Local Elections: More on the Minor Parties

Iain Dale's numbers confirm what I observed happening in the local elections. The Greens made great strides. All the other minor parties and independents stood still or went backwards. How the Greens will affect the other political parties remains one of the most interesting questions to emerge from these elections. The BNP are an ugly and unpleasant force in British politics but don't appear any closer to an electoral breakthrough. The UKIP are close to irrelevant outside of European elections. The Lib Dems are the most popular protest vote rather than a genuine third party.

Local Elections: Backlash after successful elections

Where I live, in Letchworth, is part of a solid Conservative parliamentary constituency. North Hertfordshire has a Conservative majority of nine thousand, it trebled at the last election. However, Conservative strength in the constituency is traditionally a result of a lot of rural or semi-rural areas. Letchworth area council used to be Labour run with some Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives barely getting a look in. That has almost completely reversed over a number of years.

Now, two areas are solid Conservative. Letchworth South East is reasonably safe. Letchworth South West, where I live, got huge majorities this year. It is very, very solid even by the standards of a true-blue constituency. However, the other wards in Letchworth are more problematic.

Letchworth Wilbury had always been Labour. Conservatives who stood there were practically paper candidates. Then last year one of them won. Letchworth Grange is another surprising area for the Conservatives to do well. Finally, Letchworth East has had one of its two councillors as a Conservative for a few years but is generally Labour. All of these were being defended.

We had all-out elections thanks to some boundary changes. These changes strengthened Letchworth Grange and South West but hurt East and Wilbury. In the final result the Conservatives lost the councillors in Letchworth Wilbury and East. In Letchworth Grange they gained a councillor and came close to getting a third and making a clean sweep.

Now, to the point. I don't think this was all about the boundary changes. It looks like there is a serious danger for Conservatives who have succeeded in traditionally Labour areas. If you have surprised people and won a seat you were not expected to win in a previous year you can see a rapid reverse. Labour voters may have assumed their ward was safe and not turned out. They then see that their area is not as safe for Labour as they thought and turn out in far greater numbers.

We could see this happening more often in the future with the Conservatives winning in so many traditionally Labour areas. The new councillors may need to work hard to hold onto their new seats.

Local Elections: The Minor Parties

First, the UKIP. I have no idea what happened to them. Their website seems proud of the races where they've come second which is hardly inspirational. I can't find any reporting about them by searching Google News. Unless DK corrects me I'll assume they've gone nowhere. Some of them are literally going nowhere after getting kicked off a train for being unpleasant and rather racist.

The BNP appear to have had a genuinely mixed bag. They are making advances in some new areas but suffering where they already had seats. It's nice to think that people do at least learn some kind of lesson about what they get in a BNP councillor. It isn't the Labour Party their grandparents voted for.

I'm not going to comment on the Scottish and Welsh elections as there are people better qualified to do so.

The big news on the minor party front in England is the Green Party. Just looking at where they've gained councillors, Brighton for example, underestimates their impact. I was at the count in North Herts and Green voters were being found everywhere in large numbers. In one seat they got over six hundred votes. They appear to really be going places. I don't think it has yet sunk in that they are going to be big news in future elections, possibly at the next General Election.

The big question is who they will take the most votes from. Conventional wisdom would be that the Liberal Democrats will suffer, that would fit with what has happened this election. However, we had a lot of multiple vote wards and I was able to watch who people were mixing Green candidates with. It wasn't always the Liberals. Quite a few Labour and Conservative voters were also flirting with the Green Party. The Greens are the minority party to watch.

Finally, the Liberal Democrats have confirmed their status as a minor party in this election. We don't have three-party politics in the sense of three potential governments and this election has demonstrated that. For the Liberal Democrats to lose so many candidates at this stage says dismal things about their chances at the General Election. I can see a few possible reasons for this. First, and probably most importantly, there is the classic squeeze when one of the main two parties has their act together as the Conservatives do at the moment. Second, the Greens may be hurting them more than the other parties. Third, they are an absolute shambles at the moment and it isn't all Menzies Campbell's fault. A new leader can give them dynamism but it can't resolve the immense tension at the heart of a party trying to be a libertarian alternative to the Conservatives and a social democrat alternative to Labour.

I see no prospect of any serious challenge, in England, to the two-party system. While other parties can affect the chances of Labour or the Conservatives they cannot aspire to government themselves.

Local Elections: North vs. South or Urban vs. Rural

It has long been the conventional wisdom that the Conservatives need to do better in the Northern cities. However, this begs a question. Not all of the North is urban and not all urban areas are in the North. Is the Conservative problem urban or Northern performance?

I think these elections answer that question. We would expect that if the problem were primarily the North we would see more progress in Southern areas not already voting Conservative.

In the North the Conservatives have done rather well. They have gained councils and councillors.

By contrast, look at places like Stevenage (a city in all but the technical sense) where the Conservatives have stood still despite it being surrounded by blue councils. Cambridge still has no Conservative councillor. I think that we were led astray by the strong Tory performance in London at the last General Election. That suggested that the North was the problem rather than urban areas in general. In reality it may just have been that London is exceptional.

I'm unsure why the Conservatives have such a problem gaining traction in urban areas. However, the geographical picture is becoming clearer. The rural areas are voting Conservative across the country, the urban areas are still largely Labour strongholds and the main battle is in the suburbs, whether these are the edges of cities or small towns in their own right.

Local Elections: It's gone well

Predicting before the local elections Sean Fear suggested on ConservativeHome that the Conservatives were likely to gain 500-750 councillors. This was a relatively optimistic prediction with most suggesting we'd be doing really well if we gained more than 600. Now we've come out with 875 don't let anyone tell you it isn't damned good news.

Equally, he predicted we would gain control of 18 councils. We have gained 38. I don't mean to get at Sean Fear, he was closer than most predicting these polls. I only use his numbers to highlight that we have comfortably beaten even an optimistic prediction of how we would do. There is a lot of talk of a modest Conservative success that isn't backed up by in the council elections at all.

Finally, most importantly, is our share of the national vote. In this the target was absolutely clear. Get 40% of the national vote. That is the number you need to get a workable majority and become a government. We got 41%. There is a lot of work to do before the next General Election but we are getting the kind of support that can translate into victory.

The Scottish and Welsh elections didn't go so well and are the fly in the ointment. I'm poorly qualified to discuss these but they are less relevant to national politics. It would seem to boost the argument for a new, separate, Scottish Conservative Party though.

Finally, Gracchi's assertion that the numbers now don't mean much because people just vote against the government at this stage of the cycle can't be sustained. While things will change before the election this is not purely a transient protest vote. If it was the Liberal Democrats have done well and instead they've completely collapsed with the loss of 242 councillors.

Labour doing poorly, the Lib Dems collapsing, huge numbers of new Conservative councillors and councils. I'm celebrating.