After the tumult of the referendum, the convulsions of Brexit and the Corbyn wars, and then the abrupt stop of the pandemic, we suddenly have a set of local election results that feel very much like politics as usual.
Swirling news about potential further prime ministerial fines and a new police probe of Keir Starmer’s beer drinking underline that we’re still in strange times, but the shape of these elections is not so weird.
As in so many past mid-term elections, we have an unloved government haemorrhaging votes in most of the country, and a main opposition that is struggling to inspire or consolidate in a way that would allow it to fully capitalise. Instead, the support that’s in play is splintering, with much drifting—also in time-honoured fashion—towards the Liberal Democrats, who emerge somewhat revived.
Moreover, some of the very particular psephological oddities of the last few elections finally appear to have played out. Oxford University’s Steve Fisher first demonstrated how “Leaveland” and “Remainia” had swung in entirely different directions in the general election of 2017, and that realignment continued for several years—not only through Boris Johnson’s 2019 triumph, but right through to last year’s local elections too. Sifting through today’s results, however, both Fisher and the elections expert Lewis Baston agree. In Baston’s words, “the active phase” of the “Brexit effect” has finally run its course.
The example of traditionally-marginal Dudley is telling. The two-thirds of voters there who broke for Leave in 2016 eventually translated into an overwhelming two-thirds vote share for the Tories in both of its parliamentary seats in 2019. In yesterday’s contests, however, the Conservatives slipped back to 13 wards, and Labour more or less matched that on 12. A new local authority in Leave-leaning Cumberland also swung firmly for Labour, despite having returned three Tory seats in 2019—one of them Copeland, where a storming by-election win in 2017 helped persuade Theresa May to go for her snap general election.
Meanwhile in Scotland, an entirely different political country ever since the 2014 independence referendum, the early signs are of Labour climbing back into some sort of second place. It remains remarkable that the once-dominant party should ever have fallen so far, of course, but even a modest bounce back—if confirmed—would be a definite step towards “normal.”
But if there is—at last—an emerging new normal in our politics, it is in several ways different from the old one—and not only in Scotland. Labour’s support is now much more associated with university education than it ever used to be, and is also more southern. The flipside of its eye-catching gains in Wandsworth and Westminster, and even once true-blue Worthing, is continuing slippage (against a 2018 baseline) in the north and the Midlands, in places like Sunderland, Amber Valley and Nuneaton. Meanwhile, continuing Tory advances in the last of those two are offset by the loss of prosperous and traditionally safely Tory West Oxfordshire.
The votes are still coming in, but Labour’s lead in the projected national vote share looks to be settling at around 5 points, bearing comparison with the opposition’s 3-5 point advantage in such past years as 1986, 1989, 2003 and 2013. As well as sounding like the makings of an ordinary mid-term result, this may sound like good news for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives, since the government went on to recover in all these years.
But I’d caution against any presumption that this fourth-term Tory government will necessarily be able to muddle through.
First, and most obviously, while Britain’s politics might look newly normal, its economics certainly doesn’t. The Bank of England has this week felt obliged to deepen a depressing turn because inflation is set to reach double digits. As the resulting squeeze on living standards tightens its grip, it is hard to imagine the voters “doing gratitude” in the years ahead.
Second, on all the polling, Johnson is now uniquely distrusted. Great campaigner or not, there must be doubts about whether his idiosyncratic slogans will be believed the next time around.
Finally, there is—as Baston emphasises—a sense in which these messy results understate Labour’s underlying position and overstate that of the Tories. Why? Precisely because an underwhelming Labour campaign this time has allowed for a splintering of the progressive vote, and the associated big gains for the Greens and Lib Dems. By contrast, the Tories have a near monopoly on the right, unlike all those years in the 2010s when they faced such a challenge from Ukip. In the polarising conditions of a general elections, Baston believes, it seems fair to guess that Labour would mop up a bit more of the anti-Tory vote than it has been able to this week.
Which all sounds like good news for Labour, although if we’re even roughly back in the land of normal, the party would hope to be at least notionally on track for a clear majority, instead of the messy hung parliament these numbers more plausibly point to. Politics may be becoming less mercurial and strange than we’ve recently grown used to. But there’s nothing in this week’s ballots to suggest a neat or tidy result at Westminster any time soon.
