Political reporter(wp):
The
Conservatives have gained more than 500 seats in local elections across England, Scotland and Wales, with Labour declining significantly and Ukip facing a near total wipeout of its county council seats.
Labour also performed worse than expected in elections for new metropolitan mayors, winning the contests in Liverpool and Manchester, as expected, but losing out to the Conservatives in
Tees Valley, traditionally a Labour heartland. In the West Midlands, the Conservatives’ Andy Street narrowly beat Labour’s Siôn Simon.
With just five weeks to go to the general election, Jeremy Corbyn’s party blamed “
unique circumstances” for a challenging set of results in Thursday’s polls. The numbers are ominous for Labour’s prospects in the general election, with the Conservatives benefiting from
the huge decline in support for Ukip.
Theresa May, however, said she was “not taking anything for granted” about the general election, insisting she believed
Labour could still win.
Speaking to reporters after a visit to a factory in Brentford, west London, the prime minister again tied her electoral fortunes to what she said was interference from forces within the EU which hoped to undermine Brexit.
“The reality is that, despite the evident will of the British people, we have bureaucrats in Europe who are questioning our resolve to get the right deal,” she said. “Only a general election vote for the Conservatives will strengthen my hand to get the best deal on Brexit.”
A forecast return of voters to the Liberal Democrats failed to materialise, with the party seeing a net loss of 36 seats. Ukip meanwhile, took just one seat and lost 140.
By comparison, the Tories had gained more than 530 seats across the three nations. Labour had lost almost 370, split more or less evenly between England, Scotland and Wales. In Scotland, the party
lost control of Glasgow council for the first time in more than 35 years.
Corbyn was en route to Liverpool to congratulate the new Labour mayor, former MP Steve Rotherham. He also tweeted
congratulations to Welsh Labour for “defying the pundits”.
John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, said he accepted it had been a “tough night” but defended Corbyn’s performance and told ITV it had “not been the wipeout people were expecting”.
The Conservatives gained control of at 10 English councils – Cambridgeshire, Derbyshire, East Sussex, Gloucestershire, Isle of Wight, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Warwickshire. Derbyshire was taken from Labour, with the others formerly under no overall control.
Two of the most significant results were in the north, where Labour has dominated local government for many decades. The Conservatives became the largest party on Cumbria county council in north-west England and Northumberland in the north-east, where it was denied a majority when a Lib Dem candidate beat a Tory by
drawing straws to settle a tied result.
In Wales, the Tories gained more than 70 seats and independents have added 10, while Labour lost seats but remained the most dominant party. The Tories gained Monmouthshire council, while Labour lost control of Blaenau Gwent and Bridgend but strengthened its presence in Swansea.
The Lib Dems failed to make the gains they were hoping for in the south and south-west, and were showing a net loss of 32 seats.
Ukip – which lost its presence on Lincolnshire, Essex and Hampshire councils – took until after midday to win a single seat, taking a Lancashire ward from Labour.
The Ukip leader, Paul Nuttall, said it had been a difficult night for the party but that it may almost have been a worthwhile sacrifice given the Conservatives’ embrace of Brexit.
“If the price of Britain leaving the EU is a Tory advance after taking up this patriotic cause, then it is a price Ukip is prepared to pay,” he said
in a statement.
The Greens and Plaid Cymru were the only parties other than the Tories to win ground.
The first metro mayoral result to be announced was for the West of England area including Bristol, Bath, north-east Somerset and south Gloucestershire, which went to the Conservative candidate, Tim Bowles.
The former Labour MP
Steve Rotherham won the Liverpool mayoralty, with 59% of the first choice vote, and former Labour cabinet member Andy Burnham won in Manchester, with 63%, but the Conservative Ben Houchen narrowly beat Labour’s Sue Jeffrey in Tees Valley when second-preference votes were counted.
Former John Lewis boss Andy Street narrowly won the tightly fought West Midlands mayoralty race against Labour’s Siôn Simon.
After polls closed, Corbyn’s team played down expectations of Labour’s performance, accepting that the party could lose hundreds of seats.
Diane Abbott, the shadow home secretary, told the BBC that not too much should be read into “a relatively low turnout type of election”. She said: “At the general we will have a higher turnout. And I believe that Labour voters will be repelled by Tory triumphalism and the notion of giving Theresa May some kind of blank cheque.”
But Philip Johnson, a Labour parliamentary candidate for Nuneaton who lost his Warwickshire council seat, said Corbyn was “putting off” some voters.
Stephen Kinnock was also forthright in his criticism of the leadership and argued the party needed to make the general election about the wider team.
He told the BBC: “I think we can’t just put a spin on this – the fact of the matter is that Jeremy’s leadership does come up on the doorstep on a very regular basis. What we have to do is make this election about more than leadership; we’ve got to make it about the future of our country.
“We are seeing from people on the doorstep that they are worried about the polarisation of our politics; they do feel there is a shift to the hard-left and a shift to the hard-right. And my vision of the Labour party is not one where we are anywhere near the hard-left. We are a party that is a centrist, patriotic party that stands up for working people.”
McDonnell said Labour’s policies were going down well and people would like Corbyn more as they were exposed to him more.
“I’m not underestimating the challenge we face across the country, but what I’m saying is it wasn’t the wipeout many predicted,” he told the BBC. “It is much better and I think we turned out our vote in ways people didn’t expect. In the national campaign, we have set out extremely popular policies and this issue about Jeremy Corbyn, in the very area he campaigned, Cardiff, we actually held on to it well.”
McDonnell said there would be balanced airtime in the broadcast media during a general election, counteracting “unbalanced media reporting of [Jeremy Corbyn] for the last two years”.
“What we’re finding is people like the policies and then they see Jeremy Corbyn is an honest, decent but also principled man, so the more airtime we get the better,” he said.
Up for grabs were seats on 35 English councils – most of them county councils – and every council seat in Scotland and Wales. Turnout in England is expected to have been about 35% – slightly up on the last comparable elections.
Strategists from all the major parties will be scrutinising the results closely for signs that May’s relentless message of providing “strong and stable leadership” has won over habitual Labour voters.
The Conservatives have been trying to play down the results for fear supporters may not bother to turn out at the general election in anticipation of a landslide for May.
Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, denied that the Conservatives were benefiting only from Ukip’s demise, attributing some of the party’s advances to “Jeremy Corbyn’s very feeble leadership”.
Anthony Wells, of the pollsters YouGov, said Labour was just three percentage points behind the position Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives were in at the 1983 local elections, but trailed by 16 points in the general election that followed just a month later.
Wells said: “Don’t just assume that the projected overall shares of the vote at this week’s votes are going to be repeated in next month’s election. People vote differently for different reasons at different sorts of election.”
