Politics

A bafflingly complex set of local elections with a singularly simple result: Boris Johnson on top

There is still much counting to do, but the local elections suggest that the prime minister’s Brexit realignment is consolidating, not unwinding

May 07, 2021
Photo: Piero Cruciatti / Alamy Stock Photo
Photo: Piero Cruciatti / Alamy Stock Photo

The number crunchers always plea—in vain—to those of us in the media not to rush in and “call” the local election results on the basis of a few unrepresentative councils that happen to declare early. This year, however, their howl of anguish was delivered with special feeling.

Why? Because with the pandemic cancelling the 2020 elections, there are twice as many contests as usual—and they are harder to make sense of too, because for some of them the baseline is 2016 (when the two parties were neck-and-neck in the national equivalent vote) or 2017 (when Theresa May enjoyed a 12-point lead which she soon lost in her mis-fired general election). A trend towards later counting continues, too, as squeezed council budgets meant more chose to employ counters on the Friday, rather than offer enhanced rates for tallying overnight.

To thicken the plot, we have elections with very different dynamics in both Scotland, where the Union is now the only real question, and in Wales, where developing or rolling back devolution is the issue.

Chuck in the trend that, with England, for the last five years Leaveland and Remainia have swung in entirely different directions—towards the Tories and Labour respectively—and the fact that virtually all the overnight results happened to be in Brexitland, and you can see why the real experts feared they would not be able to offer a definitive judgment even as we entered the weekend.

And yet, even in the minority of the results available on Friday afternoon, it was possible to reach three big verdicts—the Tories have done well for a governing party in mid-term; Labour has done badly; and the great Brexit realignment is consolidating rather than unravelling with the passing of the Brexit issue.

Paula Surridge at Bristol University told me that, overall, the Conservatives were making clear advances on the contests last fought by David Cameron seven weeks before the EU referendum. Why? Because, especially in what would soon be Leave seats, there was then “a large Ukip vote” which Johnson’s party is now “mopping up.”

As for Labour, the more instructive comparison was with “the seats last fought in 2017,” when they were being pummelled by May. The party was in “steady state” compared with that grim year, Surridge said. The “basic picture” emerging “was a set of local elections that you would have expected if you’d run them in December 2019,” which is to say that things have been frozen in aspic ever since Johnson’s big win.

Psephologist Lewis Baston agreed—and with fewer caveats than he might have expected. Things looked “disastrous for Labour” in the early returns in the English rust-belt—and not just up in the north-east where the party’s Hartlepool by-election humiliation epitomised a wider rout, but also Derbyshire, where the Tories consolidated their general election advances in in places like Bolsover and Clay Cross, two places with a socialist heritage embodied in Denis Skinner. In the industrial West Midlands, too, places like Dudley and Nuneaton, which not long ago were regarded as bellwethers, were blowing way to the right.

Steve Fisher of Oxford University, who will be writing more on Prospect online on Saturday when more results are in, said it was already “clear Labour was not advancing as it would want to” if it was on a path to government.

So are there any caveats? Yes: the Conservatives did poorly and Labour reasonably well in the university city of Cambridge, and the Tories also lost control of the wider prosperous county of Cambridgeshire beyond it. As more results pour in on Saturday, the question will be whether in cities and university towns Labour can make good at least some of its losses in its old industrial heartlands. It could happen. But this looks to be a sufficiently strong year for the Tories that, even if it does, Fisher expects we will see only a “pale red” of Labour advance in Remainia to set against the “neon blue” of Tory gains in Leaveland.

Strong showings by the Greens could further dilute those patches of Labour advance, and in odd pockets—including Sunderland—even the Lib Dems are joining in with the pincer movement on Keir Starmer’s party. When Ed Davey has made zero impression on the national stage, and—amid pandemic restrictions—the Lib Dems have not been able to rely on their usual pavement politics, the party looks to be standing still from a low baseline which, in Baston’s appraisal, is about as good as they could have hoped.

The very early results from Wales looked somewhat better for Labour, and in Scotland the early constituency results suggested a touch more Unionist cooperation than normal—with, Fisher says, whichever of the Tories and Labour were better placed to challenge the SNP tending to advance more. Given the SNP plan is to use a clean sweep in constituency seats to achieve an overall majority in Holyrood, this could be a cause of relief to everyone else.

While Nicola Sturgeon will certainly emerge as head of the pack in Scotland, unless she gets that majority then there will only be one real winner across the UK, namely Boris Johnson. How has he done it?

Well for Surridge, it is about the “political values” she has been researching for 20 years. Throughout that time, she suggests, voters in the Labour heartlands were left-wing on economics and more conservative on social questions. The first thing that has changed is that, in a way that Brexit has accelerated, the social questions have moved to the fore.

But the second is that Johnson’s Tories have been prepared to at least give the impression of moving towards economic intervention that voters in places like the north-east want to see. The emerging Labour base in the cities, by contrast, is more socially liberal than ever before, reducing the party’s room for manoeuvre on that front. The leader and party come across as ridiculously inauthentic when they start waving Union Jacks.

Some parties, and none more than Labour, get snared on their own principles. But in the 350 years of the Tory party’s existence, it has survived and thrived time and again by ditching fixed ideas as soon as they become inconvenient. Johnson has attempted to move from being the neoliberal champion of top-rate tax cuts as London’s mayor to, in No 10, being the dirigiste voice of the rust-belt. It might sound like an impossible stunt to pull off, but on the strength of Thursday’s voting, it would appear to be working.