Local Elections 2017: What did we learn?

County Hall in Derbyshire, now under the Conservative control thanks to a local election sweep that doesn't bode well for Labour prospects in June. Photograph: County Hall, Matlock, Derbyshire by bazzadarambler (License) (Cropped)

The big story from the 2017 local elections is that the Tories made big gains. Hard to get past that, even if some gains have been rather misreported to more effectively represent the narrative people want to tell (Murray, 2017).

For a sitting government to make such sweeping gains is very unusual. And yet, it wasn't quite the kind of triumphal sweep that polls would have led us to expect (Murphy, 2017) - especially in the Tory heartland shires.

It's even more underwhelming, perhaps, when UKIP's collapse is taken into consideration. Every single seat they held was lost and they were swallowed whole by the Tories. Yet, this was no landslide.

Yes, Labour certainly took hits, but there were perhaps fewer than feared and the party even held on in some key places, like urban South Wales, and won a couple of Mayoral contests in Liverpool and Manchester.

That's not to say this wasn't a bad night for Labour. At the least, it'll be seen as another reason for the disgruntled to break with the party leadership and attack Corbyn. But in the revealed weakness should be clarity.

Labour know where they're weak, they know where they'll be targeted, and they have a good idea who and how. The path to the 8th June should be clear, the roads in need of some barricades should be obvious.

And it should be obvious that in places across the East Midlands, in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire for instance, Labour need the support. In both of these counties, and their neighbouring cities, Labour have seats at risk and they lost a lot of county council seats in both.

That support can only come from a Progressive Alliance. With Conservatives rallying around one banner, and attracting former Labour supporters, Labour MPs will need the help.

The estimated national poll figures for the local elections where the Conservatives on 38%, Labour on 27% and the Lib Dems back up to 18% (Curtice, 2017) - very 1992, but with weaker main parties.

These numbers are short of a Conservative landslide but still bad for Labour, giving nobody what they want. Polls have suggested that the gap is perhaps closable before June, but completely overcoming the gap is unlikely.

These results make that clear. Which leads to the conclusion that the practical and achievable aim of progressives is to stop the Tories expanding their majority, perhaps even cutting it, through tactical voting.

To hurt the Tory majority, progressives need to keep their shoulders to certain barn doors, because the Conservatives do still have vulnerabilities that various candidates across the country can expose. The Lib Dems in particular have a chance to take back a number of seats.

The evidence of the local elections then is that, for the Left and Centre, this is a defensive election. In Brighton, and in parts of London, the message has caught on. But that message needs to spread.

Local Elections 2017: Council polls set to be a dry run for the GE2017 campaign

Before it got bumped down the bill by the new main event that is Theresa May's impromptu general election, this year's premier political test in Britain was going to be the local elections. While it might have lost its billing, it hasn't lost it's significance.

In fact, it now carries an expanded added role. Theresa May's U-turn on an early election has created an unusual situation: the 2017 UK general election will get a dry run. The pitches and arguments that the parties are formulating will first be tested on Thursday 4th May.

Unlike in most of Britain's elections, the parties are going to have a chance to put their strategy to the public, assess its impact and then refine it. So don't be surprised to see the parties shift gears heading into June if they feel their pitch struggled in May.

The local elections, covering nearly 5,000 council seats across England, Scotland and Wales, should also give us some idea whether - as we saw in 2016 - Labour can, for the most part, resist a Conservative advance. At the 2016 polls, Labour broke even on councils controlled and limited losses to just 18 councillors, taking 31% of the vote.

However, they also went on to lose a seat at a by-election in Cumbria in the early part of this year, in Copeland - a gift of a victory for a sitting government, the first since 1982, that would normally be faced with just limiting its losses.

With its usually lower turnouts and a slightly different approach, trying to extrapolate trends or sentiments from local elections is difficult and potentially flawed. But there are some races around the country that will be watched intently for any sign of movement.

The particular focus will be on any council under Labour control. They will be under intense scrutiny. The four Labour-controlled councils up for re-election in England in 2017 are Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Durham and Doncaster - and at least three of those have relevance in the June general election as prime Conservative targets.

In Derbyshire: Labour holds North East Derbyshire by just 1800 votes. In the nearby City of Derby, Labour holds Derby South with an 8000 majority - but by only 2500 over the Tories and UKIP combined. In Derby North seat they were narrowly beaten into second in the 2015 general election.

