I’ve been looking over the ward-by-ward results of the Greater Manchester mayoral race, because I know how to have a good time.
I’ve also been looking at the borough-by-borough results for the Merseyside – I am aware that the names for these new combined authorities are imperfect but I am using them as easily understood shorthand – Bath and Bristol, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, Tees Valley and West Midlands mayoral races.
Here are a few things that leap out.
Labour is winning the future – but falling back in the present
One of the useful things about local elections is that they give us a far clearer idea of who votes for each of the parties than general elections. Why? Because general election results are declared by constituencies but local elections are decided by smaller council wards.
That allows us to have a far more accurate idea – or at least a significantly better guess – of who it is that actually votes for each of the parties.
We have a pretty good grip on who the average Labour voter under Jeremy Corbyn is. It’s pretty similar to the average Labour voter under Ed Miliband: young, living in a big city, or from a population with a high number of graduates, ethnic minorities or both*.
*This isn’t the same as being an ethnic minority or a graduate. There is also a good amount of polling that shows that white voters without degrees who live among non-white voters are more likely to be comfortable with ethnic diversity, too. So it’s not as simple as “Labour’s coalition is one of ethnic minorities and graduates”. It also includes a number of white non-graduates who are comfortable with ethnic diversity and/or graduates.
The problem for Labour – under Miliband as well as Corbyn – is that they are recreating the coalition that elected Barack Obama twice in a country with the demographics of the United States in the 1970s – when the Obama coalition was too small to win power.
The Labour coalition looks a lot like Britain in 30 years’ time. The difficulty is that the election is 31 days away.
The Liberal Democrats are in a heap of trouble
Although it’s possible that Jeremy Corbyn will make history on 8 June, no opposition party has bettered its local election performance at a general election. People tend to use local elections to punish the government before returning to the fold at general election time. That, obviously, doesn’t bode at all well for Labour.
But less discussed is the Liberal Democrats’ performance, which is if anything worse than Labour’s as far as winning seats in June goes. Take the Bath and Bristol mayoral race. They ran Stephen Williams, the former MP for Bristol West as their candidate.
The composite constituencies of the Bath and Bristol combined mayoralty – which also includes North East Somerset – should be fertile territory for the Liberal Democrats. They are the only party to have won parliamentary seats across all of the local authorities contested.
They got just 20,000 votes out of the whole of Bristol. More troubling still they got only 10,000 votes out of Bath and North East Somerset. There are no ward-by-ward results for this mayoral race available, but as the only plausible source of Labour votes outside of Bath itself is are the small former mining towns, it looks likely that the Liberal Democrats actually came third in Bath, a seat they held until 2015 and hope to take back in June.
In Solihull – part of the West Midlands mayoralty, and a seat the Liberal Democrats held until 2015 – they got just 3578 votes, behind Labour on 6695 and light years behind Andy Street with 35,903.
They did beat Labour in the city of Cambridge itself, but not by very much – 13273 to 12222. If you take out the wards of the constituency called Cambridge (you’d think that’d be the same as the city, but no), you get a dead heat.
Outside the mayoral areas, they fell back in Cornwall and failed to make inroads in Cheltenham.
And don’t forget that Tim Farron is no more immune to the effects of political gravity than Corbyn is. You’d expect the Liberal Democrats to do worse in June than they did in May, all of which suggests they will do well not to end up with eight seats again. Their big hope is that anti-Tory voters who tactically backed Labour to stop the Conservatives across the mayoral regions will flock home to the Liberal Democrats in June.
Keep an eye out for the “hidden landslide”
The 2015 general election was a very bad night for Labour. Not only did they lose, but in the seats they lost in 2005 and 2010, the Conservative majorities increased still further, eroding the number of genuine marginals.
The nightmare for Labour in June 2017 is not just defeat but a further rolling back of its position in the seats it needs to win from the Tories.
The picture in the local elections suggests that may happen again. For instance, Labour finished 5868 votes behind the Tories in Peterborough, and, again, you’d expect them to underperform that on 8 June if history is any guide.
The picture in marginals is grim for Labour
Across the marginals, Labour’s performance is not where they ought to be if they are going to win on 8 June. They lost the West Midlands mayoral race by 14127 votes in the first round to the Conservatives. (Dudley South is Conservative-held, Dudley North is Labour-held, both are marginal.)
They lost Walsall – which includes David Winnick’s Labour-held marginal and Valerie Vaz’s safe Labour seat – heavily but Walsall is always more marginal at a local level than a general election so that is less alarming than it would be elsewhere.
In the Tees Valley mayoral contest, they lost in Stockton-on-Tees – which includes the Conservative marginal of Stockton South and the safe Labour seat of Stockton North – by 4069 votes. They lost in the wards making up the marginal seat of Darlington (albeit on a low turnout) by 1384 votes.
Andy Burnham is the one that got away
There is one very big exception to the gloom: the electoral performance of Andy Burnham.
The local elections and the other mayoral results give you an idea of what a generic Labour candidate “ought” to have done in the Greater Manchester mayoral vote, ie, they should have won but only after a second round.
To put the Greater Manchester mayoral race in better perspective: in the general election, Labour got 60 per cent of the vote in the constituencies making up the Greater Liverpool mayoralty. Steve Rotheram got 59.3 per cent, in other words, he did about par, and slightly overperformed considering the fall in the Labour vote across the country. In the Tees Valley combined authority, Labour got 43 per cent of the vote – their candidate, Sue Jeffrey, got 39 per cent of the vote.
Now here’s how it looked in Greater Manchester. Labour got 46 per cent of the vote in the general election – but Andy Burnham got 63 per cent of the vote.
Nor, unlike Sadiq Khan, who, as I’ve written before, basically did as well as you’d expect any Labour candidate to do under Corbyn, did he run up the score in friendly territory.
He won the wards making up Graham Brady’s seat of Altrincham and Sale West – which under various names has been solidly Conservative since 1945 – by 2,600 votes. He won the Conservative-held marginals of Bolton West and Bury North by 8884 and 4729 votes respectively.
To put it simply: given that the opposition parties tend to overperform their vote share in local elections compared to general elections, Andy Burnham is the only politician last week who posted scores where you’d need them to be for Labour to gain ground compared to the 2015 election.
More strikingly, one of the overarching stories of the local elections was that even when Labour didn’t lose ground – the party dropped about three points on the last time these seats were contested in England and Wales – was that the Ukip collapse benefited the Conservatives.
Except in Greater Manchester. Again, Ukip collapsed throughout the conurbation just as they did nationwide. To give you an idea: in Rochdale and Heywood & Middleton, the two most Ukip-friendly seats in the combined authority, Ukip got 333 and 538 voters respectively. Burnham won by 8598 and 6603 votes.
In terms of the debate about how movable those “Ukip 2015, Conservative 2017” voters are, the things Andy Burnham said and did are probably worth looking at.
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