Sputnik: So Chris, today voters across England will be heading to the polling stations to cast their vote in this year’s election. This comes at a very bad time for the conservatives taking into account the ongoing Windrush scandal and Brexit. Polls this morning are show that the conservatives are at risk of losing key wards across London and other strong holds across England. How significant will these losses be for Theresa May and the conservatives?
Christopher May: It’s always very difficult with local elections to know if the polls are true, but the key thing that all of the parties are concerned with, is that if the national issues impact on their local electability. On the doorstep, what they will be trying to do is stress that the local elections are not about a national poll on their behaviour and or practices.
As you rightly say, for the Tories, Windrush and the Windrush generation is a major, major, problem for them but also the current Brexit negotiations aren’t helpful for them either. The Tory government is currently sitting, trying to agree which of two possible options for border regulation they might go with; however, both of those options have already been rejected by the European Union.
So in a sense, it’s almost like shadow boxing. Anybody who knows anything about Brexit whether they were for or against will be highly disappointed with the manner in which the government has been operating. From that point of view, anyone who has been annoyed with Brexit will either not vote at all or vote for thinking it’s a safe protest vote for one of the opposition parties.
Christopher May: I think that’s a really interesting and a very difficult question to answer. I think the antisemitism issue has been very high profiled in the media, on social media, but it’s very difficult to see how that plays out with electorate. Anti-Semitism is clearly a serious problem but for many of the electorate it seems to be a serious problem within the Labour party or doesn’t really impinge on their perception of politics at all. I think actually Labour will do very well out of the Windrush Scandal, because David Lammy has been so high profile and has an enormous amount of very positive coverage that he might take Labour across the line on that basis.
Equally with Brexit, I think Labour remains strategically vague on what their position on Brexit may be. As a result many people who perhaps want to think about Brexit, and give us a signal in the local election can almost safely discount, or feel that they can safely discount, what Labour have been saying or not been saying about Brexit and will really focus on their disquiet for what the Tories have been saying.
In a sense you can sort of see a situation where Labour, partly via in-action but also partly via very high profile interventions around the Windrush generation could I think gain quite significantly. As you said already, nobody would like to predict this but you can see the logic of that happening.
Christopher May: Well I think it’s going to be very interesting. Certainly Owen Jones has been a very high profile in organizing campaigns in local areas to unseat particularly prominent local Tory administrations and certainly if they are successful it will be another piece of ammunition to say ‘Corbyn’s Labour Party’ is a vote winning machine. Within the Labour party, what’s interesting about the Corbyn period is that Corbyn, whether one likes him or not, the one thing one can’t say is that Corbyn hasn’t managed to produce a much larger membership driven Labour party.
It’s not almost the largest member driven political party in the whole of Europe. So from that point of view, further wins in local government elections will definitely be spun or correctly depicted by Corbyn supporters as being yet another area where Corbyn has managed to revolutionize in the last 3 or 4 years the electability of Labour. How that plays out in the national elections is another question and of course within the Labour party, there are a significant number of people who want to deny that result and simply interrupt it as the Tories loosing seats, as it were.
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