Local election gains in diverse seats show Labour has momentum it needs

Last month, I set out my annual benchmarks for the May elections. How did Labour do against the various measures? There are four main ways of measuring Labour’s national performance: national projected vote share, raw number of councillors, number of councillors gained or lost and number of councils controlled.

In most years, those indicators can give conflicting or mixed signals, but this time round, hearteningly for Labour supporters, they are all pointing in the same direction. The figures I am using are from the BBC website and at the time of writing are missing one ward in Redcar and Cleveland which is recounting after the bank holiday.

On national vote share (PNS – Projected National vote Share) – a projected figure calculated by the BBC as though the entire country had been voting – Labour scored 35%. This is identical to last year, but up 7% from when these seats were last contested in May 2019. Compared to the December 2019 general election, Labour is up three percentage points and the Tories are down 16, from 42% to 26% – a Conservative to Labour swing of 9.5 points.

Gaining ground

The swing has therefore improved from last year by a further two points. Although Ed Miliband got slightly higher votes shares in 2011 and 2012, the Tories were also doing well, so he didn’t get such good leads over them, and Labour’s PNS lead of nine points over the Tories is the highest we have had since 2001, and the highest in a non-general election year since 1996. National vote share in local elections for Labour is always lower than the Westminster opinion polls, because the Greens, Lib Dems and Independents perform better in local than general elections, when they get squeezed or don’t stand. For instance, Omnisis did local election polling that accurately predicted these results to within 2%, but they put Labour on 48%, 21 points ahead, in general election voting intention.

Raw number of councillors is the national (Great Britain) total figure, including all the thousands of councillors not up for election. It looks like Labour now has 6,415 councillors (by-elections and changes of party make it difficult to track the exact figure). This is the first time Labour has had more councillors than the Conservatives since 2002 and gives us the leadership of the Local Government Association, which goes to the largest party in local government after seats have been weighted to take account of the different tiers of authority (unitary, district and county).

Labour gained a net 536 councillors. This, as I predicted in my April article, is the highest number of gains we have made since 2012. I was much too pessimistic though about the number of councils where we would gain control. Rather than the handful of changes I had thought possible, Labour gained outright control of a net 22 additional councils. We took pretty much everything we had targeted, and some surprise gains as well.

Labour has made gains in a diverse range of seats

This means Labour now has majority control of 109 councils, the highest raw number since 2016, and because so many district councils have been abolished, the highest in percentage terms for at least twenty years.

The list of councils where we gained control is interesting and encouraging in its diversity:

 In Derbyshire we gained Amber Valley, Erewash, High Peak, North East Derbyshire and South Derbyshire
 In Nottinghamshire we gained Broxtowe and Mansfield
 In Staffordshire we gained East Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent
 In the North West we gained Blackpool, Cheshire West & Chester, South Ribble and West Lancashire
 In Teeside we gained Middlesbrough
 In Yorkshire we gained York
 In the South West we gained Plymouth and Swindon
 In Kent we gained Dover, Gravesham, Medway and Thanet
 Elsewhere in the South East there was the complete surprise gain of Bracknell Forest from the Tories, and the gain of Brighton & Hove where the Greens were decisively beaten.

I would also highlight strong seat gains in Arun (+7 seats), Bolsover (+13), Bolton (+5), Bournemouth, Christchurch & Poole (+8), Braintree (+7), Breckland (+6), Broadland (+6), Cannock Chase (+5), Canterbury (+8), Charnwood (+8), Cheshire East (+6), Chorley (+5), Darlington (+5), Derby (+6), East Suffolk (+5), Hartlepool (+6), Hertsmere (+7), Lewes (+6), Lichfield (+7), Milton Keynes (+5), North West Leicestershire (+7), Redcar & Cleveland (+7), Redditch (+5), Ribble Valley (+7), Rother (+5), Rushmoor (+5), South Gloucestershire (+6), South Norfolk (+8), Southampton (+8), Staffordshire Moorlands (+11), Sunderland (+5), Tamworth (+7), Thurrock (+5), Wakefield (+6), Warwick (+6), West Suffolk (+12), Wigan (+5), and Wyre (+7).

Labour councillors winning in safe Tory seats

It is also worth noting that Labour now has its first councillors for decades in some very safe Tory authorities like Mid-Sussex and New Forest. The authorities named above show us making very impressive advances in all our categories of target seats – winning back heavily pro-Brexit “Red Wall” areas, winning traditional swing areas that determine General Elections, and breaking through into the seats that aren’t part of getting us to a parliamentary majority of 326 but fall in landslide years.

We also did very well in urban areas where our main threat is the Greens or Lib Dems (Brighton and York), continued to build out our new area of strength on the Sussex coast and to replicate it in Bournemouth, and made headway in areas with strong military connections that have usually been tough for Labour (Plymouth and Rushmoor). Hertsmere, with its large Jewish community, tracked the strong swing to Labour seen last year just across the London boundary in Barnet.

Geographically there were three main battlegrounds in this election: the North Midlands, Kent and Teeside. We performed extraordinarily well in the first two (as well as the four Kent authorities we hold outright we are now the largest party in Canterbury and Swale) and more patchily in Teeside, although we gained Middlesbrough and were only one seat away from control in both Hartlepool and Darlington.

Counter-cyclical reverses have occurred in councils where there has either been a financial scandal or poor performance or communal or factional infighting, or all three, affecting a Labour council: Liverpool, Leicester, Slough.

Generally, we should be very pleased with these results and the political and organisational momentum they have created as we head towards the general election, but conscious of the need to spread the campaigning best practice from our best local teams such as Medway all round the country, and of the scale of the task being different in a general election where there are far more target seats just to get us from 200 to 326 let alone beyond that than there were target councils this time.

The tumbling to of us of councils covering parliamentary seats way beyond the 326 mark shows a Labour majority is in play but is no cause for complacency.