Now that the dust has settled...

There’s a lot to be said for focusing a little more on the glimmers of hope than on the enveloping darkness. 

It was a great pleasure to read that a spectacular change had taken place in Oxfordshire. I lived in the county at one time, and it felt entirely unchanging, politically. The City of Oxford, with one of the higher concentrations of brainpower in the country, voted Labour. The County, with its much higher proportion of the self-satisfied rich and the unnecessarily deferential poor, voted Conservative. There seemed no likelihood of any change soon.

Witney, where I used to live in Oxfordshire

Well, it turns out that I was being too pessimistic. At the local elections on 6 May, Labour retained a huge majority in the City, and the Conservatives the excellent result of no seats at all. Meanwhile, and this is the extraordinary thing, at County level the Conservatives lost nine seats. The Liberal Democrats gained eight seats, Labour gained one and the Greens gained three.

The Conservatives ended up just one seat up on the Liberal Democrats. And even that may not last: the Council has admitted an administrative error in one ward where Labour votes were assigned to the Conservatives in error. Correcting that error would return the seat to its previous Labour holder, and reduce the Conservatives to equality with the Liberal Democrats.

That’s not just an election result. It’s an earthquake.

Even better, the Liberal Democrats, Labour and the Greens have decided to work together. Between them they hold a majority in the Council, so it falls to their group’s control. Unseating the Conservatives from control of the Council is a first since 1973.

Now, on its own, this doesn’t reduce the significance of Labour’s poor performance overall on 6 May. But it’s one more element of success, and it’s by no means the only one. Andy Burnham, Labour Mayor of Manchester, took 67% of the vote and won every single one of 217 wards. Labour increased its representation in Wales, to equal its highest ever. And, out of 13 mayoralties contested, Labour won 11, including in formerly Tory areas such Cambridgeshire and Peterborough and the West of England. It also held London, where Sadiq Khan was re-elected with a slightly reduced vote.

Indeed, even overall, the results were hardly catastrophic. Labour lost the last parliamentary election by 80 seats. Projections of the local elections to national level – in other words, treating them as a massive opinion poll – would suggest that the Tories would win again but with a majority of just 48. Overturning an 80-seat majority was always going to a huge task, one that could take more than one election. It’s good, at least, to see the government’s standing on the wane.

What’s more, all of this has to be set alongside the atmosphere in which the elections were fought. There was clearly a strong surge in favour of incumbency: in many parts of England, as well as in Scotland and Wales, the governing party did well. That feels like the result of relief in many voters as they feel the Covid pandemic may be ending.

That’s not a sentiment with a long-term future.

There was also a heavy Brexit effect. Labour did particularly badly in areas which voted heavily to leave the EU. That included the parliamentary by-election in Hartlepool, which voted 70% for Brexit, and where Labour lost the seat for the first time since it was created half a century ago. It suffered far less, even though it lost about 1% on average on previous elections, in areas where people voted to remain. 

That Brexit gets associated with Toryism strikes me as entirely appropriate. We’re seeing inhumane behaviour towards EU citizens who arrive in England with minor errors in documentation – they’re not merely deported, they can even be interned without access to lawyers or relatives. That strikes me as revealing the true nature of Brexit and it seems to me that the Tories are far more appropriately tarred with that brush than Labour is.

It takes a while for economic phenomena to work their way through. These things don’t happen overnight. But in time it will become clear just how hare-brained a move Brexit was. At that point, it will become far less of an asset to the Tories and may, indeed, become a liability that they are so closely associated with it.

With the dust now settling, it’s clear that things were nothing like as bad on 6 May as they might at first have appeared. Labour needs to learn to hold its nerve. It needs to learn from places like Manchester, or Wales, or now, it seems, even Oxfordshire City Council.

The future need not be bleak. Indeed, learn to play our cards right, and it could even be rosy.