Tories need to start campaign for next year’s elections now
IF THE local elections at the start of May were good news for the Labour Party, they were most definitely not good news for local Conservatives.
Despite the best efforts of interim Tory leader (now in post permanently) David Foxcroft to downplay Labour’s two gains in the local elections here in Rossendale, there is no escaping the basic result: Labour went from not having enough councillors to rule outright, to having absolute control at the council.
Why this is will surely be a source of much debate for local Tories, who have now spent over a decade trying to regain power at Futures Park from Labour.
As this column noted last week, Labour chose to focus their efforts and energies on the two seats they were most likely to gain to win control of the council.
A ruling party the size of Labour not standing in other wards as a result, with limited canvassing as a result, feels like a high price to pay for many voters, but has given Labour the result it needed.
The Tories, on the other hand, did manage to stand everywhere.
In 2018, the last time these seats were up for grabs, the Tories actually polled more votes than Labour overall - 8,028 to Labour’s 8,002.
This time, they polled 5,921 to Labour’s 6,604.
Most of Labour’s ‘lost’ votes were in the wards where they didn’t make the effort to stand a candidate.
In only one ward, Healey and Whitworth, did the Tories see the number of votes they poll go up.
Even in wards known to be safe Tory seats, such as Helmshore, their vote declined - and this is despite local Tory councillors being the most vocal opponents of development on green field sites recently approved by the Labour-led planning committee.
Perhaps the Tories weren’t helped by the sudden change of leadership so close to the election.
Or perhaps events in Downing Street and Partygate had a factor - maybe the voters of Rossendale, including the Tory voters of 2018 who went somewhere else in 2022, aren’t as forgiving as Rossendale MP Jake Berry told Parliament we were, in what still remains one of the most baffling statements our MP has
given in the Commons over the last 12 years.
As mentioned last week, the results were scarcely a ringing endorsement for Labour, which has a decade-long track record of power in Rossendale being voted upon at every election.
But local Tories do need to ask why, when disquiet with how the council is run is so easy to uncover in Rossendale, it struggles
so much to tap into that?
To their credit, local Tories did present a very simple manifesto, which they began promoting at the start of the year.
Why didn’t that cut through?
Is it possible we’re now in a place where the vast majority of people - two-thirds in most wards - just don’t see any point in voting because, to use a well-worn phrase
‘they’re all the same?’
Councillors, in the main, are all the same in one respect: They want to make a difference to their local communities.
But that’s where that allegation runs out of truth.
There is more than one way to run Rossendale and the priorities between the two main parties differ in many ways.
The challenge for local
Tories is to start campaigning for the next local elections now.
They need to focus on issues which are relevant to a specific ward, not the borough as a whole.
They need to find a way to be present every week in the wards they want to win - and crucially in the wards they also hold already.
To win next time, the race needs to start now.