The local election results – what the mainstream media don’t tell us
JVL Introduction
Another Angry Voice blogger, Thomas G Clark, takes a perceptive look at the local election results in England.
A dreadful outcome for the Tories, no doubt, but not the result Labour was hoping for or the success it has tried to claim.
It was, for course, an extremely good result for the Greens and for the Lib Dems who picked up over half the seats the Tories lost between them.
As Clark suggests, “The Greens have demonstrated that it’s possible to take on the Tories in their own backyard and win, not by imitating them, but by offering a genuine alternative.”
And, of course, Labour did appallingly against candidates it had recently purged, particularly in Liverpool and Leicester but also elsewhere – something the mainstream media conveniently fail to report.
This article was originally published by Another Angry Voice on Sun 7 May 2023. Read the original here.
As usual there's been a lot of drivel talked about the local election results...
As usual there’s been a lot of drivel talked about the local election results. I’m going to break down some of the main stories, and critique some of the worst nonsense.
First of all it was a dreadful election for the Tories in which they lost control of 48 local councils, leaving them with just 33, which is all the more remarkable given their introduction of voter suppression tactics that denied thousands of people their right to vote (nobody even kept count of how many people were disenfranchised).
Of course the Tories had a predictable list of excuses like the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine, but there’s no hiding the fact that this was an absolute rout that saw them lose councils all over England, including several Tory strongholds in the south.
The Green Party massively exceeded their own expectations by winning 241 new seats, and taking overall control of a council for the first time in their history, in Mid Suffolk.
Interestingly many of the biggest Green gains occurred in traditionally deep blue Tory counties like Lewes, East Hertfordshire, and Mid Suffold [corrected – ed], which explodes the Starmerite lie that Labour needs to shift dramatically to the right to appeal to “soft Tories”.
The Greens have demonstrated that it’s possible to take on the Tories in their own backyard and win, not by imitating them, but by offering a genuine alternative.
It was a good election for the Lib-Dems too, gaining 405 seats and control of 12 new councils, and like the Greens, they had several of their best results in traditional Tory strongholds.
Labour increased their number of council seats by 20% from 2,131 to 2,674, but for all of their crowing, they failed to properly capitalise on widespread disillusionment with the Tories because the Greens and Lib-Dems made the bigger gains in percentage terms, and actually picked up over half of the lost Tory seats between them.
Labour’s grotesque shadow health secretary Wes Streeting has outright lied that this was Labour’s best election result since 1997, when it actually comes nowhere near the 847 seats Labour gained in 2012.
Labour could easily have presented a net gain of 536 seats as a good result without resorting to outright lies, but they just don’t seem to be able to help themselves.
It’s as if they’ve decided to imitate Boris Johnson’s style of relentless lying in the hope that it works for them too, rather than setting themselves in opposition to it.
Aside from the Green’s remarkable win in Mid Sussex many of the most interesting individual results involved the Labour Party.
Labour’s worst result came in Leicester, where they lost 18 seats after their astonishing purge of 19 sitting Labour councillors just weeks before the election. Several of the purged candidates won back their seats for other parties, or as independents, and the Tories capitalised on the Labour chaos to gain 17 seats on a council they had no representation at all on just four years ago.
When Starmer’s Labour abused and bullied the Jewish socialist Jo Bird out of the party they presumably thought they’d seen the back of her, but she joined the Green Party and was one of 13 Greens to win seats on Wirral council in their best ever performance there, denying Labour a majority.
This pattern repeated itself on various other councils, with victims of Starmer’s ideological purges winning their seats back for other parties, or as independents.
The former leader of the Labour group on Portsmouth Council Cal Corkery was expelled by Starmer’s goons for liking a left-wing Facebook post years before the group in question was proscribed. He won his seat as a Portsmouth Independent, taking their total of seats to 6, just one short of a severely weakened Labour Party that once controlled Portsmouth Council.
In Liverpool, Labour exiles Lucy Williams, Alan Gibbons and Sam Gorst won seats as Liverpool Independents despite Labour’s campaign of dirty tricks and social media bullying against them.
In Windsor Alison Carpenter retained her seat despite having been purged by Starmer’s social media stalkers, leaving Labour with zero councillors there!
