Even the BBC has been forced to admit it: “the Conservatives have been the big winners in the local elections”.
After yesterday’s results, the Labour Party has simply ceased to be competitive in vast swathes of the country.
In the East of England, the Labour Party has essentially become an irrelevance on a local government level. Across each of the seven local authorities polled in the region on Thursday, the Labour Party secured only 19 (or 3.9%) of the 481 seats on offer. Labour now holds only 1 seat on Essex County Council, 2 in Cambridgeshire, 3 in Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk and 7 in Bedford, a parliamentary seat they easily won at the 2005 general election.
Based on these results, Labour faces across-the-board meltdown across this crucial region; from coastal seats such as Great Yarmouth and Waveney to the New Towns of Basildon, Stevenage and Harlow which delivered Labour 10,000+ majorities at the ’97 election.
In Kent, where Labour narrowly clung onto the parliamentary seats of Chatham and Aylesford, Dartford, Dover, Gillingham, Medway, Sittingbourne and Sheppey and South Thanet at the 2005 general election, the party’s representation in County Hall has dropped from 20 to 2 seats. Labour even faced defeat in previously rock-solid wards like Sheerness and Swanscombe and Greenhithe which stayed loyal to Labour throughout the dark days of the late 1970s - their vote dropping by in excess of 20%.
Across the rest of the country, Labour won a single seat in Hampshire and Surrey and four in Gloucestershire, Devon, East Sussex, Leicestershire and Lincolnshire. Labour failed to elect a single county councillor in Buckinghamshire, Cornwall or Dorset – all areas where they held parliamentary seats as recently as the 2001 general election.
In some ways, the party’s decline in Labour’s former heartlands in the Midlands and North of England is even starker.
The party has been reduced from 43 to 16 seats in Lancashire, 31 to 3 in Staffordshire, 35 to 13 in Nottinghamshire and 37 to 21 in Derbyshire.
In Lancashire – a county which had been under absolute Labour control since 1981 and where the Conservatives lost several seats in 1992 whilst still winning the general election – the party now faces defeat in Rossendale and Darwen, South Ribble, Chorley, the two Blackpool constituencies, Morecambe and Lunesdale, Lancaster and Pendle.
In Worcestershire, the party was reduced from 15 seats to 3 with the Conservatives sweeping all seven wards in Jacqui Smith’s Redditch constituency.
When being on the receiving end of terrible local government election results, all political parties – our own included – have always had a tendency to dismiss the results as irrelevant and unrepresentative of the mood of the country at large.
This result, however, can be seen as nothing less than a complete and utter rejection of the Labour Party in the very areas which gave Tony Blair his election victories at the 1997, 2001 and 2005 general elections.
Bring on the general election!
