English local elections 2011

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Tory majority in Walsall is gone.

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Labour have made decent gains in the Forest of Dean; up from eight seats to seventeen.

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No LibDems elected in Rochdale.

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Labour take Redcar & Cleveland. It may be interesting to see the ward results.

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Contrasting fortunes in Lindsey... the Tories have gained North Lincolnshire from Labour (who gained it from the Tories in 2007. Weird, huh?) but Labour have made significant gains in NE Lincolnshire, vaulting from third to first.

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The BBC reports that Labour are back in control of Newcastle.

Edit: ten gains - 43-32.

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The Red Flag flies over Bideford. Or: Labour's most random gain so far. That I've seen anyway.

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A Labour majority in York. Which will be more of a surprise to those that know its boundaries than those that think it's just the city proper.

Labour underperform

In some places, yes, in others no. Usually it's hard to tell; there's no decent baseline to measure off.

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Would "Tories overperform" be a better view?

Isn't that an entirely subjective question? They didn't suffer a mid-term meltdown, but I don't think anyone actually expected that.

Look, the media (and certain academics who would, perhaps, know better but for the lure of cash in a time when there's not much of that around) like to focus on the total number of seats won, but that can be highly misleading at the best of times. Wards are not the same size across the country for one thing, and Labour is simply not at all competitive in the vast majority of district councils, especially not after most of the more historically industrial went unitary.

The Tories certainly did well in parts of the south where they were mostly facing up against their coalition partners. But results elsewhere don't look so good; for example, they lost six seats in Birmingham and were lucky not to lose a few more (they came within a whisker of losing Edgbaston, for example). Of course both of those comments are generalisations.

Basically, they should be pleased that any discontent with the government has passed over ordinary Tory voters, and they also have a right to be pleased that they are capable of benefiting from poor LibDem results in some areas (there had been some speculation to the contrary, probably based on a handful of local by-elections). Against that, they should be concerned that they are clearly on the way out in most large local authorities.

None of which tells us anything about the next General Election.

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Why are Sky reporting different figures to BBC?

Probably they're including some councils that the BBC aren't (or vice versa).

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Going back a few posts, the issue is - and I always get annoyed by this - the way that the media and the professional pundits always attempt to shoehorn local election results (I am only commenting on those in this post) into a predetermined narrative, whether that narrative is appropriate or not. In this case it was mostly for a (heavily trailed) one-year-one retrospective; how wonderful Cameron is doing gloriously, how pathetic Clegg is drowning, and how boring Labour are failing to make any kind of impact whatsoever. No matter what the results, figures would have been brandished around to 'prove' the accuracy of that narrative. Of course the narrative in question isn't entirely untrue; Cameron remains a popular figure in the parts of Britain predisposed towards the Tories, the LibDems have taken most of the flak for the unpopular things that the government has done, and Labour is rather inward-looking and focused on rebuilding. All of these things were reflected in the results. It's just that other things happened as well.

It's not an issue of systematic bias (at some point the pushed narrative will be broadly favourable to Labour and I'll still hate it) so much as the increasingly apparent tendency of the media to distort and compress information into brightly coloured chunks in order to throw at an audience presumed to be insufficiently intelligent to understand that in a British election you cast your vote by marking an 'x' on a piece of paper.

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Yes, I'm still bitter about the boat. And what it represented. And still represents. God damn it.

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My eyes! They bleed!

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The Labour candidate in Washwood Heath polled 89%!

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Quick map of winners in Brum:



The stunner of the night was Hall Green; Labour have only ever won there once. In 1945; and the ward covered a larger area back then.

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Telford & Wrekin:



Note that Labour only ran one candidate in Madeley, leaving the other seat for an Independent (Tories ran two candidates).

Yeah, didn't expect Labour to win a majority of seats in Wellington; of course the one gain was a bit of a fluke (incumbent in Park had been elected as a Tory but had since jumped to UKIP and sought re-election), but the others weren't. TAWPA were wiped out in Dawley, which is great news.

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The first election with the new system of local government in Stoke; no more elected Mayors, no more elections by thirds and less councillors from more wards.

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So that one red-blue ward has three seats?

Yeah. Oddly enough although a Tory incumbent did run there, he wasn't the Tory candidate to get elected. Really surprised that they didn't get anyone elected in Hanford & Trentham (big grey ward, far south west).

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Two wards in Newcastle will vote in June due to candidate deaths.

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West Yorkshire. Obviously a lot going on there, but I direct the eye of the casual reader to the far west of the map. Those semi-rural Pennine wards (from Calder - the red no. 2 - south) are usually yellow. In most of them they came third this time; there was a massive leaking of votes to Labour, which often let in Tory candidates. The key point being that that area has about as unbroken a Liberal tradition as they come.

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The Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire:



Interesting that the Independents in Barnsley didn't really hold up much better than in 2010; two made it, rest out.

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Forest of Dean:



The stripes don't match up, but that would be boring and thus very un-Forest-like. Obviously only part of the Forest of Dean District is actually in the Forest, no matter how defined; the rest is more typical of rural Gloucestershire.



Anyways, there are actually three wards in the Coleford area (town split between a blue/grey half and a red/grey/red half) as Berry Hill (which is not part of Coleford at all) gets a ward to itself. It's the little red blob on top.

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Excellent work!

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Winning party by ward for all of the councils in the former West Midlands Metropolitan County. Basically, Labour did well everywhere except for Solihull, the Tories did badly everywhere except for Solihull and the LibDems did extremely (shockingly?) badly everywhere (including Solihull). Of course there's a lot of variation within that general pattern.

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Birmingham

Yay, finally got one of these done. Anyways, a couple of points for those that don't know Brum that well:

1. Local elections in Brum can be very strange because you have this odd combination of massive swings linked (usually) to whatever is going on nationally and the continued importance of candidates and various local factors. There's this idea that the latter is only true of the heavily Asian wards, but that's bollocks (look at Oscott over the past... er... thirty years).

2. My, my, but doesn't the rather close relationship between the Tories and the LibDems in the city show up so clearly on maps of local elections?