Sir John Curtice
If the polls have been telling us anything in the last month, it is that the Conservatives are in electoral trouble, with the party falling in many of them below the 30 per cent mark. However, given that the principal reason for the party’s losses was the defection of many of the party’s Leave supporters to Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, who were not standing in the local elections, the Tories might have hoped that the apparent electoral gale facing the party would not blow at full force.
Local results confirm that the Brexit impasse has cost the Conservatives dear. In a set of detailed ward by ward results collected by the BBC, the party’s vote was down on average by six points as compared with last year’s local elections.
The Tories seem to have struggled in particular among Leave voters; in places where more than 60 per cent voted Leave in 2016, the drop in Conservative support was as much as nine points.
It is a warning to the Tories over their failure to deliver Brexit, particularly as the party faces a much stronger challenge from the champions of Euroscepticism, namely
the Brexit Party, during European elections on May 23.
There was, however, a silver lining for the Conservatives. As some but not all recent polls have suggested, Labour too is in electoral trouble in the wake of the Brexit impasse. Its support was also down by six to seven points compared with last year.
The party could not even quite match its performance in 2015, when local elections were held on the same day as the general election that saw Ed Miliband crash to defeat.
Moreover, Labour too saw its vote fall most heavily in Eurosceptic England – on average by some four to
It seems that many [frustrated] voters were inclined to say ‘a plague on both your houses’
five points – a pattern that encouraged Labour MPS who back Brexit to argue that the party should now try to reach an agreement with the Government.
Yet even in the most pro-remain areas the party’s vote was still down by as much as five points on last year.
The risk of the party’s ambiguous stance on Brexit is that it can end up satisfying neither Remainers nor Leavers.
Indeed, it seems that many voters were inclined to say “a plague on both your houses”. First, they seemed to express their frustration by swinging away from whichever was the strongest party locally. Both Labour and the Conservatives tended to lose ground most heavily in their areas of traditional strength – Labour in the north, the Conservatives in the south, and both in wards where they were previously strongest.
Second, where voters had the choice of a credible non-aligned Independent candidate, they seem to have been very ready to take it, resulting in a near trebling of the number of Independent councillors.
Once upon a time, before the party entered the 2010-15 coalition, the Liberal Democrats were often used by voters as a convenient vehicle of protest. The disgruntlement of many on Thursday seems to have enabled the party to regain that role.
However, there was at most only limited evidence of the party advancing more strongly in those areas that voted Remain rather than Leave. A much clearer pattern was a tendency for the party to advance most strongly in wards where it started off second to the Conservatives. It is this restoration of some of the party’s bastions of local strength rather than its anti-brexit credentials that helps account for its ability to capture many a Conservative seat. Even in the era of Brexit, pavement politics can still matter.