The London and local elections on Thursday 1 May will be Gordon Brown’s first electoral test as Labour leader and prime minister. For all the wildly fluctuating polls of his first year in office, it’s now time for Brown, David Cameron and fellow-debutant Nick Clegg to submit their parties to public vote.
As well the mayoral and Greater London Assembly elections, more than 4,000 seats will be contested in 159 local authorities in England and Wales. However, the results will not necessarily form a reliable guide to the parties’ prospects at the next general election.
The polls may be bad for Labour at present, in light of the credit crunch and backbench dissent over the abolition of the 10p starting rate of income tax. But local elections are always somewhat divorced from the national picture. Particularly significant are the respective performance of the parties in the equivalent elections in 2000 and 2004.
In both those years, Labour did badly, only to score clear wins in general elections the following year. In 2000, Labour lost (while the Tories gained) over 500 council seats, but Tony Blair crushed William Hague by another landslide in 2001. A backlash over the Iraq war meant that Labour’s national share of the vote in 2004 was just 26 per cent, according to the psephologists Rawlings and Thrasher, with over 800 seats lost. Although it was low in historical terms, the party’s share of the vote in the 2005 general election was around 10 percentage points better.
This time, Labour will not sustain anywhere near as many losses as in 2004. As ever, officials from all three main parties have played down their chances, so that the actual results look better in the end. Press reports have quoted some Labour people predicting around 200 losses, and perhaps an unprecedentedly low share of the vote of less than 25 per cent. The Tories have cast doubt on the scope for Labour losses given their awful result last time the seats were contested. The Lib Dems are right to be cautious about their chances: things don’t get much better for them than their 2004 performance.
In London, the personal appeal of Ken Livingstone has also been a factor. Though he ran as an independent in 2000, in 2004 he had returned to the Labour fold. He won both elections easily against a fairly limp challenge from Stephen Norris for the Tories. Boris Johnson, by contrast, exhibits similar levels of name recognition and public affection as the mayor does himself. Livingstone is in the fight of his life. Most recent polls have put Johnson ahead, although the gap is closing: the received wisdom is that the two men are currently ‘neck and neck’.
Livingstone seems to be gaining some traction by painting Johnson as not serious enough to run such a big, complex city. The Tory candidate’s bumbling performances at the Newsnight and other hustings have fed this perception. He seemed ill-acquainted with his own policies – such as the cost of his scheme to replace the capital’s maligned ‘bendy buses’ – if indeed he had any.
The question is whether London voters will pull back at the last minute from Johnson and ‘time for a change’. Labour is hoping for a kind of 1992 in reverse, where voters apparently shied away from voting for Neil Kinnock (supposedly ‘in the polling booth’) because they couldn’t imagine him as PM. One sign that this might be happening is contained in a recent MORI poll that put Johnson marginally ahead: asked what they thought the actual outcome of the mayoral race would be, 43 per cent said Livingstone, 28 per cent Johnson. And one-third of voters are still not certain which way they will vote.
Different parts of each party will put their own spin on the results come 2 May, using it as evidence to back up policy prescriptions. Many in Labour are worried about that crucial part of the Blairite coalition, southern voters outside London, being lost to the Tories. This feeling will be intensified if one of their few remaining southern councils, Reading, is lost. The pressure group, Progress, is staging an event on this subject on 13 May.
But Brown’s hope that he can ride out current economic difficulties – and take the credit at the next general election – will be as important as policy direction or any cabinet reshuffle.
David Cameron, meanwhile, has been subject to talk of ‘tortoises’ and ‘hares’ in his party, the latter apparently wanting a more right-wing, tax-cutting agenda while the party’s position in the polls remains strong. By contrast, Cameron will want to secure a bare minimum 40 per cent of the vote in the local elections as a sign that he is steering a winning, more centrist course.
Like Labour, the Tory leader will be looking to make progress outside his heartlands – perhaps in North Tyneside and the Vale of Glamorgan. And John Curtice of Strathclyde University wrote recently in the Independent that it would be a ‘bitter blow’ for the Tories if Johnson doesn’t become Mayor of London.