This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen
on .
It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
Local elections: Tories gain over 550 seats as Labour and Ukip votes plunge
Local elections: Tories gain 500 seats as Labour and Ukip votes plunge
(about 1 hour later)
The Conservatives have gained more than 550 seats in local elections across England, Scotland and Wales, with Labour declining significantly and Ukip facing a near total wipeout of its county council seats.
Theresa May’s Conservatives gained more than 500 council seats and swept to shock victories in mayoralty contests in the West Midlands and Tees Valley in results that placed her party on track to secure a thumping majority in the general election.
Labour also performed worse than expected in elections for new metropolitan mayors, winning the contests in Liverpool and Manchester, as expected, but losing out to the Conservatives in Tees Valley, traditionally a Labour heartland. In the West Midlands, the Conservatives’ Andy Street narrowly beat Labour’s Siôn Simon.
The prime minister insisted she was not taking “anything for granted” but the Tories enjoyed a stunning day that was matched by a dramatic decline for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, which lost more than 300 seats.
With just five weeks to go to the general election, Jeremy Corbyn said Labour faced a challenge on a “historic scale” if it is to win the general election on 8 June.
The results forced Labour to hand over control of a series of English councils including Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Northumberland, while in Scotland the party lost its grip on Glasgow for the first time in 40 years. Paul Nuttall’s Ukip was crushed as every single councillor facing election suffered defeat.
In a statement, he accepted they had lost “too many” councillors and now faced a huge challenge if they were to regain power. “The results were mixed. We lost seats but we are closing the gap on the Conservatives,” he said. “I am disappointed at every Labour defeat in the local elections. Too many fantastic councillors, who work tirelessly for their communities, lost their seats.
The results were turned into a projected national vote share of 38% for the Tories, 27% for Labour and 18% for the Lib Dems, with Ukip plunging to just 5%. Despite that being narrower than the polls, it projects that May would win a solid majority in June’s general election.
“We know this is no small task – it is a challenge on an historic scale. But we, the whole Labour movement and the British people, can’t afford not to seize our moment.”
Despite the scale of the Conservative victory, May told reporters that she still believed Labour could win the general election. Speaking after a visit to a factory in Brentford, west London, where the Tories are hoping to overturn a Labour majority of just 465, the prime minister said: “The reality is that, despite the evident will of the British people, we have bureaucrats in Europe who are questioning our resolve to get the right deal. Only a general election vote for the Conservatives will strengthen my hand to get the best deal on Brexit.”
The numbers are ominous for Labour’s prospects in the general election, with the Conservatives benefiting from the huge decline in support for Ukip.
Her party is also preparing to launch its flagship health policies over the weekend, with the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, scheduled to appear on television on Sunday.
Theresa May, however, said she was “not taking anything for granted” about the general election, insisting she believed Labour could still win.
Corbyn issued a statement acknowledging some of the problems Labour faced: “The results were mixed. We lost seats but we are closing the gap on the Conservatives.” He insisted that Labour could still win the general election, though admitted it was an “challenge on an historic scale”.
Speaking to reporters after a visit to a factory in Brentford, west London, the prime minister again tied her electoral fortunes to what she said was interference from forces within the EU that hoped to undermine Brexit.
He said he was “utterly determined” to use every hour of the next four weeks to get his message across. “We’ve now got five weeks to get a message out there.”
“The reality is that, despite the evident will of the British people, we have bureaucrats in Europe who are questioning our resolve to get the right deal,” she said. “Only a general election vote for the Conservatives will strengthen my hand to get the best deal on Brexit.”
Labour’s consolation was two convincing victories in the north-west in which Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram were elected as metro mayors for Manchester and Liverpool.
A forecast return of voters to the Liberal Democrats failed to materialise, with the party seeing a net loss of 37 seats. Ukip meanwhile, took just one seat and lost 115.
In, Scotland the SNP made modest gains, although there was also a surge for the Conservatives. while the Lib Dems were disappointed to lose dozens of seats but were pleased to see a boost in their overall vote share.
