The ‘mystery’ of Labour’s performance in the south
I hear Labour is increasingly hoping it might be able to declare itself ahead in the national equivalent vote share when all the results are in. There is even talk of a 33 to 31 per cent lead over the Conservatives, though the BBC projection currently has Labour on 31 per cent to the Tories on 30 per cent.
It won’t stop the attacks from Corbyn critics but it will, they hope, feed the narrative that there is steady progress (albeit from the 2015 general election – not the usual comparator, the 2012 local elections).
The mystery I talked about earlier as to why Labour is performing better in some southern seats, exactly where it was thought they might lose councils, is puzzling a lot of people. We’ve tried to map across what sort of swing happened in some of the red/blue battleground marginals that defined the 2015 general election.
Labour’s done quite well in Reading East: a 6.5 per cent swing. You’d be wanting to get a 10 per cent plus swing probably at a time like this in the cycle to have hopes of getting the parliamentary seat back but it’s not negligible.
It’s also very different from, say, Derby North, where Labour’s gone backwards with a swing to the Tories from 2015 of 3 per cent. You can see a small swing to Labour in the southern marginal of Southampton Itchen but go further north to Bury North and there’s a small swing back to the Tories from 2015.
One senior Labour figure thinks two demographics helped Labour in the southern seats. One is the concentration of new Corbyn-supporting members who were pointed at key councils and are often to be found in greater numbers in the south of England.
The other, not completely unrelated factor, is a sense that the Labour-leaning voters who most like Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership – often more middle class, often university educated, sometimes public sector – are in greater numbers in the southern councils where Labour surprised some expectations.
Labour still has a problem, as one senior Labour source close to Jeremy Corbyn admitted, with the traditional working-class supporters, which could explain the less impressive performance in some battleground areas further north. To adapt an old “Sun” newspaper headline from 1992: “It’s The Guardian Wot Won It.”
John McDonnell has spent part of this morning asking some critical Labour MPs to pipe down. I detect no sign amongst those MPs that they intend to do that. They don’t want Jeremy Corbyn, as they see it, to get away with a fairly static performance. They may not feel now is the moment to pounce but they want to push their narrative: it’s not working and it never will.
There’s been some reference to the Sedgley ward in Bury which has one of the highest concentrations of Jewish voters outside London and which saw a stronking 22 per cent swing against Labour yesterday. But as with so much in the overnight numbers the story isn’t quite as clear as a headline writer would like.
With the help, as ever, of the excellent elections analyst Lewis Baston, we’ve had a look at the other wards with strong Jewish voter presence in the bordering areas of Salford, Manchester and in North Leeds, and they didn’t show a swing against Labour.
Just seen some pictures coming in of a badly dented and dusty Prius in a suburban London street being driven, presumably towards City Hall, by Zac Goldsmith. It will be interesting to see if there’s even more criticism of his campaign tactics in the coming days. I wonder what, Tory darling of the moment, Ruth Davidson, thinks of them?
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