Five things we learnt from May’s local election results
Having suffered its biggest defeat since 1935, it was difficult to see how Labour could sink any lower than 2019. Well, lo and behold, it did.
Cartoon by Crid.
At the beginning of the month, I wrote on the key battles of the May local elections. Here, I discuss five of the lessons we can take from the results.
The Union is safe… for now.
As I had predicted, the SNP fell just short of a majority. Having taken East Lothian from Labour and Ayr and Edinburgh Central (former leader of the Scottish Conservative Party Ruth Davidson’s old seat) from the Tories, the SNP needed just one more steal to reach the magic 65 seats. They were to be denied by tactical Unionist voting, however, as Tory voters swallowed their pride to help Jackie Bailie to retain her seat in Dumbarton whilst Lib Dems in Aberdeenshire threw their support behind the Tories.
Upon closer inspection, however, the unreciprocated nature of this Unionist alliance is rather clear. Indeed, had Labour voters been less reluctant to lend their vote to the Tories in places like Perthshire North and South, the result may have been more fatal for the SNP. This may explain Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross’s peculiar decision to tell the BBC that Boris Johnson should resign, if he were to be found guilty of breaking ministerial code. Alongside the Prime Minister’s decision not to visit Scotland once during the election campaign, this was a clear strategic ploy to create some distance between the Scottish Tories and their English counterpart, presenting themselves as a more moderate centrist party.
Before the results had even been finalised, Nicola Sturgeon declared that she now had a mandate for independence and vowed to use the pro-independence majority (with the Green’s eight seats) to push through her second referendum bill. While it is inevitable that a Section 30 order (granting the Scottish parliament the legislative powers to hold a referendum) will be requested before the end of this parliamentary session, this demand can and most likely would be ignored by the UK Government.
During the televised debate, Nicola Sturgeon repeatedly denied any intention to hold an illegal Wildcat referendum. Having been able to rid herself of the SNP’s most extreme separatists to Alba (who performed abysmally in the elections), the First Minister is no longer under pressure to accelerate the independence process or do so illegally. It is thus likely that this parliamentary session will be characterised by an independence ping pong match between Westminster and Holyrood with little or no progress.
The next Scottish elections will arguably be more critical as the Unionists’ ‘once in a generation’ argument will have decayed. Indeed, a political generation is defined by whether new voters have a memory of the election or referendum in question. In 2026, new voters in Scotland will have been three-to-four years-old during the time of the first independence referendum and thus be considered as a new generation. The latest YouGov poll found that support for remaining in the UK had a five per cent lead. Only time will tell whether those numbers hold.
Labour’s ‘Hampstead-Hartlepool’ alliance is collapsing… at both ends.
Having suffered its biggest defeat since 1935, it was difficult to see how Labour could sink any lower than 2019. Well, lo and behold, it did.
Having kickstarted the weekend with a humiliating defeat in the Hartlepool by-election, Labour had to watch on in horror as the party surrendered control to the Tories in Dudley, Nuneaton, Redditch, Cannock Chase, Nottinghamshire, Amber Valley, Basingstoke & Deane, Thurrock, Harlow and Southampton.
Following the abysmal results, the excuses came flooding in thick and fast. Ash Sarkar insinuated that voters outside of London were too racist to vote Labour; Lord Adonis insisted Tony Blair would have won in a landslide; and one Labour councillor went as far as saying that the voters had ‘let them down’.
With such a clear level of muppetism on both ends of the Labour spectrum, it is rather bewildering that blue Labour figures such as Paul Embery and Brendan Chilton continue to place their faith in the party.
Despite believing that they are natural opponents, Corbynites and Blairites are two cheeks of the same liberal globalist arse. Both despise any form of patriotism, both wish to erase our borders, both pushed for the disastrous second referendum – both played their part in the collapse of the party’s traditional working-class support.