In Nottinghamshire: In the Ashfield constituency, Conservative and UKIP votes add up to over 20,000 with Labour sitting MP elected on less than 20,000, in a seat Labour kept only narrowly from the Lib Dems in 2010. It's a similar story in Bassetlaw, in Gedling and in Mansfield, and Broxtowe was lost narrowly to the Tories in 2010. In the City of Nottingham, the Nottingham South constituency, the total support for the Right is enough to cause concern.

In Doncaster: The Conservatives and UKIP combined to total 18,000 votes in Doncaster Central, a constituency where a Labour MP received just under 20,000 - and in 2010, 15,000 votes between the Tories, UKIP, the BNP and the English Democrats to 16,500 for Labour's MP elect. The neighbouring constituency of Don Valley faces much the same numbers.

In Doncaster it would take a mighty shift to tip the seats away from Labour MPs. But, as with all of the council elections mentioned above, that is exactly what the Tories are counting on. And major losses in council elections will not bode well for Labour's chances come June.

Labour will also have an eye on the elections for the new Metro Mayors, who being given funding powers - though with little democratic oversight, sitting as they will at the head of a council of council leaders. But it presents a chance to fight Conservatives for executive positions that come with funds to distribute locally.

The Liberal Democrats will also be looking to continue their fightback, recovering the ground they lost between 2010 and 2015. They made large gains in 2016 and recovered to 15% of the vote - out performing the polls - and will hope to repeat that performance to gain momentum heading into the June election.

The Lib Dems will also have an eye on the Metro Mayor elections, in particular in the West of England where Stephen Williams, their former Bristol West MP, is running against a Conservative. Winning an election for an executive position, on what used to be their home turf, would be a tremendous boost.

The Green Party will just be looking for a positive performance, after failing to make any headway in 2016 - coming out with 3 seats less.

The local elections in Wales will likely carry a particularly heavy level of media interest, thanks to the BBC focussing on Theresa May's repeated visits to the country and the talk of the opening of opportunities there for the Conservatives. As elsewhere, the question will whether Labour can hold its ground.

In Scotland, there is talk of the Conservatives rallying Unionist support to take seats from the Scottish National Party in June. For both the SNP, with their own aims, and the anti-Tory opposition in England and Wales, it will be of intense interest whether the Conservatives can make any inroads into the astonishingly broad front the SNP have seized in Scotland.

The overall popular vote will also likely be of interest. With only the polls as a guide, some tangible numbers could have a real impact. Now, these should be taken with caution as the majority of councils up for re-election are currently Conservative-controlled - meaning this won't be a simple straight fight. But the plus and minus of council seats, at least, should offer some illumination.

The final factor, but by no means the least, will be the turnout. With a second general election in two years, along with the referendum, falling a month after a large round of local elections, there is reasonable grounds for concern that turnouts will fall drastically.

The big question facing all parties will be: who won't show up? Overall turnout and where and which demographics could have a gigantic affect in June. A lot will depend upon whether disenfranchised voters feel able to turn to the Conservatives (Fearn, 2017) - or whether they simply wash their hands and walk away. If Theresa May is to increase her majority, she needs these people to turn out.

The only effective progressive strategy in June will be vote anti-Tory, whoever and wherever possible uniting behind the strongest candidate. So the local elections will be a chance to express their support for the different Left and Centre options with nuance, before things get an awful lot simpler in June.

Progress is Possible: The facts show that the Tories can be beaten - but it's going to take huge local participation

To defeat the Tories, progressives must rise above their partisan divisions to defend the bigger ideas than bring them together.

The statistics for this summer's UK general election are a sorry sight for progressives. Values shared across the whole of the Centre and Left are being threatened by Theresa May's government, and meanwhile there is infighting, disappointment and partisan divisions to contend with.

Some have taken these as the grounds to say that winning is impossible or to double down on the one party, majoritarian rhetoric. But if the Left and Centre spends all of its time fighting itself, the doom and gloom predictions will almost certainly come true. There is a better way to go.

And, on this, the facts speak for themselves.

Take the West Yorkshire constituency of Shipley, seat of Tory arch-meninist, Philip Davies. Shipley was Conservative, with large majorities of more than ten thousand from 1970 to 1997. Then in 1997, Labour gained nearly 7,000 more votes, while the Conservatives lost around 8,000.

Labour kept the seat until 2005, when after eight years in power at Westminster, the seat slipped back to the Conservative by just a few hundred votes. Since then, the support for parties that are not the Conservatives has largely collapsed, with Labour falling back and the Liberal Democrats nearly disappearing as their vote splintered across the spectrum.

Over a ten year period, Philip Davies has built a majority of 10,000. In 2015, the collective conservative vote, Tories and UKIP, was around 30,000 while progressive votes totalled around 20,000 - on a 72% turnout. But this has occurred over time: in 2010 it was 24,000 to 25,000; in 2005 it was 20,000 to 27,000; back in 1997 it was 20,000 to 31,000.

As the by-election in Richmond Park demonstrated, a majority for any party, save for some very few 'heartlands', is far from safe. Sitting MP Zac Goldsmith was turfed out of the seat by a 30% upswing in support for the Liberal Democrats that overturned a 23,000 majority. Goldsmith himself had previously overturned a Lib Dem majority of 4,000.

To press the point further, Labour's win in 1997 would in fact have been impossible if safe seats were unbreachable. Labour won 329 seats in England alone, almost twice as many seats there as the Conservatives and even unseated a host of safe-seated Tory ministers in the process. There are two important things to take away.

One: a huge number of voters in most constituencies do not 'identify' with their vote - they do not consider themselves Tories when they vote Tory, and see no issue in switching to another party if they see a better pitch or feel they were mis-sold a previous one.

And second: no majority is safe in the face of a damned good argument. Zac Goldsmith ran a horrifying negative campaign against Sadiq Khan for London Mayor, had failed to hold his own party to account on a third Heathrow runway and - however the Tories and Goldsmith tried to distance one another - represented an austere authoritarian government overseeing unpopular policies.

An election can be won seat by seat, fight by fight. The political tide turns nationally and locally, ebbing and flowing one way or another, due to a complex set of factors. If voters are willing and support each other, they can take on the system and usher in an alternative. Even a huge slump can be recovered from in dramatic fashion.

For an unusual example, consider the general election in Canada in 2015 - and example with relevance for its use of the Westminster, first-past-the-post, system. Years of austere, conservative, ever rightward drifting government under Stephen Harper was overturned in dramatic fashion.

The centrist Liberals had become the party of government in Canada, providing most of the Prime Ministers of the twentieth centuries with brief Conservative interludes. By 2011, the party's fortunes had been in decline for a decade. Yet it was still a surprise when under Michael Ignatieff, a respected journalist and professor, the party fell to just 34 seats - the fewest in its history.

That made their victory under Justin Trudeau, who was popular despite being derided for being young and unqualified, in 2015 all the more remarkable. In the biggest swing in Canadian federal history, the Liberals went from third with 34 seats, to first and holding a majority of fourteen.

Trudeau ran an optimistic campaign, making bold policy promises and even making a surprise break from austerity, unexpected from the Centrist party. The contrast was significant to Stephen Harper's Conservatives, who took a stance that might be familiar to Theresa May: pleas to trust, "Proven Leadership", for a "Strong Economy", a "Strong Canada" and a "Safer Canada" to "Protect our Economy".

A stern government, turning harsher with terrorism reaching Canadian shores, campaigned on conservatism and strength. Their Liberal opponents pitched optimism and a way to get things moving forward. In that contest, optimism won.

The question ahead for progressives in Britain is how to beat the Tories in each seat. The contest can't be won in the way that it was in Canada. Optimism is a must, yet broadly accepted and respected leadership at the national level of a kind needed to run a national movement of hope is - to be kind - at a premium just now for the Centre and Left.

It is never simple to say that some votes are conservative and others progressive. People vote for different parties for different reasons. But we can say this: the progressive parties - Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens - share some fundamental positions, against austerity, protecting the NHS and social care, to protect the rights of minorities, and people are willing to vote for parties standing for these values. Voters have even looked for Conservatives to stand by these values.

This is a positive struggle that can gain traction, but if voters want an alternative the campaign must be taken on locally - by local activists, yes - but mostly by voters themselves in their own constituencies. The facts say, however dire the present situation, that the Conservatives and Theresa May's austere authoritarianism can be beaten. But in this election it must be achieved by individual votes in individual seats.