Learning election lessons

by Amit Roy

RELIEF FOR THE TORIES BUT LABOUR ‘SHOULD HAVE DONE BETTER’

IT GOES almost without saying that it is risky to extrapolate the results of a general election from local ones, whether that is in India or in the UK.

Nevertheless, the assembly elections in In­dia’s south Indian state of Karnataka, set for Sat­urday (12) to next Tuesday (15) may provide possible pointers to how Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will perform in next year’s general election.

In Britain, the next general election does not have to be called until 2022, so the result of last week’s local government elections has to be treated with even greater caution.

With all councils declared, Labour won 2,350 seats, up 77; the Conservatives took 1,332, down 33; the Lib Dems got 536, up 75; the Greens won 39, up eight; and UKIP took three, down 123.

Based on this, it does not look as though La­bour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his party will win an overall majority in the Commons.

According to Prof John Curtice, one of the foremost political analysts in the country, La­bour’s vote share of 35 per cent was neck and neck with the Tories, when it should have been much higher. On his estimate, Labour would win 283 Westminster seats, compared to 262 in 2017 – well short of the 326 needed for an overall ma­jority. A rival forecaster, Michael Thrasher, put Labour on 261 seats.

Corbyn was probably disappointed that Labour did not do as well as he might have expected, and prime minister Theresa May mightily re­lieved that despite the Windrush scandal, the Tories did not fare as badly as was predicted.

Just after last year’s general election, so strong was the pro-Corbyn wave that Labour MPs were put on message to refer to the opposition as “the government-in-waiting”. After the local elec­tions, that mood appears to have disappeared.

The Conservatives gained the London council of Barnet from no overall control and also held their flagship London councils of Westminster and Wandsworth. In addition, they won Basil­don and Peterborough, which had both also been under no overall control. But they lost control of their northern flagship Trafford Coun­cil after 14 years of Conservative rule.

Labour won Plymouth from the Tories and gained Kirklees from no overall control, but lost Nuneaton and Bedworth, and Derby.

Sir Vince Cable was happy that the Liberal Democrats gained four councils, winning neigh­bouring Kingston-upon-Thames and Rich­mond-upon-Thames in Greater London and South Cambridgeshire from the Tories and Three Rivers from no overall control.

“We have to do better if we're going to be in government,” admitted Lady Angela Smith, La­bour’s leader in the Lords. “Not much went wrong, but not as much went as well as we would have liked.”

Shadow trade secretary Barry Gardiner com­mented: “Would I have liked to have done bet­ter? You bet.”

Meanwhile, Labour Party chairman Ian Lavery acknowledged there was a problem with anti-Semitism, especially in a borough such as Barnet in north London. “Anti-Semitism has no role, no place at all in the Labour party,” Lavery said. “We will root it out from top to bottom.”

Since I went to school in Hendon where a third of the pupils were Jewish, I can understand why the anti-Semitism row reduced the Labour vote in Barnet.

The near collapse of the UKIP vote benefited mostly Tory candidates. This might encourage the pro-Brexit lobby and also May to stick to hardline policies on immigration and visas.

But she should be careful not to lose the sup­port of Indian-origin voters who enabled Camer­on to win his overall majority in 2015 and which May lost last year.