayors’ I don’t mean that they only had 2 in the entire country before this election — I mean that they went in controlling 2 of those available in these elections.
Note: There’s a TL;DR version below.
Scottish Parliament
SNP 63, Conservative 31, Labour 24, Greens 6, Lib Dem 5
Labour fall to third place in Scotland. This is really quite a sour result, considering that traditionally Labour have performed much better in Scotland than the tories. Interestingly, Labour have a slightly higher share of the constituency votes than the tories (22.6% vs. 22%), while the SNP have an incredibly solid 46.5%, though they have lost their majority.
Nevertheless, we can’t avoid the fact that Labour has been making losses in Scotland and that the tories actually seem to be making gains (presumably pro-union voters are responsible for the rally behind them, though quite why pro-union Labour voters would switch is not necessarily obvious, particularly in a more proportional system).
The biggest story here is clearly the way that the SNP has disrupted Scottish politics. That are clearly now the major party of government (though not single-party majority government in the case of this election) in both the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish seats of the UK Parliament, and it doesn’t seem that there’s any obvious route to reversal available in the immediate future. What could have been a flash in the pan has cemented into solid long-term control.
Some suggested that having a more left-wing leader at the head of Labour would return them to their former glory and the SNP would subside. I think this alone is not realistically going to lead to a rise in Labour’s Scottish prospects, and these results bear that out, but I do think it’s part of the solution. One of the real issues is that Scottish Labour needs to be fixed — Scottish voters will opt for the SNP over Labour if the top-level Labour party has a left-wing leadership but the Scottish leadership do not earn the trust of voters. I also think that the national question is more firmly embedded now than it was in the past, and that a big shift would have to happen to see Labour displace the SNP as the presumptive heirs of Scotland.
What do the gains and losses look like? Down 6 seats for the SNP (~8.5% of their prior seats) and a nasty 13 (~35% of their prior seats) for Labour. Meanwhile, the Greens advance impressively with a net gain of 4 seats (200% of their prior seats!), and the tories have similarly pulled off a very substantial gain of 16 seats (~107% of their prior seats).
Welsh Assembly
Labour 29, Plaid Cymru 12, Conservatives 11, UKIP 7, Lib Dems 1
Labour are still in first place by a comfortable margin here, but losing out on a majority. They also remain the preferred party in terms of constituency votes at 34.7%, though Plaid Cymru are actually underperforming at the constituency level, taking only 20.5% vs. the tories’ 21.1%, even though they won more seats.
This is a net loss of 1 seat for Labour (~3% of their prior seats, and lost to PC — so not a swing to the right, unlike most of their losses elsewhere). Meanwhile the tories and Lib Dems have suffered noticeable losses to UKIP: the tories are down 3 (~21% of their prior seats) while the Lib Dems are down by 4 seats (80% of their prior seats).
Northern Irish Assembly
I won’t discuss Northern Ireland for various reasons, but mostly because the party structure is fundamentally different there (there is neither a ‘Labour Party’ nor a ‘Conservative Party’ as such, due to the nature of Irish politics and history). Suffice to say it’s not something we can draw any criticisms of Corbyn from.
London Mayor & Assembly
Mayor: Labour
Assembly: Labour 12, Conservatives 8, Greens 2, UKIP 2, Lib Dems 1
Labour regain control of City Hall and are the largest party on the Assembly. This means Labour made no net losses or gains, while the tories were down 1 seat (~11% of their prior seats).
The smaller parties are clearly eating into the seats somewhat here, and in particular the Lib Dems have been in decline in recent years while parties like the Greens and UKIP have been advancing. In a FPTP system I suspect we’d have seen something more like a narrow Labour majority and the rest of the seats (or maybe all but 1) going to the tories.
Mayoral Elections
London: Labour, Liverpool: Labour, Bristol: Labour, Salford: Labour
Aside from London, which I’ve discussed above, there were a couple of other mayoral elections taking place. In Liverpool, the incumbent Labour mayor was re-elected with 52.6% of first-preferences, while in Bristol, the Labour candidate displaced the previous independent mayor by a significant number of votes in the second round (he was also leading in the first round by a large stretch). Salford also say a Labour mayor elected, replacing the previous Labour mayor.
So that’s a loss of 1mayor for the tories and a gain of 2 mayors for Labour, taking them to 100% of the mayors elected, double their prior mayors. They literally couldn’t have done better, except by just increasing their vote share some more.
Police and Crime Commissioner Elections
Independents declined in this election, with Labour and the tories both making comparable gains: 3 seats (25% of their prior seats) and 4 seats (also 25% of their prior seats), respectively. The more mathematically inclined of you will notice that this leaves the tories in control of more than Labour, because of their starting positions.