By comparison, the Tories gained 558 seats across the three nations. Labour lost 320, split more or less evenly between England, Scotland and Wales. In Scotland, the party lost control of Glasgow council for the first time in more than 35 years.
May’s claim that the EU was meddling in British affairs, which propelled her on to the front page of every national newspaper on Thursday morning as voters headed to the polls, was believed to have contributed to her party’s success against Ukip.
A BBC estimate of the projected national share of voting – what vote proportions would be expected if every British ward had taken part – put the Conservatives on 38%, Labour on 27%, the Lib Dems on 18% and Ukip on 5%.
The results suggest Nuttall’s party could be wiped out after it lost every seat it was defending, including being crushed in Brexit-supporting areas such as Essex and Lincolnshire, where the leader is fighting to become an MP.
Corbyn visited Liverpool to congratulate the city’s new mayor, former MP Steve Rotheram. He also tweeted congratulations to Welsh Labour for “defying the pundits”.
Nuttall claimed that, if his party’s hammering was down to a Tory advance driven by May’s determination to leave the EU, then it was a price he was “prepared to pay”.
John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, said he accepted it had been a “tough night” but defended Corbyn’s performance and told ITV it had “not been the wipeout people were expecting”.
The former Ukip MP Douglas Carswell, who defected from the Conservatives, said it was “over” for a party that once soared to overall victory in European elections in 2014 and secured 4m votes in a general election under the stewardship of Nigel Farage.
The Conservatives gained control of at least 10 English councils – Cambridgeshire, Derbyshire, East Sussex, Gloucestershire, Isle of Wight, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Warwickshire. Derbyshire was taken from Labour, with the others formerly under no overall control.
Political analysts have argued that Ukip had become a “gateway drug” for voters in Labour heartlands to shift to the Tories, which could be hugely damaging for Corbyn’s party. Commentators highlighted dozens of Labour seats where the Ukip vote is larger than the party’s majority.
Two of the most significant results were in the north, where Labour has dominated local government for many decades. The Conservatives became the largest party on Cumbria county council in north-west England and Northumberland in the north-east, where it was denied a majority when a Lib Dem candidate beat a Tory by drawing straws to settle a tied result.
One of the biggest blows for Labour was to watch the former John Lewis boss Andy Street narrowly win the West Midlands mayoralty for the Conservatives, in a sign that May could be making inroads into traditional Labour strongholds. He claimed to have won by reaching out to new voters with a “moderate, tolerant, inclusive” local plan but added that the question of leadership had been a huge boost for the Tories.
In Wales, the Tories gained more than 70 seats and independents have added 10, while Labour lost seats but remained the most dominant party. The Tories gained Monmouthshire council, while Labour lost control of Blaenau Gwent and Bridgend but strengthened its presence in Swansea.
Many Labour candidates said they were planning to run local campaigns without a focus on Corbyn, claiming he had been toxic on the doorstep. Stephen Kinnock, who is contesting the seat of Aberavon, said the results amounted to a “disastrous picture” and Corbyn’s leadership had come up as an issue on the doorstep.
The Lib Dems failed to make the gains they were hoping for in the south and south-west, and showed a net loss of 37 seats.
Siôn Simon, Labour’s losing candidate in the West Midlands, said: “We can’t duck the reality of what we heard in the places we won on the streets of cities and towns like Birmingham, Coventry, Wolverhampton and Sandwell.
Ukip – which lost its presence on Lincolnshire, Essex and Hampshire councils – took until after midday to win a single seat, taking a Lancashire ward from Labour.
“Traditional working-class voters, who we were born to serve, quite simply want to hear a clearer, stronger message about traditional values like patriotism, hard work and a defence of decency, law and order.”
The Ukip leader, Paul Nuttall, said it had been a difficult night for the party but that it may almost have been a worthwhile sacrifice given the Conservatives’ embrace of Brexit.
Alan Rhodes, who was the Labour leader of Nottinghamshire county council but is now leader of the opposition group, admitted that his party was “in a difficult place at the moment”. He made clear that he believed the national polls had resulted in his group losing control.
