Ouch. That hurt quite a bit. After several years of some pretty bad local election results for Labour across the country, we got well and truly clobbered. Results in the north, best described as very bad but not catastrophic, were perhaps more significant in that they showed the regional divide to the ‘Cameron effect’ may be diminishing. Northern voters have long seemed more resistant to the new Tories, with cultural anti-Conservatism more deeply ingrained up here, but that appears to be changing. Northern voters may still not like Cameron, but their disenchantment with the Brown government is such that they are starting to overcome it.
In most parts of northern England, whichever party was available to be a grateful recipient of the anti-Labour backlash gained. However, there was no question that the Tories did particularly well. The only places where they struggled were areas in which they are still to re-establish themselves in any meaningful form, such as on Merseyside and central Manchester.
In Greater Manchester, the Tories took Bury and inflicted substantial losses on us in Salford, Wigan and Oldham. High-profile casualties included Roger Jones, a Salford councillor and Chair of Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Committee (GMPTE), whose defeat may signal the death of the Greater Manchester congestion charge scheme – one of Labour’s flagship local government initiatives. In the north-east, North Tyneside fell into Tory hands and they made gains in places they haven’t touched since the 1960s, such as Sunderland. It was the same story in Yorkshire, with substantial Tory gains in Bradford, Wakefield and Rotherham.
As in the rest of the country however, the real alarm bells for Labour lay not in the tally sheet of the numbers of councils and councillors lost, but in the share of the vote. It was a truly nail-biting evening to be a Labour councillor, with even the soundest majorities cut to the bone. This was not a case of our supporters staying at home – they chose to go out and vote directly for our opponents instead to send us a message.
We should remember that local election results are a notoriously bad guide to general elections, with the Blair governments often doing badly in between resounding general election wins. However, on the share of the vote we received on 1 May no Labour strategist could seriously deny that the key Northern marginal seats – especially the ‘bellweather seats’ such as Bury South and Bolton West – are now firmly within the Tories’ reach.
Those who want to use these results in our heartlands to argue for a suicide run towards the policies of the 1980s are as wrong as ever. Our problems are deeper, and encompass our leadership, strategy, organisation and our inability to break out of the Westminster village when it comes to campaigning. This is one area – getting their people and campaigns around the country – where the Tories have invested real resources and the signs are that it is beginning to pay off for them. Unless we begin to match them it may be that the very definition of what constitutes a ‘Labour heartland’ will soon be put to the test.
Jonny Reynolds is a Labour councillor in Tameside