Category: Local Elections

LANCS LABOUR TARGET AND JOE’S CHANCE TO UPSTAGE MANCHESTER

The restless world of politics moves on. With the elections and Queen’s Speech out of the way, it is time to look to the political future of the North West after a busy week.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user johnnyenglish

Two issues stand out. Following Labour’s good night in the district elections in Lancashire, the battle is already underway for the biggest prize of all, control of Lancashire County Council. Next year, it will be the only show in town in our patch, but expect the colourful leader of Lancashire, Geoff Driver, to put up a tough fight.

In the cities Joe Anderson is the unlikely pin up boy of the Tories having delivered an elected mayor whereas Manchester has not played ball. Already Cities Minister Greg Clarke is talking about giving the elected mayor transport powers although it would have to be with the agreement of the other councils on Merseyside. Good luck with that Joe.

With most cities joining Manchester in a no vote, it must have been a distinct possibility that Liverpool would have given a thumbs down too. So Joe Anderson’s move to get the council to bypass the referendum retains the whiff of a coup.

What will matter in the long term is if the handful of elected mayoral cities like Middlesborough, Bristol and Liverpool really do benefit from their Downing Street meetings with David Cameron or if they come to look like odd experiments in Town Hall governance that have done no better than the refusniks like Manchester and Birmingham.

There is speculation that the government is still toying with the idea of city region mayors if people want it. They should have legislated for that in the first place giving the conurbations real power. Instead they were vague on the powers of mayors and resorted to referendums which are not an effective way to make constitutional change. People don’t care enough about such issues and just use them to give the government a kicking.

Before we finish with mayors it will be worth keeping an eye on Salford where Ian Stewart was elected. He’ll be joining Joe Anderson on trips to Downing Street but he’s going to have to work hard to win the confidence of officers of the council. There’s also the question of his relations with John Merry, the former council leader who Stewart beat for the post.

Now let’s look at the council results in more detail.

LANCASHIRE ELECTIONS

A good night for Labour particularly in Blackburn with Darwen where they now hold nearly three quarters of the seats. A few years ago they lost power to a mixture of Tories, Lib Dems and For Darwen independents. The latter have disappeared completely, perhaps Darwen feels more comfortable about its relationship with Blackburn these days.

Labour returned to power in Burnley after a decade when first the British National Party and then the Lib Dems challenged its supremacy. The fascists are now off the council completely. The result must be worrying for the town’s Lib Dem MP Gordon Birtwhistle.

Labour also held Hyndburn and gained Rossendale and Chorley where six years ago David Cameron arrived by helicopter to celebrate the Tory triumph.

The Conservatives held off the Labour challenge in West Lancashire but only have a two seat majority over the Labour Party led by the experienced John Fillis.

The only joy for the Liberal Democrats in Lancashire is that they hold the balance of power in Pendle.

GREATER MANCHESTER ELECTIONS

It really was a bad night for the Lib Dems here. Another wipe out in Manchester means they have lost 24 councillors in two years and put a huge question mark under the future of John Leech as MP for Withington.

In Rochdale, once the home of Liberal success under Cyril Smith, internal divisions and the national tide has reduced the party to just 5 councillors on the authority.

The Lib Dems lost their leader in Stockport but remain the largest party largely because of the continuing poor performance of the Conservatives in the leafy suburbs that should be Tory territory. For the party not to be able to take advantage of the Lib Dems at this time should be a cause for a party inquiry.

MERSEYSIDE ELECTIONS

The whole of Merseyside is now in full Labour control for the first time. The party has all the seats on Knowsley,in St Helens the frustrated Lib Dem leader Brian Spencer was led from the counting hall by the police and in Liverpool the party lost a further 9 seats including group leader Paula Keaveney.

But the most spectacular result was in Sefton where never before have Labour had full control. Their victory in genteel Blundellsands summed up a night of triumph.

Political stability has come to Wirral with a Labour majority of eight. With no elections in 2013 the new Labour leader, Phil Davies, has two years to sort out the running of the troubled authority.

So the Coalition has hit the mid term blues. As ever the economy will dictate whether Cameron and Clegg can recover by 2015. Developments in France, Greece and Spain suggest that is far from certain.

LABOUR LANDSLIDE IN NORTH WEST ELECTIONS?

LABOUR LANDSLIDE IN NORTH WEST TOWN HALLS?

Labour could be heading for the dominance of Town Halls in our region that they last enjoyed in the mid 1990s.

The local elections on May 3rd have been overshadowed by coverage of the elections and referendums on elected mayors. We need to remind ourselves that in Lancashire the issue is completely irrelevant. In most cases the old model of electing councillors to the Town Hall and the leader being chosen internally remains.

There are old fashioned elections for a third of the metropolitan councils in Greater Manchester and Merseyside. There are also contests for a third of the councillors in seven district councils in Lancashire and the all purpose councils in Blackburnwith Darwen,Warrington and Halton.