For what it’s worth, Labour managed to win more seats directly from tories than the other way around. Plaid Cyrmu also managed to nab 2 seats. The general pattern seems to be the right-wing vote fracturing (UKIP were second place in a lot of tory areas) and the left eating into it somewhat. Independents are falling to tories more frequently than to the left.
Council Elections (England)
Seats: Labour 1,326, Conservatives 842, Lib Dems 378, Independent 77, UKIP 58, Greens 45, Residents 39, Liberal 4
Council control: Labour 58, Conservatives 38, Lib Dems 4
This is the real meat of the debate. The council elections (which were for English councils only on this occasion) are what the media have latched onto as their evidence of Corbyn’s failure. So let’s go over the net gains and losses in a bit of detail.
Labour are down 18 (~1.4% of their prior seats), while the tories are down 48 (~5.4% of their prior seats). The Lib Dems have miraculously gained 45 seats (~13.5% of their prior seats), proving that some voters have very short memories indeed. UKIP are up 25 (~76% of their prior seats), while the greens are down 3 (6.25% of their prior seats).
In terms of overall control of councils, Labour have held their ground while the tories have lost 1 (~2.6% of their prior councils controlled). Conversely, the Lib Dems are up 1 (~33% of their prior councils controlled).
So insofar as we’re concerned with council elections, it wasn’t a good day for either major party, all told. However, you’d have a tough time making this into a huge tale of woe for Corbyn of the kind that the media would like us to believe: many based their assessments on early returns, when it seemed that the tories had made gains and Labour had made losses, which would have been a bleaker picture but turned out not to be true once all the results were in. In fact, labour lost less than half as many seats, and less than a third of the proportion that the tories lost. That’s not too bad, really.
TL;DR: Roundup of all results
Labour are suffering significantly in Scotland, where they were pushed into third place behind the tories.
This isn’t the case in Wales, where they remain the largest party and their only loss was to another social-democratic/left-of-centre party.
They won every mayoral election and remain the largest party on the London Assembly.
Their gains in the PCC elections were roughly comparable with the tories’, and their losses in the council elections were noticeably less severe than the tories’.
Where does this leave us?
Nobody should pretend that Labour doesn’t face challenges, or that this was a great result for the left. UKIP continue to surge upwards, while the Greens have had mixed results. Labour have lost significant ground in Scotland, which is important. The tories have not been punished anywhere near as much as they ought to have been by the electorate for the way they have governed.
However, Labour have clearly not been shut out in the cold by most of the electorate, and predictions were way off. The Telegraph, after consulting with an academic, predicted a loss of 170 seats for Labour (and even of 120 if Labour started to bounce back a bit in the polls), which turned out to be further off the mark than the hung Parliament we were all promised last year.
Labour obviously remain popular, and perhaps more so than the tories: they won nearly half (~48%) of all the council seats being elected, and control a similar amount (~47%) of those councils. Again, the figures are pretty consistent for their position in the Welsh Assembly (~48%) and the London Assembly (48% exactly). On the other hand, 100% of the mayors being elected went to Labour.
Labour control fewer PCCs than the tories, but both parties are growing their share as independents are edged out in elections with higher turnout. There is still a noticeable amount of no man’s land in PCC elections, and they’re generally treated as a bit of a shame and/or joke anyway.
Managing nearly half of most significant forms of representation up for grabs in (party and electoral) systems which divide the pie up between 4 or 5 contestants (remember, many of these are proportional systems, or local elections in which independents and minor parties are more likely to win) is not to be sniffed at. The only place in which Labour are really struggling to be a leading, or at least substantial, force is Scotland.
What does this mean?
In terms of wider lessons to draw from this, it seems apparent that the UK is shifting away from the old 2.5-party system to some extent, which had recently become more like a pure 2-party system (with nationalist parties supplanting conventional parties over time in national bodies, UKIP rising in council and national/regional bodies, LDs recovering somewhat from their catastrophe, etc). This presents both challenges and opportunities to Labour, particularly in FPTP general elections.
It looks pretty certain that Labour will not be able to resume the position of lone hegemonic force it was through the 2000s. But that doesn’t mean that it has no hopes of governing or shifting the political battleground. It increasingly looks like Labour will have to be the leading body in a coalition of broadly social-democratic organisations and movements if they want to run the country any time soon (that is, short of a drastic rightward shift which would be worthy of condemnation for all kinds of reasons).
Labour should be able to form a workable alliance with at least Plaid Cymru and the Greens, and Northern Ireland should be able to contribute a few allies in Westminster. The big question is whether Labour can work with the SNP, which is less certain. Clearly there are elements of the party who would not be out of place among Labour’s left, and the party has long presented itself as social-democratic rather than merely nationalist. However, the actual practice of governing would bring out tensions and conflicts that might not be immediately apparent, and it’s far from clear how it would be received by the English public.
