Labour can expect to do well in local elections this year, but fortunes in London and Scotland look more uncertain, argues Lewis Baston

The big contest looming over the rest of the electoral landscape this May is the election of the mayor of London. The mayoralty is powerful and London is politically marginal territory. Polls so far suggest that the result will be close and, as in 2008, Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson are both strong personalities, so there is reason, even apart from the media’s metropolitan bias, to concentrate on this election.

The race is currently difficult to call and it may come down to events during the London campaign itself. Johnson is a lot more viable as a candidate in London than a generic Conservative – if it were purely about national party support, Labour would walk the election because it has a 16-point lead over the Tories in the capital. Labour’s general strength in London may show through more in the assembly elections, where it should become the largest party for the first time in the assembly’s history. This has few consequences for policy because the mayor decides, but Labour would find it particularly satisfying to knock out Brian Coleman in the Barnet and Camden constituency. The British National party won an assembly seat in 2008 but is unlikely to do so this year; the Greens and Liberal Democrats should get representation.

While the London contest might attract most of the attention much of the rest of the country will also have local elections. Every seat in Scotland and Wales (except Anglesey) is up for election, as are a third of the seats in each of the 36 metropolitan boroughs and some unitary and district councils, mostly in the larger urban areas. A few councils will have half or all of their members elected this year – the English local election calendar is not straightforward.

When assessing gains and losses in local elections, it is important to look at the areas where the elections will happen, and the political climate last time the seats were contested. The seats this time are more urban than in 2011, when Labour did well in the cities but did not make much of an impact in suburban and rural areas. The political climate in 2008 was catastrophic for Labour and it was the peak Conservative performance in any recent set of local elections. Labour should be winning back fairly large numbers of seats.

Looking at the current opinion polls, if there is no change in public opinion between now and early May, the results overall will be pretty similar to those in 2011. In councils where there are elections in both years, this will be a useful benchmark for the performance of the parties. Even a repeat of 2011 means a swing of nine per cent from the Conservatives to Labour and 10 per cent from the Liberal Democrats to Labour. Labour lost 434 seats in 2008. Recovering these means getting back to where Labour was in 2004, which was itself a pretty poor year. Three hundred seats would fall if Labour repeated its 2011 performance in the metropolitan boroughs alone, so Labour sights should be set higher than that – perhaps a net gain of 700 would be ‘par’.

In some places Labour victory is almost inevitable. In Harlow, for instance, the Conservatives have a majority of one, a legacy from their extraordinary performance in 2008 when they won every single ward contested in the town that year. Even a historically poor Labour showing in 2012, as long as it is even slightly better than 2008, will be enough to win control. The task is harder than this in several other councils, but Labour should win control in Thurrock, Plymouth, Southampton, Exeter, Reading and perhaps Norwich, creating some satisfying red splodges on the map of southern and eastern England. The Southampton election is particularly interesting because it is currently run by a particularly rightwing pro-cuts Tory council.

Labour gained a swath of councils in the metropolitan areas of the Midlands and the north in 2010 and 2011, but a few more low-hanging fruit should fall from the tree in Birmingham, Bradford, Wirral and perhaps Walsall. It would be very disappointing if Labour did not win the newly established Salford mayoralty. The hard tests that would indicate Labour has advanced significantly since 2011 are Swindon, Dudley and Cardiff. Swindon and Dudley are straight two-party fights with the Conservatives in areas with marginal and volatile parliamentary seats where the Tory vote held up reasonably well in 2011. Cardiff is more of a contest with the Liberal Democrats, who should put up more resistance there than one can expect in the northern cities where they are likely to be massacred for a second year.

The local elections in Scotland are different for three reasons. The simplest is that these seats were last contested in 2007, rather than 2008. The electoral system is also different – Scotland has the single transferable vote proportional system for its local elections. The third reason is the political context, in which the Scottish National party dominates politics, and this set of results will be seen as more of a test of the SNP’s aspirations for independence than Labour’s UK-wide performance. A repeat of the SNP landslide in the 2011 Holyrood elections would see the nationalists controlling most councils in Scotland even under proportional representation. This is unlikely, but it seems possible that the SNP will gain ground, principally at the expense of the Liberal Democrats but also to some extent Labour and independents. The big battleground is Glasgow, where the SNP will try to demolish the last bastion of the Scottish Labour establishment. Most people expect Labour to lose outright control.

—————————————————————————————

Lewis Baston is senior research fellow at Democratic Audit

—————————————————————————————

Photo: lewishamdreamer