The political background against which these contests are taking place does have similarities to the mid nineties. In 1995 and 1996 the dying Tory government of John Major suffered successive hammerings in local elections which left them in control of only one council in the whole of the North of England.

Things aren’t that bad for the Conservatives this time but events have conspired to make it likely that this will be the election where the government really suffers the mid term blues. Last year the Tories dodged the bullet, partly because of the collapse of the Lib Dems. This time both coalition parties are likely to face the wrath of the voters for a range of reasons.

The economy is always the main factor and however much Ministers might look for signs of recovery, people and businesses are suffering.

Then there was the Budget. Far from helping Conservative and Lib Dem candidates in the North West, a range of unhelpful headlines will ensure a frosty reception on the doorstep, phone or Twitter.

The underlying strategy to keep bearing down on our national debt was right. What was wrong was not to foresee the reaction of people to the granny tax, the pasty penalty and the removal of tax relief on large charity donations.

So let’s look at how all this might play out on the ground in the North West with Labour having a healthy lead in the polls and the Lib Dems fighting with UKIP for third party status.

Labour is further helped by the fact that on the last three occasions when these seats were contested they did badly so they have “easy” ground to make up. In 2000 Tony Blair suffered mid term blues, in 2004 the Iraqwar was underway and in 2008 Gordon Brown’s brief honeymoon was over.

Last year the Tories made up for northern losses by taking Lib Dem seats in the south. This year they are defending some unlikely gains when Gordon Brown was in charge.

The Lib Dems may not repeat last year’s catastrophe which saw them lose nearly every seat they were defending in Liverpool and all in Manchester, but they could end up with less than three thousand councillors nationally for the first time since 1986.

Lancashire offers most prizes to Labour with the probability that they will win full control of Rossendale and become the largest party in Pendle, Chorley and Burnley. In Pendle and Chorley the Conservatives are currently the largest party, but in Burnley it’s the Lib Dems.

A Labour recovery in Burnley would mark the end of eight dark years for the party. They lost control in 2004 initially to a surge from the British National Party who were in turn replaced by the Lib Dems.

On the back of that the Lib Dems got Gordon Birtwhistle elected as MP which illustrates the importance of these polls for the General Election in three years time. If your council base is knocked away, you can lose the activists you need to fight the parliamentary contest.

An outside prospect for Labour is West Lancashirewhere they would need a net gain of six seats to resume the control they lost in 2002.

On Merseyside the most significant contest will be in Wirral. All hell has broken out around Wallasey Town Hall in the last couple of years. Two years ago the Tories took minority control. Last May Labour were back only for the Tories to link up once again with Lib Dem support to put Conservative Jeff Green back in charge in February.

Steve Foulkes, the long standing leader of Labour in the peninsula is standing down and added to all this a tale of alleged council officer incompetence is being revealed. Labour’s new leadership is hoping it can gain full control for the first time in ten years.

Labour has never had full control of Sefton. They need a net gain of five seats which will be difficult in this historically balanced council, but deep Tory divisions centred on ex Tory Sir Ron Watson may help.

In Greater Manchester, Lib Dem minority control of Stockport is in jeopardy. A lot will depend on whether the consistently underperforming Tories can help Labour in squeezing the Lib Dems.

Labour should take full control of Rochdale where the Lib Dems have been hit by defections to the Tories and Labour should consolidate the hold that they gained in Bury by the drawing of lots in a dead heat ward last May.

Trafford is likely to remain the one Tory bastion in Greater Manchester although Labour entertains a thin hope of removing the Tories overall majority.

Labour will hold the unitaries of Blackburn with Darwen, Halton and Warrington. In the latter case a particularly interesting contest will take place in the Lymm ward. Long standing Tory matriarch Sheila Woodyatt is up against Labour’s Su Williams. Williams is well regarded for her local community work and it might make a difference.

It is a reminder that for all the national political tides at work, local candidates can often make a difference.

MANCHESTER CENTRAL: ANOTHER CHANCE FOR RESPECT?

MANCHESTER CENTRAL

Could the drama of Bradford West be rerun in Manchester Central?

Labour chooses its candidate next Monday to replace Tony Lloyd who is set to resign to stand for Police and Crime Commissioner for Greater Manchester.

Manchester Central has some of the characteristics of the Yorkshire seat that saw George Galloway’s shock victory for Respect at the end of last month.

Nearly 30% of the electorate is non-white and many feel this would be an appropriate constituency for Labour to choose an ethnic minority candidate. It is long overdue for Manchester to end its white male monopoly representation at Westminster.

If that is to happen then Patrick Vernon is the man. He is Chief Executive of the Afiya Trust, one of the leading race equality health charities in the country.

However he faces an uphill task. He is a Londoner facing three experienced Manchester politicians.

Party bosses are hoping that Lucy Powell will be chosen. She is a close aide of Labour leader Ed Miliband but failed to dislodge the Liberal Democrats from the neighbouring Withington seat two years ago.

