Commentary on the 2021 English Local Elections

Across England, the Conservatives were the main victors, securing 40% of the popular vote and enjoying a string of stunning gains, particularly in the Red Wall areas of northern England.  

 

Victories at the Hartlepool parliamentary by-election and Mayoral races at Teeside and the West Midlands set the tone for the weekend count, with the Conservatives enjoying big swings in towns that have historically been solid Labour.  

 

But these gains masked a regional divide, with Labour generally holding on in the larger metropolitan cities, and along with the Liberal Democrats and Greens, making some small inroads in more traditional Conservative areas of the Home Counties.  

 

The other big winner of Thursday’s election were the Greens who gained almost 100 Council seats and whose vote was up substantially across the country, laying the foundation for possible Green led councils over the coming years.

 

Eleven years into a Conservative Government and Boris Johnson has pulled off the remarkable feat of presenting his administration as a new Government.  He has united the right wing vote and is now dominant across large swathes of England.  He has built a political coalition that stretches from Cornwall to Durham.  The left wing vote, on the other hand, is divided between a Labour Party in decline, the Liberal Democrats that are just about hanging on, and a Green Party that is on the up, but from a very low base.

 

The election success will spur Johnson on to push ahead with a reform agenda designed to appeal to his new voters in the north, including controversial planning legislation Ironically, he might find that this ‘levelling up’ reform will be the one that fragments his own coalition and triggers a revolt from southern voters.

By |2021-05-10T11:35:54+00:00May 10th, 2021|Blog, Forty Shillings, Politics|0 Comments