Analysing the May results 1: everything but the councils
Starmer breaks a Blair record in the by-election, big swings in the PCCs, and encouraging signs in the open seat Mayoral elections
With the big three day festival of vote counting now at an end, the time has come to sift through the results and see what it all means. In this piece, I kick things off with a look at the Blackpool South by-election, the Police and Crime Commissioner contests and the Mayoral contests. Voters’ behaviour in all three largely supported the message we have been getting from opinion polling for a while: a big swing is on the way in the general election. Those sharing and believing rumours of a possible Hung Parliament are taking a heroically selective approach to the data. The electoral landscape is moving fast - lets get stuck in and see what’s been happening.
1.Blackpool South - another dominant Labour performance
The result from Blackpool South came very early in the Big Voting Buffet, and by the weekend it was barely being discussed. It is a sign of Labour’s remarkable progress in this Parliament that the third largest Conservative to Labour swing in post-war history, coming almost exactly three years after Starmer’s worst by-election defeat, was seen by pundits as so predictable that it was barely worth discussing. It is worth discussing! Twenty six point swings don’t happen every day.
Tony Blair 4 - Keir Starmer 5: 20 point Conservative to Labour swings since 1945
If, in the aftermath of Labour’s Hartlepool defeat three years ago, you had suggest that Keir Starmer would finish this Parliament with a better record in by-elections than Tony Blair managed in opposition, the response would have been mocking laughter. And yet here we are. Starmer has - in just the last year - won five seats from the Conservatives on twenty point plus swings. That’s one more than the four such mega-swing wins Blair achieved in opposition. And Starmer added a sixth twenty point plus swing with Labour’s triumph over the SNP in Rutherglen and Hamilton West. No opposition leader in living memory has looked so dominant, so often. Labour went nearly a decade in opposition without taking a single seat of the Tories in by-elections between the Corby win in 2012 and Starmer’s first win in Wakefield in 2022. Now massive swings to Labour are so routine that Conservative defeat is priced in the moment a seat becomes vacant.
Better than Thatcher, Cameron…and Blair? Average swing in the last three Parliaments ending in a change of government, and Starmer’s performance to date
The average swing Starmer has achieved over the whole of this Parliament is now nearly 12 points - well ahead of the 9 point average government to opposition swing in Parliaments where the opposition goes on to win the next general election. Starmer’s by-election record is now better than Margaret Thatcher’s ahead of the 1979 election and David Cameron’s ahead of the 2010 election. If we take the period since December 2021, after the vaccine bounce faded and the partygate scandal broke, the average swing to Labour under Starmer is 14.7 points, marginally ahead of the 14.4 point average swing achieved by Tony Blair in the run up to Labour’s 1997 landslide.
2.Police and Crime Commissioner elections - middle England swings big
Elected Police and Crime Commissioners have been one of the less successful Coalition innovations, generating little media attention or voter interest. Yet they are for this reason a good test of the parties’ relative strength. Even the high engagement voters who do bother to participate in such contests will seldom know much about the candidates involved, so PCC elections provide a pure test of party appeal. And with 37 PCCs up for election across the length and breadth of England and Wales, they offer a more complete test of nationwide strength than either the local elections or the mayoral contests.
It is a test Labour passed with flying colours, with an average Conservative to Labour swing of nearly 10 points across England’s 33 PCCs, gaining 10 PCCs from the Conservatives.1 Labour did even better than this average suggests, winning bigger swings in more rural areas, areas with more pensioners and in less diverse areas - in other words, getting the biggest PCC swings in the Tory leaning areas they are targeting in the general election, including huge swings to defeat the Conservatives in Cumbria (22 points), Cleveland (15 points) and Northamptonshire (14.6 points).
Conservative to Labour swings in Labour’s best PCC performances (seats gained in brighter red)
The PCC elections were also a rare example of the Conservative changes to the electoral system clearly working in the party’s favour. Labour finished with a tally of 17 PCCs, just short of the Conservatives’ total of 19, but in many races the result was close enough, and the vote for Labour leaning third parties such as the Lib Dems and Greens was large enough, that the result may well have gone the other way if the previous supplemental vote electoral system had been retained.2
The Mayoral elections - incumbents took the headlines, but the real story was in the open seats
The Mayoral contests featuring incumbents all ran true to form this month. All the Labour incumbent Mayors won comfortably, including Sadiq Khan in London, whose 11 point victory was much larger than widespread rumours of his vulnerability suggested. As I anticipated in my post on the race, Khan underperformed Labour in London, but his personal weakness as a candidate was more than offset by the strength of the Labour brand and the toxicity of the Conservatives. Khan’s 41% share put him several points behind Labour’s national polling (and a long way behind Labour’s London polling) - easily his worst performance to date. Khan’s Conservative opponent Susan Hall actually ran well ahead of her party’s national polling in securing 33%, but she was never likely to be able to defy political gravity in such an anti-Conservative environment.
The West Midlands was, as expected, the biggest nail-biter of the weekend. Political gravity proved too much in the end for Andy Street, who went down to a razor’s edge defeat, losing by just 1,500 votes out of over 600,000 cast. Street arguably secured a larger personal vote in defeat than in either of his victories - his 37.5% vote share put him miles ahead of Conservative councillors who were defeated in droves in concurrent local elections, and of the Conservative candidate for the West Midlands PCC, who lost an election on the same boundaries by a 15 point margin. Yet Street may also have been helped by a dynamic outside of his control - Labour’s vote was down sharply in Birmingham as Muslim voters backed the George Galloway endorsed independent Akhmed Yakoob. The swings to Labour were much larger in the outer West Midlands boroughs with smaller Muslim electorates, so without Yakoob’s intervention Labour would have won the West Midlands comfortably.