“If the price of Britain leaving the EU is a Tory advance after taking up this patriotic cause, then it is a price Ukip is prepared to pay,” he said in a statement.
“This doesn’t reflect on our four years in office locally. It is more reflective of the national malaise that the party finds itself in. I’m proud of what we’ve delivered and achieved in our four-year term – Labour councillors should be proud of that,” he said.
The Greens and Plaid Cymru were the only parties other than the Tories to win ground.
The first metro mayoral result to be announced was for the West of England area including Bristol, Bath, north-east Somerset and south Gloucestershire, which went to the Conservative candidate, Tim Bowles.
The former Labour MP Steve Rotheram won the Liverpool mayoralty, with 59% of the first choice vote, and former Labour cabinet member Andy Burnham won in Manchester, with 63%, but the Conservative Ben Houchen narrowly beat Labour’s Sue Jeffrey in Tees Valley when second-preference votes were counted.
Former John Lewis boss Andy Street narrowly won the tightly fought West Midlands mayoralty race against Labour’s Siôn Simon.
After polls closed, Corbyn’s team played down expectations of Labour’s performance, accepting that the party could lose hundreds of seats.
The party said it performed strongly in 2013 when the same council seats were last contested and it was confident its message would start to resonate as 8 June approached.
Diane Abbott, the shadow home secretary, told the BBC that not too much should be read into “a relatively low turnout type of election”. She said: “At the general we will have a higher turnout. And I believe that Labour voters will be repelled by Tory triumphalism and the notion of giving Theresa May some kind of blank cheque.”
But Philip Johnson, a Labour parliamentary candidate for Nuneaton who lost his Warwickshire council seat, said Corbyn was “putting off” some voters. Stephen Kinnock was also forthright in his criticism of the leadership and argued the party needed to make the general election about the wider team.
He told the BBC: “I think we can’t just put a spin on this – the fact of the matter is that Jeremy’s leadership does come up on the doorstep on a very regular basis. What we have to do is make this election about more than leadership; we’ve got to make it about the future of our country.
“We are seeing from people on the doorstep that they are worried about the polarisation of our politics; they do feel there is a shift to the hard-left and a shift to the hard-right. And my vision of the Labour party is not one where we are anywhere near the hard-left. We are a party that is a centrist, patriotic party that stands up for working people.”
McDonnell said Labour’s policies were going down well and people would like Corbyn more as they were exposed to him more.
“I’m not underestimating the challenge we face across the country, but what I’m saying is it wasn’t the wipeout many predicted,” he told the BBC. “It is much better and I think we turned out our vote in ways people didn’t expect. In the national campaign, we have set out extremely popular policies and this issue about Jeremy Corbyn, in the very area he campaigned, Cardiff, we actually held on to it well.”
McDonnell said there would be balanced airtime in the broadcast media during a general election, counteracting “unbalanced media reporting of [Jeremy Corbyn] for the last two years”.
“What we’re finding is people like the policies and then they see Jeremy Corbyn is an honest, decent but also principled man, so the more airtime we get the better,” he said.
Up for grabs were seats on 35 English councils – most of them county councils – and every council seat in Scotland and Wales. Turnout in England is expected to have been about 35% – slightly up on the last comparable elections.
Strategists from all the major parties will be scrutinising the results closely for signs that May’s relentless message of providing “strong and stable leadership” has won over habitual Labour voters.
The Conservatives have been trying to play down the results for fear supporters may not bother to turn out at the general election in anticipation of a landslide for May.
Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, denied that the Conservatives were benefiting only from Ukip’s demise, attributing some of the party’s advances to “Jeremy Corbyn’s very feeble leadership”.
Anthony Wells, of the pollsters YouGov, said Labour was just three percentage points behind the position Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives were in at the 1983 local elections, but trailed by 16 points in the general election that followed just a month later.
Wells said: “Don’t just assume that the projected overall shares of the vote at this week’s votes are going to be repeated in next month’s election. People vote differently for different reasons at different sorts of election.”
