For Britain’s major political parties Thursday’s local elections proved that every silver lining has a cloud. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party did not have a good night yet it was the Conservatives who faced the darkest and stormiest skies. The Liberal Democrats did well by comparison with the truly dreadful results they posted in 2015. But the biggest winners were the nation’s smallest parties. Independent councillors flourished and the political stalemate in Westminster found expression in the rise of local authorities where no party had overall control. If any one of the mainstream parties could say they won on Thursday it was the Greens, buoyed by the government’s public acceptance that their arguments about an impending climate emergency had won the day. The political arm of the environmental movement had its best night for years.
Viewed through the most salient of national issues – Brexit – it would be easy to construct an analysis in which the voters had laid the blame at the feet of the two major Westminster parties either for failing to deliver on the results of referendum in 2016 or for failing to find a way to repudiate them. Both the Conservatives’ Theresa May and Labour’s Mr Corbyn recognised that this instant precis of events would be attractive and sought to defuse its allure by saying they will “sort out” Brexit. This is too roughly hewn an argument.
Local elections are often seen as a “real world” test of public opinion in the years between national elections, but their superficial similarities with national politics distort any analysis that does not pay proper attention to the more significant differences. This year’s local elections are no different. Thursday’s turnout is likely to be in step with previous local contests this decade where just a third of voters turned up. This one fact makes impossible a detailed read-through to a national election picture when two-thirds of the electorate cast their ballots. Although this week’s elections were held in 248 English councils, six mayoral districts and all 11 councils in Northern Ireland, none took place in Wales, Scotland and London. The elections on Thursday were a local affair: pavement issues make a real difference and voters tossed out administrations who just perform badly or were mired in scandal.
Missing from the ballot paper were many of the new insurgents. In socially liberal pro-EU Britain, Liberal Democrats went unchallenged by the upstarts at Change UK. Meanwhile in Brexitland, a lifeless Ukip was the only option open for voters unhappy at the failure of the UK to depart from the EU.
Nigel Farage’s Brexit party, which has captured the headlines and drawn large crowds, was not on the ballot – saving the Tories from an even greater embarrassment. Tory leave voters had nowhere to go. Things still look dismal for Mrs May. Her party’s projected vote share from the local elections has slipped behind the vote it achieves in national opinion polls. The Tories lost more than 1,000 seats and control of dozens of councils. Ballots were disproportionately located in what are usually regarded as the Tory shires, so the result is a genuinely bad one. The prime minister remains stoic in the face of calls for her to go. But she is more than ever the figurehead rather than the leader of a party that has lost all discipline.
Mr Corbyn is unchallenged, but he ought to be worried. Given that it is defending a poor performance in 2015, Labour went backwards in terms of the number of councillors. It did win some high-profile contests. However, there must be a concern that its coalition of older, less-educated, working-class voters and younger, liberal metropolitan graduates is wilting in the heat of the Brexit argument. Winning wealthy urban seats while losing party heartlands ought to provoke a bout of soul-searching in all those who believe that Britain badly needs an effective Labour government. British politics could fragment ever further, with unpredictable results. With European elections impending, there is a lesson for both Labour and the Tories: they cannot easily profit as the Brexit process drifts on and on, but their insurgent rivals might.