The great results for the left-wing Greens, and the successes of so many victims of Starmer’s purges suggest that Labour could have done an awful lot better had they not lurched so hard to the right, and had they concentrated on actually winning elections instead of conducting factional and divisive purges against so many of their own councillors.
Accuracy Correction.please Alison Carpenter was not previously a councillor. Labour did not have any seats in Windsor
Much too vague in almost every direction, the characterisation of what Starmer is mainly attempting is misdirected and finally the thrust of the argument, green shoots for soft left whatever is a triumph of hope over reality. Yes some nice little local results like in Liverpool but significant, not nearly. Fundamentally Starmer’s is expecting/hoping to win on the back of Tory toxcity tories continuing to stay home, The thrust is to ensure that those who drifted to Johnson don’t have reason to cease to be alienated from the Tories. Fundamental to this is Labour presenting as a brexiteer party. If you are looking for straws in the wind. Take Leicester City. Starmer intervened heavily to disrupt opposition to the Labour Mayor. Net effect is the Mayor vote fell from 51.4k to 35k every body picked up a bit in the wreckage but the ‘left’ least and the main consequence was that Tory vote revived quite a bit from 14.5k to 26.4k. Reflect in associated votes. If this proves anything it is that Starmer’s strategy of laying low was better for him.
A few corrections are needed, not least the belief that the Greens are a radical alternative party. In Brighton where they ran the Council for the past 4 years they were heavily defeated, going from 20 to 7 seats. In power they were anything but radical, supporting e.g. the IHRA.
Internationally we have the German Green Party as the most pro-NATO and Ireland the GP props up 2 conservative parties – Fine Gael and Fine Fail keeping out Sinn Fein.
I welcome the victory of Jo Bird but that does not deflect from the fact that when in power the Greens always move to the Right.
The victory of socialist independents in Liverpool and elsewhere it welcome and the key question is now we can use this to build an alternative to Starmer and his reactionary Labour Party
OPINION PIECE
There’s an obvious confusion
Between online pornography and bourgeois democracy
Both deal in stereotypes and reach predictable conclusions
Oppression and submission are depressingly fundamental
But one is sometimes capable of releasing inhibitions
The other is Keir Starmer
Comparing local to general elections demands caution but this does not look good for Labour’ s leadership. The claim of final victory over Corbynism does not stand up. The vote share of 35% in 2023 was higher than the 32.1% in 2019 but still well behind the 40% in 2017.
The Conservative vote is more interesting, falling from 43.6% in 2019 to 26% now. This suggests that about 4 in 10 people who voted Conservative in 2019 are no longer prepared to do so. Where did these votes go? The initial appearance is that they did not go mostly to Labour, despite Starmer’s desperate attempts to attract them. The Conservative losses were much greater than the Labour gains.
The reality is more complex. Labour probably is gaining votes on the right but losing almost as many on the left. One may question whether the Greens and the Liberal Democrats really are left wing parties but if people are voting for them because they are perceived to be left of Labour this is significant in itself.
The big problem for Labour is that its losses are likely to be more permanent than its gains. It is hard to believe that the Conservatives will not recover at least some support before the next General Election. There is no reason however why people who have abandoned Labour because of its move to the right should return now, particularly since Starmer has made it absolutely clear that he does not actually want their votes. His message ‘The door is open. If you do not like it you can leave’ may look bold and challenging when addressed to party members but it will also be seen by voters and in that context it is simply stupid.
Concerning Tory Losses vs Labour Gains – there is a theory that
many Tory voters stayed at home.
Of those stay-at-home Tories, of those who vote in the next GE
some will return to voting Tory and some will vote for other parties.
I agree with Rory O’Kelly. I cannot see undecided voters deciding to vote Labour for why should they bother to vote for a Party which does not welcome their votes?
Policy-wise, Green or Eco-socialists are influential in the Green Party England and Wales, even if electoral strategies at local level concentrate on ‘bread & butter’ issues, naturally, where councillors can make a difference. And not being very “tribal”, unlike Labour.
When reading the above comments, I’m always cautious of folks rhetoric, making claims without citation of any verifiable evidence to back them up. One should never conflate opinion with an assertion of fact. By all means assert facts, if one can support with a clear citation of evidence, but for goodness sakes, please identify one’s own view, as merely one’s own “opinion”, otherwise.