As the sun rose over Essex this morning, there was one result from our county council elections that all sides agreed on – Essex county council has never been so politically diverse.
‘Essex Man’ has always been a pretty good barometer of what the population as a whole thinks and feels, and the outcome of yesterday’s local elections bears that out. The Tories had their worst results in Essex for 40 years, losing 19 seats across the county to a range of other parties – Labour, Green, UKIP and independents.
The majority of Tory seats were lost to UKIP. The surge by Nigel Farage’s party in the Tory heartlands of Essex will be a shock to many, not least the Tories themselves. In Clacton, you would have expected arch-Eurosceptic Tory MP Douglas Carswell to have seen off any UKIP challenge, but the rising UKIP tide in this Essex seaside resort saw an independent push between the two parties to claim the sea.
Up the coast in Harwich, the former Labour MP Ivan Henderson has been sent to county hall in place of the sitting Tory county councillor, who was kicked into a humiliating third place by his UKIP opponent.
The Lib Dems in Essex will not be happy with these election results either. Losing two of their 11 seats overall, they couldn’t even rely on Bob Russell’s Fortress Colchester to save them this year. In Britain’s oldest recorded town – my own back yard – we won a seat from the Lib Dems in a contentious and hard-fought campaign.
But while the majority of Tory county councillors lost as a result of the UKIP surge, Labour candidates were still failing to make an impact on areas where, back in the heyday of the late 1990s, we were winning. Places like Harlow and Witham, where we had Labour MPs in 1997 and where we need to win in 2015 to form a majority government, still feel tantalisingly out of our grasp.
There is a sense from these results that many voters are casting their ballots with a ‘plague on all your houses’ mentality – Farage would say, these are the people turned off by politicians and the political process. But this is not the case in places like Colchester, where hard-working, committed councillors had stunning victories. The Labour group leader on Essex county council, who hails from Colchester, polled more votes than all her opponents put together. While Dave Harris – known locally as ‘Dynamo Dave’ – beat the Lib Dem incumbent by over 700 votes, standing on his record as a dedicated community activist. Harris summed up his own performance – ‘I think the result indicates the type of councillor I am, which is a hard-working all year round campaigning type of guy.’
Essex needs councillors, and the Labour party needs role models, like Dave. It not only shows the value of having good Labour councillors, but also that where we work, we win.
When I look back at the last time Essex county council was up for election, in 2009, the picture today could not be more different. Labour is making gains and making progress, albeit at a slower pace than many of us would like. It is true that with two years before a general election, the progress is moving in the right direction.
To win Downing Street, Ed Miliband needs to win the south, and he and the Labour party know that to do that, the only way is Essex.
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Jordan Newell is a Progress member and chair of Colchester Labour party. He tweets @jordannewell
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