Thursday’s council elections are the most difficult in the cycle for Labour. There are no elections in most of the biggest urban areas, including London and the six former metropolitan counties, nor in Scotland, nor in Wales except for Anglesey. Instead, the main battleground is the rural shire counties, which were largely gerrymandered in a boundary review in the 1990s which put many cities in separate unitary authorities.
But, paradoxically, they are perhaps the most symbolic for Labour’s recovery of the annual rounds of local elections. We have had the low-hanging fruit in 2011 and 2012, the recapture of metropolitan borough councils that the public would be surprised to learn had ever been lost by us. This came largely through the collapse back to us of the Lib Dem vote once they went into coalition.
In this year’s election the task is to take seats directly off the Tories. There is not much opportunity to recapture control of entire councils – perhaps just three or four are in play, though these are powerful and populous counties like Lancashire that are full of parliamentary marginal seats and where the councils control big-ticket spending on schools and social services. But there is an opportunity to put Labour back on the map in southern and Midlands counties where it was wiped out in 2009. This was the absolute nadir of Labour’s fortunes. It is worth looking at the 2009 results to get a painful reminder of how bad they were. Not a single Labour councillor in Buckinghamshire, Cornwall, and Dorset. Just one Labour councillor in each county in Essex, Hampshire, and North Yorkshire. Just two Labour councillors in each of Cambridgeshire, Kent, Somerset, Suffolk, West Sussex, and Wiltshire. Some of these counties contain marginal parliamentary seats we need to regain to get a general election majority.
We have to build back decent-sized Labour groups in some of these counties if we are to have any claim to be back in action as a truly national party. And that is essential if Ed Miliband’s One Nation narrative is to be credible. And where the gains are made in parliamentary marginals, it strengthens our chances of taking that constituency because councillors are organisational force-multipliers. When you gain a council seat there is a proven connection to future success in the same area at parliamentary level.
The wild card in this election is UKIP. We simply don’t know how many seats they might take and, more importantly, whether their intervention by running so many more candidates this year will disproportionately benefit us by siphoning more votes from the Tories than Labour. But we do need solid gains round the country to ensure that on Friday there is a narrative about Labour momentum in the media, not just pictures of Nigel Farage grinning.
Academic pundits Rallings and Thrasher have played their usual unhelpful role of suggesting Labour is on track for 350 gains. Personally I think winning back the 291 councillors we lost in 2009 is a more realistic target, given those were last won in 2005 on the same day, and the same higher turnout, as our third general election victory.
But you can be part of making sure we get nearer to 350 gains than to 291.
If you have already been active in this campaign I don’t need to tell you to redouble your efforts in the final straight.
But too many Labour members tend to regard council elections as a spectator sport when they are not happening in their own patch. And the nature of this year’s contests means that the majority of Labour members are in areas without an election this year.
If that’s you, and you haven’t already travelled to help in a marginal area with elections, this is your call to arms. Don’t be a spectator and watch Labour fail to make the gains it needs, get on the pitch and get stuck in. Just a couple of extra people turning up, even in the evening after work, could mean the difference between winning and losing a target county council division on polling day. And many of the areas where we can win are within 30 minutes to an hour by train or car from the urban areas where there are no elections.
To find out where you can most usefully help on Thursday just call your Labour regional office – all the contact details are online here.
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Luke Akehurst is a councillor in the London borough of Hackney, writes regularly for Progress here and blogs here.
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Credit: Louisa Thomson
“Academic pundits Rallings and Thrasher have played their usual unhelpful role of suggesting Labour is on track for 350 gains.”
Rallings and Thrasher are professional academics. They base their predictions on their analysis of data. It’s not sheer ‘punditry’. You may well think they are wrong, and they may well be, but the error will be with their model, not with them being ‘unhelpful’.
I don’t think I’d be as optimistic as Luke or R&T, but 200-250 gains would probably be a more realistic figure. As a candidate in a distinctly non-rural part of a rural shire county, the other wild cards are local Lib Dems, of whom I am opposing at the ballot box a popular candidate who is also an incumbent. UKIP are probably helping make it a 2 way, rather than a 3 way, marginal it had previously been, and do not appear to be impacting enormously on the core Labour vote, deriving much of the votes from the Conservatives, or those disenchanted with the political process overall. How much UKIP take from the Fib Dems is also of interest, as it has been opined locally that much of the Lib Dem vote regionally and nationally was a protest vote. and UKIP, lacking a coherent or cohesive political programme, are essentially also a party of protest.
We shall see.
Well written Luke. Two target seats in Witney, Labour friends wlcome this evening. Just an hour or two will help.