It’s the year to make voice heard in politically divided borough
THERE are many ways to look at election results – but here’s a stat which might surprise you here in Rossendale.
Labour, as we know, has retained control of the council.
It lost one seat, Irwell in Bacup, to the Conservatives.
That means Labour still has a comfortable majority on the council.
But look a little closer at the numbers, and it becomes clear that Rossendale is a politically divided borough, if, of course, the 37 per cent of us who managed to find the time to vote represent the area as a whole.
According to the result, 8,028 votes were cast for the Conservatives across the area and 8,002 for Labour.
A further 741 were cast for independents, most notably in Healey and Whitworth ward, where Community First councillor Alan Neal continues to prove that you don’t need party backing to win voters if you are known well enough locally.
If proportional representation was used around here instead of first past the post, we’d be comfortably into hung council territory based on this result.
But for maybe 250 extra votes in key wards, most notably in the Goodshaw ward where the Tories came within 37 votes of ousting council leader Alyson Barnes, the Tories could easily now be in control of the council.
Of course, Labour can point to several other wards, such as Greensclough in Bacup, where just 50 votes the other way would have given them a bigger majority on the council.
And as mentioned at the start of the column, who knows what would have happened had more than one in every three voters made it to the polling stations last week.
For councillors and candidates, the question they surely need to ask is why so many people care so little.
The answers, I suspect, flatter no-one.
What the results for 2018 show is broadly as many votes were cast as in 2014, when this tranche of councillors – a third every year, plus a fallow year on the fourth – were last up.
For all the controversy over government spending cuts, the redevelopment of Rawtenstall town centre, anger at the council’s handling of the regeneration of Bacup town centre, the abandoning of Haslingden swimming pool, the £5m empty homes scandal and most recently the growing disquiet over the sale of Rossendale Transport, very few extra votes were cast than in 2014.
Back in 2014, Labour recorded around 39pc of the popular vote in Rossendale, compared to the Tories’ 38pc – so still very close then.
However, 23pc went to other parties.
In 2014, we saw the Green Party and the Lib Dems standing, but the most notable difference was the presence of UKIP in the local elections. Not so now. Looking through last week’s votes, it’s clear that both Labour and the Tories have benefited from UKIP not standing.
Tory votes across the area are up 26pc, compared to Labour’s 25pc.
What does this mean for the next 12 months?
I suspect more of the same tribal party politics we’ve endured for the last year – and expect it to be very localised.
In Bacup’s two wards, the Tories polled 52pc of the total votes. Can they build on that? In Rawtenstall, Labour commanded more than half of the votes from the two wards which voted – but the Tories closed the gap between the two parties to less than ten percentage points.
In Haslingden, the two wards remain politically divided, although Labour continues to make inroads into Greenfield.
If there’s a lesson for us from the Rossendale elections of 2018, it’s that the elections of 2019 will be very tight.
If ever there’s a year to make your voice heard on the issues which matter to you, it’s this one.