There is also always the possibility that some or all of these parties would rather criticise from the sidelines and remain morally pure than partner with Labour and have to prove themselves at the level of UK government, if that was the choice they were faced with. But any attempt to forge partnerships should come before the next election, so there should be less chance of this outcome. This would carry the advantage of allowing the election to be contested more strategically, with some degree of carving up territories, vote-swapping, etc. Once again, however, this would be a risky tactic as at least some of the public might react badly if the media portrayed it as an undemocratic ‘stitch-up’ (and I can’t imagine them portraying it any other way).
Another interesting dimension of the reconfiguration of party allegiances is that UKIP appear to be on the rise, and the Lib Dems are bouncing back. Theoretically, this could split the vote enough in a FPTP election to allow Labour to beat down all other contenders. I wouldn’t recommend relying on this as a strategy, however…
In any case, it should be evident that much of the public is not scared of a Corbyn-led Labour, at least at more local levels. Whether they would actually vote for a candidate that might put Corbyn in Number 10 when it comes to the general election is another question.
So why didn’t Labour gain more ground?
There’s a broad debate to be had about why Labour didn’t perform better, and I can’t cover all of it here. We should bear in mind that Labour were starting from a high point, so expecting further gains was pretty unrealistic.
Furthermore, Labour councils tend to have been hit the hardest by austerity — it is hardly surprising if Labour struggles to hold onto councils when practically every council they control seems to attract budget cuts and therefore struggle to deliver the basic services that people require, while tory councils are often better-resourced (and thus appear to the outside observer who is not aware of the funding disparity to be more competent or generous).
We should also take into account the obvious media bias and the timing of the anti-Semitism accusations. Nor is the PLP helping through its constant attacks on the leadership (incidentally, since his victory Kahn looks to be lining himself up as a future leadership candidate). There also seems to be some evidence that the tories have been pursuing somewhat illegitimate means of swaying elections in recent years, and who is to say (at this point) whether similar events occurred around these elections?
It’s not good enough simply to complain that circumstances are bad and other people are mean, though. The left (in a broad sense) should be realistic about the patterns we can see here, as well as our own shortcomings. The PLP really does need to be whipped into shape, one way or another, or it is bound to collapse under its own tensions eventually — much of the worse ‘damage’ to Corbyn has been fuelled (at least in large part) by his ‘colleagues’ within the party.
Labour seems to lack a certain degree of long-term strategy at present, and the Corbyn surge within Labour does not appear to have been followed up with grassroots organisation and action on the level necessary to carry Corbyn to victory in a few years and to embed the tide of opinion that his election represents more firmly in both the party’s structures and other social institutions. Some of this work has been done, but much remains.
The verdict
It’s worth noting that the BBC’s projected vote share extrapolating from these results puts Labour marginally ahead of the tories in a general election vote share. We shouldn’t give this too much weight, but that looks like one assessment that implies Labour ‘won’ these elections in some sense. On the other hand, the Guardian seems to be favouring an extrapolation that puts Labour behind the tories, so it’s really a case of ‘pick your expert’ here.
Another notable data point is that some of the marginal areas that have been identified as ‘key battlegrounds’ if Labour plans to beat the tories at the next general election have sided with Labour. In Harlow, for instance, Labour won 7 of the 11 seats that were up for grabs, giving the Labour administration a majority of 5.
However, this was really treading water, and the MP for Harlow is a tory despite the council having been Labour-run for decades, so this does not necessarily translate into another seat in Westminster, even if the general election were to be held tomorrow. Again, this isn’t a huge amount of information to go on in terms of predicting future success or failure, but it’s certainly a sign that nothing dismal has happened.
Let’s get down to an honest assessment here: nobody should pretend these results were a real victory for Labour, but nor were they a sign of collapse or marginalisation. The media would have us believe that Labour are a laughing stock to much of the UK, but they outperformed the tories in England (councils and councillors), Wales, London (mayor and assembly), Bristol, Liverpool and Salford. The tories edged them out in Scotland and the PCCs. If this is a disaster for Corbyn, maybe disasters aren’t as bad as everyone makes out.
Some more analysis for ‘further reading’:
Paul Mason’s midway-through analysis based on Greek coverage, which he notes does not paint it as a disaster for Corbyn, unlike British media.
John McDonnell’s thoughts, which are positive spin but not as triumphalist as the headline makes them sound. Interestingly, just as the tories have set themselves all kinds of economic goals and then flailed in the dirt far short of them, McDonnell points out that they said we should judge Corbyn by Labour’s performance in London, a line that they probably regret in retrospect.
A Guardian article that isn’t complete dross.
