Local elections: Voters punish main parties for refusing to deliver Brexit

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There have been loocal elections for 248 English local councils and all 11 Northern Irish local councils - and it seems as though voters are telling politicians to deliver Brexit.

The Conservatives have lost 1,334 councillors, with Theresa May saying voters wanted the main parties to "get on" with Brexit.

Labour also lost 82 seats in the English local elections, in which it had been expected to make gains.

But the strongly pro-EU Lib Dems gained 703 seats, with leader Sir Vince Cable calling every vote received "a vote for stopping Brexit".

However, it's more likely that the increased votes for the Lib Dems were nothing more than protest votes against the two main parties.

Local elections: Conservatives lose more than 1,300 councillors

3 May 2019
BBC News

The Conservatives have lost 1,334 councillors, with Theresa May saying voters wanted the main parties to "get on" with Brexit.

Labour also lost 82 seats in the English local elections, in which it had been expected to make gains.

But the strongly pro-EU Lib Dems gained 703 seats, with leader Sir Vince Cable calling every vote received "a vote for stopping Brexit".

The Greens and independents also made gains, as UKIP lost seats.

All 248 English councils holding elections have now announced their full results.

While the scale of the Conservative election losses is larger than expected, Labour had predicted it would gain seats, having suffered losses the last time these council seats were contested, in 2015.

The Green Party has added 194 councillors, while the number of independent councillors has risen by 612.

UKIP, which enjoyed large gains in 2015, lost 145 seats.

Results from Northern Ireland's 11 councils are also being announced. No local elections are taking place in Scotland and Wales.

MPs have yet to agree on a deal for leaving the European Union, and, as a result, the deadline of Brexit has been pushed back from 29 March to 31 October.

While local elections give voters the chance to choose the decision-makers who affect their communities, the national issue has loomed large on the doorstep.

Mrs May, appearing at the Welsh Conservative conference, said voters had sent the "simple message" that her party and Labour had to "get on" with delivering Brexit.

"These were always going to be difficult elections for us," the prime minister added, "and there were some challenging results for us last night, but it was a bad night for Labour, too."

A heckler shouted at the prime minister: "Why don't you resign?" He was then ushered out of the conference hall in Llangollen, North Wales, as the audience chanted: "Out, out, out."

BBC political correspondent Iain Watson said that while the Conservatives had lost "more than 10 times as many councillors", it was "remarkable" that Labour, "around the mid-term of a not-very-popular government - has not made net gains".

Speaking in Greater Manchester, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said he "wanted to do better" and conceded voters who disagreed with its backing for Brexit had deserted the party.

But Lib Dem leader Sir Vince, attending a rally in Chelmsford, Essex, where his party took control of the council, said it had been a "brilliant" result and that "every vote for the Liberal Democrats was a vote for stopping Brexit".

The BBC projects that, if the local election results it analysed were replicated across Britain, both the Conservatives and Labour would get 28% of the total vote.

The data, based on 650 wards in which detailed voting figures were collected, suggests the Lib Dems would get 19% and other parties and independents 25%.

Polling expert Prof Sir John Curtice said the days of the Conservatives and Labour dominating the electoral landscape, as happened in the 2017 election when they won 80% of the vote between them, "may be over".

He said it was only the second time in history that the two main parties' projected national share of the vote had fallen below 30%.
The only other occasion was in 2013, when UKIP performed strongly in local elections.

Prof Curtice also said the Conservatives and Labour had both lost ground since last year's local elections when both were estimated to be on 35%.

While the Lib Dem figure was the highest since 2010, when they agreed to join the coalition government with the Conservatives, he said it was still well below the 24% the party regularly achieved in the 1990s and 2000s.

Green Party co-leader Sian Berry told the BBC the Greens were not simply benefiting from a protest vote over Brexit - their gains reflected "huge new concerns" about climate change as well as the strength of their local campaigning on a range of issues.

For UKIP, Lawrence Webb, a former London mayoral candidate who is standing in this month's European elections, said the party's "fortunes were on the up", despite the fall in its number of councillors.

This is the biggest set of local elections in England's four-year electoral cycle, with more than 8,400 seats being contested. A further 462 seats are up for grabs in Northern Ireland.

Six mayoral elections have also taken place, with Labour's Jamie Driscoll winning the contest to become the first ever North of Tyne mayor.

Labour candidates also won in Leicester and Mansfield but the party out lost to independents in Middlesbrough and Copeland.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-48091592

 

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Even the ‘local’ elections were all about Brexit

Some thoughts on the best municipal polls in memory.





Mick Hume
Editor-at-large
6th May 2019
Spiked

The council elections in much of England last week were the most interesting local contests in living memory. That may not seem much of a claim, given the inherent dullness of most municipal elections. But these were no normal parish pump polls.

It’s Brexit, stupid

Before Thursday, top Tories tried to talk down the importance of their looming disaster by insisting that these were only local elections, not a national referendum. In other words, they were about the bins, not Brexit. This rubbish imitation of Edward from League of Gentlemen – ‘These are local elections, for local people – we’ll have no trouble here!’ – fooled few.

