Lacklustre Local Election Results Give Cold Comfort to Labour

Britain's main opposition party has little to celebrate following Thursday's local government election results — so says a top polling pundit.

Voting analyst Professor Sir John Curtice said the Labour Party would be "somewhat disappointed" with its slim pickings at the polls, which leader Sir Keir Starmer has tried to portray as a referendum on Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson's leadership amid the 'Partygate' scandal.

"I think they would have wanted to have clearly registered that their vote was up on what it was four years ago" — the last time this year's contested council seats were up for election — Curtice told the BBC early Friday morning. "Labour have certainly made progress as compared with last year, but last year was a very poor performance," the pundit said. "So four points up on last year was not exactly surprising."

Curtice said there was "still an awful lot of work for Labour to do, not least perhaps in more Leave-voting England".

Labour took control of three once rock-solid Tory councils in London — Barnet, Wandsworth and Westminster — along with the port city of Southampton in Hampshire and the newly-created Cumberland authority.

The Conservatives had lost 120 seats by Friday morning, with Labour picking up just 33 compared to 58 for the smaller Liberal Democrats and 23 for the Green Party.

Starmer hailed his party's gains as vindication for his leadership since the Conservatives' landslide victory in the December 2019 general election. That result was largely thanks to Labour's policy U-turn from honouring the 2016 EU membership referendum result to calling for a re-run of the vote — in which then-shadow Brexit secretary Starmer said he would campaign to reverse the popular choice.

"This is a big turning point for us. From the depths of 2019 in that general election, back on track, winning in the north," Starmer declared. "Cumberland! Southampton! We've changed Labour and now we're seeing the results of that."

But Curtice pointed out that while Labour had made gains in London, its share of the vote elsewhere in England had fallen elsewhere in England — where it performed worse than under former leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose suspension from the party whip Starmer personally ordered in 2020.

Labour's setbacks included losing control of Hull council to the Liberal Democrats, who won 29 of the 57 seats to Labour's 27 — with the "electoral pact" alleged by Conservative Party co-chairman Oliver Dowden seemingly not extending to the East Yorkshire city.

The Tories even increased their tally in Hartlepool, wining two seats from sitting independent candidates but leaving the council under no overall control. Labour suffered a shock Parliamentary by-election loss in the Johnson's party in northern 'Red Wall' heartland seat a year earlier.

And in the suburban north London borough of Enfield Conservative candidates gained seven seats from independents and one Green party incumbent, leaving them the only opposition on the Labour-run council.

Counting in Scotland and Wales, where all council seats are up for grabs, did not begin until Friday morning, with results expected later in the day.

The pro-Labour New Statesman magazine predicted Starmer's party would pick up 87 more seats in Scotland and 41 in Wales, mostly at the expense of Conservatives. But its overall projection of more than 200 losses for the Tories and 150 gains for Labour was well below earlier forecasts of an 800-seat slaughter for Johnson's party.

Those predicted gains would be less than half of Labour's net loss of over 400 council seats in the 2019 and 2021 local elections. It failure to take advantage of the traditional 'mid-term blues' for a sitting government may put pressure on Starmer to define clearer policy differences between his party and the Tories.