The only Conservative Mayor left standing was Ben Houchen, who secured a third term as Tees Valley Mayor. Yet this was very much a personal triumph for Houchen whose huge majority from 2021 proved too large to overturn, despite a 17 point swing to Labour - a swing more than large enough for the opposition to retake all the battleground seats in Houchen’s combined authority. Labour also comfortably took the Cleveland PCC from the Conservatives on a similarly whopping swing, and won back control of Hartlepool council. In short, Labour won against any Conservative not called Ben Houchen in this patch, so they’ll be confident of beating some more Conservatives not called Ben Houchen in the coming general election.
While Tees Valley a rare moment of Tory hope in the election marathon, and the West Midlands furnished a dramatic finale, the most important messages for the general election came in the less reported contests for the new East Midlands and York and North Yorkshire Mayoralties. Both were open seats without a popular or unpopular incumbent to skew results, and both told the same story - Labour are surging ahead, and the Conservatives are in deep trouble.
Conservative hopes that Ben Bradley’s massive Mansfield majority could be a platform for personal success in the East Midlands were soon dashed as the results started to arrive. The Labour candidate Claire Ward defeated Bradley by an 11 point margin overall this month, and the geography of Ward’s win will be very encouraging for Labour in a region thick with target seats. Ward was ahead of Bradley in practically every local authority, suggesting Labour could sweep the region in the general election to come, defeating Bradley a second time in his Mansfield constituency and perhaps taking out most of his Tory neighbours to boot.
East Midlands Mayoral election results in local authorities with Labour target seats
I am grateful to David Cowling for compiling and sharing the local authority level results data
Labour won all but two of the seventeen Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire local authorities which make up the new Mayoralty, and only narrowly lost the other two (losing Derbyshire Dales by 0.4 points and Newark and Sherwood by 4 points). Labour are thus on course for victory or running the Tories close in each one of the three categories of Conservative held seats in this city region:
New Labour marginals (Labour until at least 2005, lost since): Amber Valley, Broxtowe, Derby North, Erewash, Gedling, High Peak, Sherwood Forest, Derbyshire South
Red wall seats (Labour for many decades, lost recently): Ashfield, Bassetlaw, Bolsover, Mansfield
Tory strongholds (Labour haven’t won since 2001 or earlier): Newark (1997); Rushcliffe (1966); Derbyshire Dales (1945)
If replicated in the general election, Labour’s big and broad advance in the East Midlands could see the opposition come close to a clean sweep in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, recovering all the marginals lost since 2005, all the red wall seats lost in the last few elections, and taking deep blue Tory strongholds like Rushcliffe, Ken Clarke’s seat for nearly 50 years or even Derbyshire Dales, which hasn’t had a Labour MP since the Attlee government, but where Labour were tied with the Conservatives in the Mayoral vote.
This news may seem bad enough but the news from Mayoral election in Rishi Sunak’s own backyard is even grimmer for the PM and his party. Labour comfortably won the York and North Yorkshire Mayoralty, winning the York council area by a large margin and winning nearly 29% in North Yorkshire, narrowly behind the Conservatives on 31%. This is a massive swing away from the Conservatives in North Yorkshire - the Conservatives won all six of the seats in this local authority with an average vote of 58%.
Conservative held seats in York and North Yorkshire
The Mayoral in North Yorkshire represents a Tory to Labour swing of over 17 points in both York and North Yorkshire, relative to average 2019 results in the two authorities. More than half the Conservative seats in York and North Yorkshire would be vulnerable on such swings, including Selby, where Labour won a by-election on a massive swing less than a year ago, and Harrogate and Knaresborough, where the Liberal Democrats need a swing of less than eight points to recover a seat they held throughout the New Labour years.
While Rishi Sunak himself is likely to be safe - his is the safest seat in North Yorkshire and has returned Conservative MPs since 1910 - the election of a Labour Mayor suggests the moors and dales of North Yorkshire will provide no shelter for his colleagues from the winds of political change which look set to sweep out his government a few months from now.
This piece was edited to correct an error regarding Amber Valley in its first draft - Labour last won this seat in 2005, not 2001. Apologies for the error and thanks to Graham Harries who flagged it up.
Labour’s performance in Wales was more muted, with an average swing of 2 points in the four Welsh PCCs. Labour did much better in Wales in 2021, when they had a strong performance in concurrent Welsh Assembly elections, and Plaid Cymru also performed well in Welsh PCC elections this time and last. Strong showings for Plaid in North Wales and in Dyfed-Powys, which they held, will raise Welsh nationalist hopes for the general election, as their top target seats are in these two PCC areas.
The supplemental vote system (which was also previously used in Mayoral contests, and ditched this time) enables voters to back a first choice party and then cast a “supplemental” vote for another party which is counted if that party is in the top two. The main effect is to enable people to vote for a smaller party, then indicate a preference for Conservative or Labour. While divided votes can harm either party, as Conservative MPs worried about Reform know all too well, the net effect in this case was likely to be to reduce the number of Labour victories, as the left vote in PCCs was more fragmented in more of the closest PCC contests, which often featured large Green and/or Lib Dem votes, while Reform interventions were rarer.