The local elections became the outlet for a national outpouring of anger, frustration and ‘**** the lot of them!’ over the Brexit debacle in Westminster. The humiliation of Theresa May’s two-faced Brexit-betraying Conservatives and the failure of Jeremy Corbyn’s dishonest Remainer Labour Party both confirm Brexit’s status as the defining issue in British political life.

It does not much matter today what your policies are on the bins, or anything bigger. Brexit and the crisis of British democracy is now what every election is about. The dustbin of history awaits any who doubt it.

The near-death of two zombie-party politics

Less than two years ago, we were assured UK politics had gone ‘back to normal’. The fact that the Tories and Labour together won 82 per cent of the total votes cast in the 2017 General Election was supposed to signal the return of two-party politics. Last week, however, voters gave two stiff fingers to that notion.

In different ways, both major parties did execrably badly. May’s Tories lost a remarkable 1,330 seats compared to David Cameron’s high tide in 2015 – far worse than their most dire expectations. If the old political patterns still held, that would have meant big gains for Corbyn’s opposition Labour Party. Yet Labour managed to do even worse than its poor performance under Ed Miliband four years ago, losing 84 council seats overall last week.

Worse still, as top psephologist Professor John Curtice observed, both the Tories and Labour lost most seats in their traditional heartlands. The Conservatives did badly in the south, losing control of councils from Chelmsford in Essex to Bath and North-East Somerset. The Labour Party, meanwhile, took a hiding further north, losing control of councils that had been Labour as long as anybody could recall, such as Bolsover in Nottinghamshire and Hartlepool in County Durham.

For years, Labour and the Tories have staggered on as zombie political parties, occupying their old bodily shells but with no heart or soul. Last week’s elections suggest the zombies might be staggering towards final decapitation.

The anybody-but-them movement

That doesn’t mean, however, that the other mainstream parties who did rather well in last week’s local elections are set to ‘challenge’ the Tories and Labour. Yes, the Liberal Democrats picked up an impressive gain of 704 council seats, more than doubling their total. The Green Party did even better proportionately, starting Thursday night with only 71 council seats and ending it with 265.

But ignore all their overexcited talk of these parties making a ‘breakthrough’ in national politics. If that were true, established parties such as the Lib Dems and Greens would not have been almost invisible in political life prior to last week’s elections.

The truth is they made their gains as part of the general anybody-but-Tory/Labour outburst in this Brexit election. Tellingly, the non-mainstream candidates lumped together as ‘Others’ gained 661 seats, more than doubling their total; independents – not to be confused with the Independent Group of Remainer MPs – took control of councils for the first time in decades. Candidates from ‘fringe’ groups such as the Yorkshire Party or For Britain won their first council seats.

And perhaps most tellingly of all in terms of disaffected voters, the number of spoiled ballot papers reached unheard-of levels – in some places reportedly outnumbering the votes cast for the ‘winning’ candidate.

Remainer backlash? Leave it out

The Grasping-At-Straws party declared the local elections a victory for the Remain movement. Indeed, some supposedly intelligent commentators even started talking about the boost in votes for the likes of the Lib Dems and Greens as ultimate proof of a ‘Remainer consensus’ in the country.

Leave it out. The increased vote for the Lib Dems, the most creepingly Remainer party in national politics, may indeed confirm that there is still a sizeable minority for staying in the EU, even if it means voting for a relic like Vince Cable. But the more powerful force revealed by these elections, even if underground, was the majority Leave movement.

Angry support for Leave was evident in the high number of spoilt ballot papers with ‘Brexit’ or ‘traitors’ scrawled across them, in the votes for the discredited rump of UKIP, and for any candidate that hinted at being pro-Brexit. Perhaps most of all, it was evident in the bitter rejection in Leave areas of the real Remainer Party, Corbyn’s Labour.

The ghost at the feast – or perhaps at the funeral – is Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. The Brexit Party, which was only launched a few weeks ago and did not even stand in the local elections, nevertheless emerged the real winner. All the signs from Thursday are that the European elections on 23 May will put the Brexit cat among the Remainer pigeons, with its claws out. As even top Tories have conceded, if they think last Thursday was bad, they ain’t seen nothing yet. Labour Leavers should surely wake up to the same reality and vote Brexit.

Democracy on the line

Last but by no means least, the local election results confirmed that the central issue of our age is not just Brexit, but the future of British democracy. spiked has argued all along that, if 17.4million votes to leave – the biggest popular mandate in British history – can be overturned by a few MPs and Lords, then by what standard are we a democratic society?

Last week also demonstrated that democracy is the one overriding issue that Leavers and Remainers can unite around today. It is clear from the results that neither Leave nor Remain constituents trust mainstream politicians to deliver what they want. Could we, as the old left used to say, unite and fight for democracy?

May and Corbyn’s attempt to stitch up some deal before the EU elections is classic Westminster court politics. It shows they are desperate to get any deal done behind closed doors to keep it out of the spotlight. Let’s insist that these elections are happening on 23 May, that contrary to rumours they do matter, and that every vote counts.


For democracy now, it’s Brexit or bust.

Mick Hume is spiked’s editor-at-large. His latest book, Revolting! How the Establishment is Undermining Democracy – and what they’re afraid of, is published by William Collins.


https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/05/06/even-the-local-elections-were-all-about-brexit/

 

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The results in Northern Ireland: