2024 local election results and Labour’s future prospects

In the end, May 2nd’s local election results were better for Labour than many had foreseen. Sadiq Khan was comfortably re-elected as London Mayor and the Party narrowly took the West Midlands mayoralty – despite Labour sources earlier predicting  a Tory win.

Mayoral results

In London, Labour staffers had some last-minute jitters about the mayoral race, fearing that voters might turn away from the Party over the leadership’s line on Gaza and Mayor Khan’s commitment to the Ultra-Low Emission Zone (ULEZ).

But as the Observer noted, Sadiq Khan “bucked the trend” of Muslim voters rejecting Labour over its stance on  the Israeli bombardment of Palestine, unlike Labour candidates elsewhere. Richard Parker became West Midlands mayor only after a knife-edge contest with Andy Street, but it would have been a lot easier for Labour had substantial numbers of voters not backed an independent candidate whose campaign focused on Gaza.

Parker won by a margin of just 1,500 votes. Akhmed Yakoob, an Independent, came third with over 69,000 votes, 11.7% of the overall vote share. But in Birmingham, he took nearly a fifth of the votes cast.

In London, especially in areas with significant Muslim populations, the results were rather different: “In North East, which includes Waltham Forest, Khan got 127,455 votes compared with 111,359 first preferences in 2021, while in City and East, which includes Newham and Tower Hamlets, the turnout fell by 30,000, but Khan had nearly 10,000 more votes than first preferences in 2021.”

Ali Milani, the national chair of the Labour Muslim Network and a former Labour councillor who stood against Boris Johnson in Uxbridge in 2021, explained: “Sadiq is bucking the trend and there’s a reason for that. He was very early in calling for a ceasefire. He is now supporting a suspension of arms sales, as long as it’s clear that international law has been breached. So he did what we should have done and reaped the electoral rewards for that.”

Elsewhere, the leadership’s moral cowardice on Gaza had a marked effect – a 17.9% drop in the Labour vote in areas where more than a fifth of people identified as Muslim.

Manchester and the North West

The North West area saw perhaps the biggest erosion of the Labour vote, due to disaffection over the leadership’s position on Gaza. Labour lost its overall majority on Oldham Council for the first time in thirteen years, with seven seats going to Independents.

Labour also lost seats to Independents in Blackburn – and in Pendle, where Labour failed to win any seats in these elections. Earlier this year, all ten Labour councillors in Pendle resigned from the Party and sat as Independents.

In Rochdale, Labour kept overall control, despite losing a seat and George Galloway’s Workers Party gaining two. Labour in Bolton also lost seats. “Gaza cost us three of the five we lost,” one Labour councillor admitted.

In Manchester, Workers Party candidates stood in five wards. In three, they achieved less than a quarter of the vote achieved by the elected Labour candidate.  In Levenshulme,  the Workers Party came second with1,200 votes to Labour’s 1,948. They won in one ward, Longsight, defeating Luthfur Rahman, the council’s Deputy Leader. It was a remarkable fall for a man who was just narrowly beaten in 2021 in his bid to be Council Leader.

Longsight ward has a high Asian Muslim population, in narrow busy streets with plenty of hardship. Labour’s organisation in the ward has lately been moribund: activists say it has been run as a fiefdom with branch meetings not called and members not informed or involved. “Longsight was one of the safest seats in the city and they took the residents for granted,” one member reported. “It was complacency, laziness, arrogance.”

On that basis, the result was less an endorsement of the Workers Party and more an expression of anger at Labour’s stance on Gaza anger. It was also an indication of the serious work needed to build genuine political and community action in Longsight.

The North East

In the North East, both the main party leaders were be relieved at the electorate’s choice of mayors. Tory Lord Houchen was re-elected in Tees Valley by a much reduced majority and in the new North East mayoralty Labour’s Kim McGuinness beat Independent Jamie Driscoll, who was barred by Labour from the Party’s shortlisting process, into second place.

Driscoll was upbeat in his response, tweeting: “The fact that we got 126,652 votes here, nearly as much as Tories, Green, Lib Dem and Reform put together, with no Westminster party machine behind us, shows something is happening in the North East. This was a people-powered campaign and it doesn’t die with just one election result. Tens of thousands of people voted for a different type of politics. There is a huge appetite for pragmatic transformative policies that reduce inequality and treat people with respect. We are building a movement and we’re staying right here.”

In the local council elections in the North East, the Greens emerged as a significant challenge to Labour, achieving over 15% of the vote across five Tyne and Wear councils, up threefold on a decade ago. In Newcastle the party won two seats from Labour.

In South Tyneside, Labour lost ten seats. Independents took 28% of the vote and gained nine seats, making them the second largest group on the council with fifteen. The Greens took a slightly greater share of the votes with 29% but gained only two seats, giving them a total of eleven.

Prospects for a general election

Back in London, Mayor Sadiq Khan won praise for sticking to his guns over ULEZ.  Momentum tweeted: “When Sadiq Khan implemented the ULEZ, the Right screamed blue murder. Keir Starmer pressured him to drop the policy. Today, Londoners re-elected Sadiq with an increased majority. A clear lesson for Labour: we don’t have to be afraid of our own shadow. Climate leadership works.”

How these results translate into Labour’s performance at the upcoming general election is more difficult to gauge. The Tories were quick to point out that on the same swing, Labour would fall short of an overall majority. But they downplayed the fact that Labour did especially well in key areas they will need to win back. In any case, these elections were not particularly representative of the whole UK and general election turnout is likely to be significantly higher.

One blogger pointed out that the Tories were less keen to talk about the “real disaster” revealed by these results:  “For the new York and North Yorkshire combined authority, Labour swooped in and saw David Skaith returned by an eight point margin over the Tories. This isn’t just another region. It is home to some of the safest Conservative constituencies in the country. Skipton and Ripon (23,694 maj), Thirsk and Malton (25,154), and Rishi Sunak’s own Richmond (27,210) are here, along with three others with majorities hovering around the 10,000 mark. The Tories should have been able to rely on this rock solid support to gift them the mayoralty. That they didn’t suggests the hole they’re in is much deeper than even their critics appreciate.”

Owen Jones, however, warned against Labour triumphalism and easy comparisons with Tony Blair’s landslide win 27 years ago, tweeting that last week’s results were “nothing like 1997. Labour had a 17 point lead over the Tories in the local elections before the 1997 general election. This time, they have a 9 point lead. Labour wasn’t losing seats to parties to their left in the pre-1997 local election. This time, Labour have haemorrhaged support to the Greens and independents. What that underlines is a massive rejection of the Tories, but none of the enthusiasm for an opposition party set for a landslide victory of the sort on the cards for Labour. It shows that already key parts of Labour’s electoral coalition – younger people, Muslims and other minority Brits – are angry about Keir Starmer’s leadership. That’s before he’s even prime minister and actually enacting policies which anger people – like continued austerity, or complicity in war crimes, for example.”

Andrew Fisher also highlighted the dissatisfaction felt among these demographics, suggesting Labour lost votes for neglecting its base over Gaza, tuition fees and diluting its commitment to the Green New Deal.

Unite warning

There were fresh signs, post-election, that some sections of the labour movement would not take Keir Starmer’s policy backtracking lying down. The Observer headlined: “Unite warns it will hold back funds if Labour weakens plan on workers’ rights.” Last week, there was fresh speculation that Labour’s commitment to workers’ rights was facing further dilution, despite being unanimously passed by last year’s Party Conference.

Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham tweeted that the Party had “ been effectively moved by the business lobby, there’s no doubt about that. For me, it is a red line.”

TUC President and Fire Brigades Union leader Matt Wrack also weighed in, saying that watering down Labour’s plan to strengthen workers’ rights would be disastrous for the Party’s relations with the unions and could cost votes at the general election.

Momentum Co-Chair quits Party

Meanwhile, in  a shock move, Momentum Co-Chair and Worthing Councillor Hilary Schan has resigned from the Labour Party and stood down as Momentum’s Co-Chair. Resigning from Labour alongside two other councillors in Worthing, including the Deputy Leader Carl Walker, Schan announced she is joining the We Deserve Better campaign, launched recently by Owen Jones.

Carl Walker attempted to stand to become Labour’s candidate for East Worthing and Shoreham last autumn, but was not included on the shortlist. He said: “The reason they gave me was because I was criticising the Labour leadership when I gave a speech at the CWU picket line saying they should allow frontbenchers to support picketers. It was a shame but not a surprise.”

A spokesperson for Momentum said: “It is a sad state of affairs for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party when committed activists like Hilary, who work so hard to deliver progressive change for their communities, no longer feel it is the place for them.

“Momentum remains focused on organising for a democratic Labour Party which views its members and core voters as an asset, not an inconvenience. We will keep campaigning for real Labour policies which deliver the country the transformative change it is crying out for, instead of constant U-turns and corporate-friendly policies.”