A further cause for concern for the Labour party came on Saturday when results in Sheffield and Bristol exposed Labour’s withering long term plan to dominate the electoral map of a more progressive future Britain. Indeed, the party’s substantial losses to the Greens in both councils showed that it could no longer rely on the woke vote. This result begs the question: why did Labour ever try to appease the woke mob in the first place?
Even if Labour were to start eating into the liberal cosmopolitan ‘blue wall’, there simply would not be enough of these seats for Labour to wrestle back power from the Tories. Indeed, a recent study found that the first past the post voting system had a pro-Brexit bias similar to that of the Electoral College for the Republicans. Secondly, it has been proven time and time again that any attempt to appease the far-left will ultimately fail. If you take the knee for them, they will ask you to lie down. They will not be satisfied until every social construct has been completely dismantled.
Those who understand this fact are those that will remain in power. This explains why the once reputed symbol of European Liberalism Emmanuel Macron has used the latest culture war to appeal to his former populist opponents with speeches defending French history and toughening his stance on radical Islam.
If Labour wants to find itself back in 10 Downing Street, it must win back the Red Wall seats it lost in 2019. To do so, it must begin to talk about the following: sovereignty, levelling up, reindustrialisation, common national identity, preserving community, creating secure well-paid job, defending the country and the importance of the family.
Vaccines save li… political careers.
Whether a red or a blue rosette was pinned to their suit, incumbents up and down the country evidently benefited from a vaccine bounce. Indeed, while the Conservatives increased its hegemony over England, both Labour and the SNP equally saw their majorities increase in Wales and Scotland respectively. An astonishing result, considering all three have been in power for a combined time of 47 years. Meanwhile, incumbent mayors across the country equally swept away their opponents.
Following its abysmal performance in May’s election, it is difficult to believe that Starmer’s Labour had once been performing rather well in the polls. Indeed, a YouGov poll, conducted on January 26th actually gave Labour a four point lead over the Conservatives. Once the process of the vaccine rollout began to accelerate from February onwards, however, Boris’ boys left their opponents in the dust.
Today’s YouGov poll now gives the Tories a 15 point lead over Labour – suggesting they will increase their majority further in 2024. There have equally been suggestions that the Conservatives have greatly benefited from pork barrel politics. The term usually refers to spending which is intended to benefit constituents of a politician in return for their political support, either in the form of campaign contributions or votes. Having already gained a large majority in Government alongside vast swathes of constituencies in the North, it was only natural that the Conservatives translated their national success into local triumph with promises of ‘levelling up’ in return for local council jurisdiction.
As I mentioned in my election preview, this strategy was utilised by the Conservative MP for Mansfield, Ben Bradley, who promised to ‘tie-up’ the local and national decision-making process and thus easing the process of local funding and investment. Evidently, the chairman of Blue Collar Conservatives’s decision was rewarded as he became the new leader of the Nottinghamshire County Council, following an empathetic election victory.
The Tories were not the only ruling party to benefit from the ‘rally around the flag’ effect, however. Before the party was hit with the Alex Salmond affair, polls had put the SNP on track to gain a stonking majority. It is clear that Sturgeon and her Government benefitted greatly from her daily Covid briefings. An opportunity to showcase an appearance of statesmanship, Sturgeon utilised her televised appearances rather effectively by placing herself at the forefront of Scotland’s recovery campaign.
As the aforementioned poll suggested though, support for the Union has equally benefitted from the successful vaccine programme. This must come as no surprise, however, as the vaccine roll-out fiasco in Europe, which saw president Von Der Leyen ban member states from negotiating separate vaccine deals, exposed the inefficiency of the EU’s federalist dream.
After some polls in March suggested that he may lose his seat, Mark Drakeford arguably gave us the biggest surprise of the election by increasing Labour’s Senedd seats to its joint record high. Despite some questionable decisions, such as blocking off clothing aisles in supermarkets and reopening two weeks later than England, the Labour leader’s fortune was turned around by the Welsh vaccination programme which has seen Wales vaccinate a higher percentage of its population than any other UK nation.