The other candidates are Manchester councillors Mike Amesbury and Rosa Battle.

If Lucy Powell is chosen, will she face a similar challenge from Respect that Labour failed to withstand in Bradford?

Probably not as Manchesteris a city well run by Labour without a hole in the ground where a shopping complex was meant to be, as was the case in Bradford.

But there will be nervousness about the timing of the contest after Galloway’s victory and because by elections that are caused by party manoeuvrings, rather than the death of an MP, often annoy voters and lead them to punish the party that held the seat.

FROM PRISON TO TOWN HALL?

The government hoped that a different type of person would stand to be elected mayors instead of the usual political suspects.

Well they have certainly got what they wished for in Salford. Paul Massey hasn’t got a political record, but he certainly has a criminal one. In 1999 he was jailed for 14 years for stabbing a man in the groin. Mr Massey will give a whole new meaning to the description “independent candidate” when he stands against the likely winner, ex-Labour MP Ian Stewart, in the poll next month.

There are ten candidates in Salford but a full dozen in Liverpool where the race will be on to stop the Joe Anderson political bandwagon.

One blow for the current council leader will be that he will not appear at the top of the voting paper.

Normally alphabetical order prevails but there appear to be different rules for this new post. Election officials carried out a ballot which resulted in Joe being placed second behind the National Front representative.

There are a number of quality candidates including successful businessman Tony Caldeira for the Tories, experienced Richard Kemp for the Lib Dems and Tony Mulhearn who has stuck to his socialist principles all his life.

But the independent candidate Liam Fogarty should be given serious consideration. Liam was my producer at the BBC and has been campaigning for an elected mayor forLiverpool when most of the other candidates were still pouring scorn on the idea.

Nominations are now closed for the two mayoral polls and the local elections across Lancashire, Greater Manchester and Merseyside. The parties are all likely to be affected by three extraordinary weeks in politics.

GALLOWAY: THE POLITICAL TROUBADOUR

By all means the major political parties should beat themselves up over the result in Bradford West. They need to ask themselves how a political maverick and a powerful social media campaign among the Asian community of that city, left them floundering.

However it is likely to be one of those by election soufflés. We have seen a few of them in the North West.

Shirley Williams was elected at the height of the surge of the Social Democrats in 1981 as MP for Crosby, but dismissed by the fickle electorate two years later. The SDP had a similar experience ten years later when Mike Carr won Ribble Valley on the back of poll tax anger. He lasted a year.

Chris Davies managed just two years as Lib Dem MP for Littleborough and Saddleworth from 1995-97 following a by-election.

By-elections, like the European Parliament elections are classic opportunities for otherwise serious voters to let their hair down and give the major parties a kicking knowing that the government of the country is not at stake.

Bradford West was a bit different because of the complex world of Asian politics which mixes uneasily with the traditional politics of Westminster.

We saw that in the 2010 General Election in Oldham East and Saddleworth where old Labour party apparatchiks answer to Muslim voters drifting to the Lib Dems was to “get the white vote out”.

But there was was no sign of the dodgy leaflets in Bradford that did for Phil Woolas in Oldham.

One suspects that in Bradford a fairly complacent Labour machine felt they just had to put up a well known member of the Muslim community and job done. But Galloway has been riding political bandwagons since 1987 when he defeated the leader of the Social Democrats, Roy Jenkins, in Glasgow Hillhead.

After saluting Saddam Hussein and getting expelled from the Labour Party, Galloway was at it again defeating an excellent MP, Oona King in Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005.

People made the mistake of thinking that pretending to be a cat slurping milk on Big Brother would do for him. But the Muslim community of Bradford West appears to have turned a blind eye to such decadence.

Certainly the younger members of that community have anyway, because there is evidence that a frantic surge of tweeting in the final days caught the main parties napping. The doorstep encounter is no match for the iPhone amongst the young. That’s something all parties will now have taken note of.

So where have all these events left the parties in our patch with a three weeks to go to the local and mayoral polls?

Despite Bradford, Labour is set to do well. We are now deep into mid term and that is usually a bad time for the party in power. Nowadays the government is both the Tories and Lib Dems, so it’s a win win for Labour. Also Labour did really badly in this round of elections in 2008 and can regain lost seats relatively easily.

For the Tories we only have to put together a few bizarre phrases to identify their short term problems.

Just think of a granny munching on an ambient temperature pasty while trying to fill a jerry can and you have identified that the Conservatives have temporarily lost the plot. They are heading for the mid term hammering that they avoided last year. But petrol and pasties will be forgotten if the underlying economic woes can be sorted out in the next couple of years.

The Lib Dems are perhaps staring down the barrel of a pistol rather than a double barrelled shotgun this year, but it stlll looks pretty dire for them. Local elections used to be great for their party. They were grateful recipients of the votes of people fed up with the government. But they are the government now and will only be saved in some places by the individual work put in by councillors in particular wards.