Why success may hinge on who’s at the top of a ballot paper
– and the historic 0-0 draw with which Stoke City Football Club sealed promotion for the first time to the Premier League, incidentally relegating a club called Leicester City.
Probably rather fewer now recall the previous Thursday’s local elections, when Labour won barely a quarter of the low-turnout vote, lost 12 of the 14 council seats it was defending, plus its overall council control – without UKIP fielding a single candidate.
Back then, the British National Party (BNP) was the big recipient of disaffected Labour votes, its nine councillors making it the second largest group on the council and second largest BNP group in English local government.
And, for those for whom BNP policies were a bit too raw, there were the City Independents, with their populist, Trump-like “accountability solely to the genuine people of Stoke-on-Trent”.
Seven years on, General Election day in May 2015, while Tristram Hunt was becoming ‘Britain’s least popular MP’ – supported by just 19 per cent of Stoke Central voters in the only seat where a majority stayed at home – it was the 14 City Independents, in coalition with seven Conservatives and two UKIP members, who took control of the newly re-warded 44-member council. I suggest these results taken as a whole show why, in Stoke itself, it may not be quite the historic bombshell it sounds, were the city to elect its first non-Labour MP in 80 years. As for our city, it’s that council re-warding that has particular interest for us.
Stoke’s 2015 whole-council elections followed a Local Government Boundary Commission review similar to that recently completed for Birmingham City Council.
In Stoke, although the Council favoured the uniformity of 44 singlemember wards, the Commission’s solution comprised 31 such wards, plus one 3-member and five 2-member wards.
Birmingham’s review resulted from the critical Kerslake report on the council in 2014. A reduction in the council’s size, from 120 members to the eventual 101, was seemingly non-negotiable, but the number of wards and particularly their detailed boundaries and names weren’t set in stone.
Following the Commission’s initial recommendations, as Neil Elkes reported in the Post last May, “You complained and they listened”, and the final kind-of-agreed outcome was 37 single-member and 32 2-member wards.
And we’re now embarked on what Neil recently tagged the “great political chicken run, as councillors squabble and jostle for a new seat”. Following which the real spectator fun begins – because, for us mere voters and viewers, multi-member wards mean multiplied uncertainty.
In Stoke, three of the six multimember wards produced split results, with the election of councillors from more than one party group.
My first Birmingham prediction, therefore, is that our 32 2-member wards will produce at least a handful of such splits. In 2004, the last time the whole council was elected, the then 40 3-member wards produced nine split results. Billesley, Kings Norton, Quinton, and Weoley each returned two Conservatives and one Labour member, while Longbridge did the reverse. Moseley & Kings Heath, Sparkbrook, and Springfield elected one Labour and two Liberal Democrats; Washwood Heath two Labour and one Lib Dem.
Interestingly, there were no ward-level Conservative-Lib Dem ‘coalitions’ to anticipate the ‘Progressive Partnership’ that was about to start its eight-year incumbency of the Council House.
However, the PP might never have been born, had all three Labour candidates in the first five wards listed above polled as well as those actually elected. Labour would have won 60 seats instead of 53, and probably have retained council control.
As for which candidates win or lose in these split results, the alphabet really matters in our system which insists on listing all candidates in strict alphabetical order of surname. Thireteen of the successful candidates elected in those 2004 split wards were listed first in their 3-candidate group, with just one listed third.
My second prediction, therefore, is that, even with our two-member wards, we’ll see a similar pattern in 2018 – of which more nearer the time. Chris Game is a lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies, at the University of
Birmingham