Labour May Day massacre

For once the hyperbole is justified. Labour and Gordon Brown suffered a humiliation at the hands of electors across England and Wales last week, polling the lowest share of the vote ever recorded for either of the two major parties at a local election. And for the first time since Black Wednesday in 1992 the Tories were the clear and direct beneficiaries.

We have examined more than 3.5m votes in 1,350 local wards in order to calculate how the parties would have fared if these elections had taken place in every part of the country. This comprehensive analysis has the Tories on 43% (a three-point increase since last year) with Labour on 24% (down two points). The Lib Dems scored 23%, down a single percentage point from last year.

Repeated at a general election, such a result would put the Tories in power with a majority of 126 seats. The number of Labour MPs in the House of Commons would slump from 356 at the last election to just 177. The Liberal Democrats would be left with 55 seats.

All those Labour MPs sitting on majorities of less than 22% will now be worrying about the future of their parliamentary careers. Such a swing would see the back of cabinet members Jacqui Smith (whose own Redditch council went Tory for the first time since 1979), Ruth Kelly in Bolton West, John Hut-ton in Barrow and Furness, and John Denham in Southampton Itchen. Many less prominent MPs first elected in 1997 would also lose out.

It seems as if suburban voters who have supported new Labour for more than a decade, or at least sat on their hands or voted for other parties at previous times of disillusionment, are now prepared to turn to the Tories again. There were signs of this in the south in last year’s local elections, but on Thursday the mood spread further afield to places such as Bury, North Tyneside, Nuneaton and Bedworth, and the Vale of Gla-morgan where the Tories have been out of power for a generation or longer.

While it is true that there are still no Tory councillors in some major northern urban authorities such as Liverpool, Newcastle upon Tyne and Shef-field, it is a myth that a general election victory requires the party to break through there. It is the progress they made in the commuter estates and large towns surrounding such areas which counts because that is where the crucial parliamentary marginal constituencies are located.

The figures strikingly spell out the scale of Labour’s losses at Gordon Brown’s first electoral test. Taking into account the previous results in councils where there has been a reorganisation or boundary change, Labour lost more than one in four of the nearly 1,500 seats it was defending. The Tories emerged some 300 seats to the good, with double-figure gains for the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru in Wales and a mixture of smaller parties.

In London, the overwhelming concentration on the John-son-Livingstone battle squeezed out all the other candidates and had a knock-on effect in the assembly contests. There, Johnson’s election as mayor diverted attention from a somewhat less good performance by the Tories. If Johnson rode to victory on David Cameron’s coat-tails, so Livingstone seems to have helped to peg back the haemorrhaging of Labour votes in the capital.

The Tories picked up about 37% of constituency votes in the city, more than six points up on 2004, but Labour also did better than four years ago. Significantly, the Tories have never won a general election without polling more than 40% in London.

The Lib Dem share was down by about a quarter compared with 2004, and the minor parties, too, fell back. The BNP would have won an assembly seat four years ago but for falling below the 5% threshold; this time they cleared that hurdle as the UKIP vote shrank.

The significance of last week’s election result is threefold. First, it confirms recent opinion polls that the Conservatives are now able to attract the support of more than 40% of voters. Second, it adds to the perception of a government that is losing touch with the very electors who gave it such impressive majorities in 1997, 2001 and 2005. Third, it will make Labour strategists ponder whether it is policies or personalities (or both) that need to be changed before the next general election.

The result of that election is still far from a foregone conclusion, however. History tells us that the government will recover some support by 2010, and the electoral system remains weighted against the Tories. Cameron must win by at least 10 clear points to get an overall majority at Westminster.

Last week gives some credence to the argument that the government is on its way out; it would be a far bolder prediction that the Tories are poised to step straight into Labour’s shoes.

The authors are directors of the Elections Centre, University of Plymouth

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