Did May win it for Boris in 2017?
CONSERVATIVES made significant gains in the West Midlands in December’s General Election when it came to winning seats.
But there was only a modest increase in the number of people voting for them.
Tories received 1,449,000 votes across the West Midlands region.
That was up by around 93,000 votes compared to the 2017 general election.
It was actually back in 2017 that the real breakthrough was made.
During that election, Conservatives in the West Midlands region received 1,356,000 votes – up from 1,099,000 in 2015.
In other words, the Conservative vote rose by 257,000 between 2015 and 2017.
Of course, 2015 is when David Cameron won a majority, a result that is naturally regarded as a triumph.
But 2017 is when Theresa May, as Conservative leader, managed to lose the huge majority she inherited, after fighting a dire election campaign. However you can make a strong argument that Boris Johnson owes the remarkable result he achieved late last year to Theresa May. He didn’t create new Conservative voters, or at least not half as many as Mrs May.
Rather, his contribution was to convince Mrs May’s converts to stick to their new home.
The other factor in Mr Johnson’s triumph was, of course, the fall of the Labour vote. Labour received 1,175,000 votes in the West Midlands in 2017 – but this fell to 918,000 in 2019.
But note also that back in 2015, Labour got just 865,100 votes in the West Midlands region. In other words, Labour still got more votes in the region last December than it did in 2015.
Obviously, the Conservatives won the 2015 election. Nobody is going to hold that up as a good result for Labour.
It’s fair to say, however, that the 2019 defeat is seen as particularly devastating for Labour, with the party losing seats it had held for decades such as Birmingham Northfield, both West Bromwich seats, Wolverhampton North East, Stoke Central and others.
It’s tempting to assume that Labour’s vote must have collapsed in 2019, but this is not the case.
Looking at share of the vote, Labour gained 33.9 per cent in the West Midlands in December, down from 42.5 per cent in 2017 but up from 32.9 per cent in 2015.
Again, nobody would suggest that 2015 was a good result for Labour.
But it’s still worth noting that Labour’s result last year was roughly the same as it achieved when Ed
Miliband was leader in
2015 in every respect except the one that really matters – the number of seats it was able to win. In 2019, the Conservatives won 44 seats in the West Midlands, while Labour gained 15 (none of the other parties won a seat).
This was a significant change from 2017, when Conservatives won 35 seats and Labour got 24.
Back in 2015, Tories won 34 West Midlands seats and Labour got 25. What does this mean? It might be tempting for some Labour supporters to look at some of these statistics and feel heartened.
After all, you’d think from much of the coverage of the result that Labour’s vote vanished under Jeremy Corbyn in regions like the West Midlands.
In reality, it returned roughly to where it was before he became leader – which is still a failure, but perhaps slightly less of one than some commentators suggest.
At the same time, you might have thought that a combination of Brexit and Boris Johnson’s bumbling charisma had persuaded working class “traditional Labour voters” to abandon the party they once loyally supported.
The statistics, however, suggest that the Tory vote rose only by a small amount. It would be a big mistake for any Labour activist to feel too cheerful. Because the Conservatives have, in fact, achieved what they claim to have achieved – convincing traditional Labour voters to desert their party and lend their support to the Tories instead.
It’s just that it took them two elections to do it.
We look back at the 2017 election as a disaster for the Conservatives and something of a triumph for Labour on the grounds that the party lost, but did better than many journalists expected.
But the Tories actually made a breakthrough in 2017. They just weren’t able to translate this immediately into seats.
The Tory vote rose nationally by 2.3 million in the 2017 general election to 13.6 million, and their share of the
The Tories actually made a breakthrough in 2017. They just weren’t able to translate this immediately into seats...
vote rose by 5.5 per cent, to 42.3 per cent.
Many of these new Tory voters may have come via UKIP, which saw its vote collapse in 2017. But however exactly they got there, they were backing the Tories.
When Labour considers how to beat the Conservatives at the next election, it should avoid the temptation to see the 2019 election as a reversal of gains made in 2017.
It was actually back in 2017 that the Tories parked their tanks on Labour’s lawn.