The ‘politics of belonging’ is close to the hearts of voters
Having been resoundingly re-elected as the mayor of Greater Manchester with 67.3 per cent of first preference votes, Andy Burnham can be equally thankful of the incumbent Covid bounce. Nevertheless, Burnham’s rise in popularity notably came from his opposition to the Government’s ridiculous lockdown tiers as opposed to the vaccine’s success.
If one casts their mind back to October of last year, one can recall Burnham’s damning indictment of the Government’s treatment of low paid workers in the North West who would suffer as a result of a ‘Tier Three’ lockdown. Throughout his media appearances, the former MP for Leigh’s rousing speeches touched upon the old Mancunian idea of ‘we do things differently around here’.
Whether it be his anti-lockdown stance, his fight against homelessness or his opposition to free movement, Burnham has struck a chord with his voters by embracing a politics that attaches a strong sense of belonging to a community and ‘looking after our own’ to the traditionally proud Mancunian identity.
An attachment to place and belonging equally played a part in Labour’s other rare success story in Wales. Indeed, Welsh Labour did what English Labour had failed to do – hold onto its Leave-voting constituencies. In order to understand this juxtaposition, one must analyse the stark contrast between the English and Welsh Labour Remain campaigns. Whilst the former publicly showcased its embarrassment of English identity and mocked those who believed in the country’s potential, the latter ran a more dignified campaign of pride in Welsh culture and identity. This is rather reminiscent of George Orwell’s words in England Your England:
In left-wing circles, it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British.
Unfortunately, contemporary Labour members seem to have forgotten that their party’s origins are deeply rooted in Christianity, as well as organised labour. In fact, Harold Wilson himself once stated that the party’s history owed ‘more to Methodism than Marxism’.
With its traditional working class at the heart of the movement, the Labour party thus had a current of social conservativism running through it. It saw relationships of trust and reciprocity as the pathway to the deepest form of social solidarity. Visible all throughout the Labour giant Clement Atlee’s discourse that was deeply sceptical of both the Soviet Union and Marxist globalism, civic patriotism with Christian ‘love thy neighbour’ undertones were promoted; leading to the creation of the NHS and the welfare state.
As Blue Labour’s Paul Embery points out, however, the ever-growing middle-class student membership that dominates the contemporary Labour party rejects the supposedly ‘reactionary’ ideas of patriotism, borders, religion, self-sacrifice and traditions. Indeed, the left’s language, according to Embery, is now domineered by the baseless buzzwords of ‘equality’, ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusivity’; none of which strike a chord in a working class wishing to talk about family, work and community. Today, the left immerses itself in identity politics, promoting separateness and difference, when the working class worries about social atomisation and fragmentation.
Labour should learn from its victories in Manchester and Wales as well as its defeats elsewhere in the North.
Surviving Communist dictatorships make us right-wing
In one of the more unusual yet inspiring stories of the elections, Jihyun Park became the first North Korean defector to stand in a British election. Having survived one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world, Park chose to use her newly found democratic right to present herself as the Conservative Party candidate for the Bury Moorside ward.
Park’s first attempt to escape hell came in 1998 when she succeeded in crossing over the border into China. Unfortunately, she became a victim of human trafficking when she was sold into a forced marriage with a Chinese farmer with whom she had a child. Years later, Park was tragically sent back to North Korea where she faced endless torture in a Labour camp. However, she was eventually freed after having contracted gangrene and appearing moribund. Despite her infection, Park finally succeeded in her great escape and was offered British citizenship.
Today, Park finds herself teaching languages in the UK which she describes as ‘heaven’. Unfortunately, it was not to be for the North Korean defector this time round as she was defeated by the Labour candidates. However, she did manage to increase the Tory vote share from 511 to 984 and one may suspect that perseverance on the electoral stage will eventually yield some results.
