There was so many positive trends in last month’s Local Elections, as a geography nerd I like to look for patterns. A common trend for us Lib Dems was to make incursions into cities where we previously had no councillors or just a token presence. We’ve reached the gates of a city, instead of a medieval army armed with torches and trebuchets, we roam the streets armed with focus leaflets and probe the weaknesses of incumbents pointing at potholes, graffiti, abandoned cars, fly tipping and faded road markings. Sometimes we might even clean a street sign covered in algae or do a litter pick, peaceful and well meaning but it has the same devastating effect on our enemies as the Vikings smashing up St Cuthbert’s Church on Lindisfarne in 793.
The sound of the exurbs
When it comes to regional positioning, things didn’t really matter. We made in roads in cities all across England, from Exeter to Middlesbrough. If there is one commonality, it’s that these gains are often made in the suburbs, nay even the exurbs – right where the town meets the country. A greater mind than mine will be able to explain in full why our success would be exclusive to the edge of the city in Southampton and also several hundred miles away in Lincoln. I should imagine there are socio-economic and cultural factors at play, and perhaps a campaigning methodology that is well suited to these edge-of-the-city areas. Psephologists sometimes say that people in boundary wards feel a sense of isolation and neglect compared to those cheek-by-jowl with the town hall – this happens even the biggest metro areas such as London. This was certainly something picked up by, and exploited successfully by Liberal Party activists in Orpington in 1962 and something we’ve traded on ever since (Orpington is part of Greater London but only a thin umbilical chord makes it contiguous with the built up area of the rest of the city).
Biting back in the South
While every success has a particular set of circumstances, often in the south metro incursions are a manifestation of the levee breaking, a city surrounded by a solidly-liberal hinterland, this is certainly the case in Exeter and Southampton, and to a lesser extent in Swindon. One might say Slough is a special case, however . . .
🎶 Sup up your beer and collect your fags
There’s a row going on down near Slough 🎶
The collapse of Slough Labour makes sense if you look into their record of maladministration, however it very much bucked the national trend, and it is not always the case that mediocre/poor governance is reflected in the ballot box. Nevertheless the local Lib Dems were alive to the possibility, despite not having won a seat since 2012 and often polling around 1,000 votes for the whole borough in the last decade. What happened in Slough, picking up three seats and flipping the status of the council, is an object lesson in never giving up. The electoral arithmetic of the borough is on a knife edge and suddenly our small group is important. It’s also the case that Slough is close enough to Windsor & Maidenhead, Wokingham and Elmbridge so people in the town know Lib Dems success is not so improbable.
Chipping away at the two party duopoly across the cities of the South
Midlands – municipal dreams come true
The Lib Dems have had notable success in Leicester before – Parmjit Singh Gill winning the 2004 Leicester South by election (Leicester East Labour MP Tom Bradley also defected to the SDP though things didn’t go quite as well as we’d like in the 1983 General Election). A year before the 2004 by election the local Lib Dems were the largest single party in Leicester, with 25 seats, a brief interlude for a council that’s been controlled by Labour for all but seven years since its creation in 1973. Fast forward to present day, it’s like pushing water uphill in most metro areas to take seats off of Labour when the Conservatives are in power and so rotten nationally. Never underestimate control freak Labour’s ability to shoot itself in the foot however, Wimbledon’s around the corner but Labour started with the unforced errors back in the Spring. Leicester Labour’s plans were thrown into disarray by their NEC, as explained here:
https://liberalengland.blogspot.com/2023/03/most-leicester-councillors-deselected.html
I’d rather not go into the identity politics being played in areas of high Asian population by the Conservatives but again Leicester is an area of potential growth for us, to the South of the city are Lib Dem controlled Oadby & Wigston, Hinckley & Bosworth, Harborough and Rutland. Also note we made major gains in Blaby and the Tories are now hanging by a thread there.
If you’re a heavy social media user like me you’ll see Lib Dems groups across the country working hard, saying and doing the right things (campaigning and community voluntary work), even though electorally they have to climb a mountain. You always wonder if that will yield results, one place where that’s clearly paying off is Lincoln. Lincoln is now the southern tip of a swathe of gold cutting through Lincolnshire thanks to our success in West Lindsey. The local Lib Dems group has been busy with a community politics play based on sheer elbow grease, and because manual labour is not in the modern Labour playbook people have clearly noticed the contrast.
Leicester and Worcester – two big rugby union towns where our opponents have had to take extra long in the shower to wash away the stain of defeat
Middlesbrough – a ray of sunshine for the Smoggies
Where was the biggest underdog victory for us in the whole of the country? Much was made of the Lib Dems winning a seat in Boston, indeed it was remarked, ‘You’ve got more chance of seeing a bikini shop in Riyadh than winning there’. Surely the most against-the-odds metro wins were in Middlesbrough. Politically Middlesbrough is known for being dominated by Labour, with the odd moment of going off-piste (electing popular Robocop Ray Mallon as Mayor several times). The Lib Dems hadn’t had a councillor here since 2011 and hadn’t been able to form a group since 2008. Probably the nadir was 2015 when we polled under 1,000 votes across the whole city. You can’t keep us down for long, however, and voters in Middlesbrough are getting bored/indifferent to Labour neglect. In the Lib Dems they’ll also see a party that’s been in power in Redcar & Cleveland, County Durham and York in recent years. We’re re-establishing a reputation for being the main challengers to Labour across the metro areas of the North East. This time around in Middlesbrough the party won just shy of 3,800 votes and has targets for next time, missing out on a seat in Acklam by just seven votes.
Lessons for future elections
While the Lib Dems have been famously agnostic when it comes to any urban/suburban/rural divide the party has to accept that we’re doing better on the edge of cities than right in the middle. This might change if there’s a majority Labour government in the future, but for now strategically we might as well focus on the edge of cities. If I was involved in London Lib Dems I’d be eyeing the Tory swathe of wards in rural Bromley and Croydon councils as there are no strong reasons why they wouldn’t follow the same pattern as other smaller cities.
Boro and Lincoln, home to fantastic Lib Dem local groups putting themselves on the map
Acknowledgement: Many thanks to the fantastic Election Maps UK organisation for creating the above graphics (excl London). Its website – electionmaps.uk – is an invaluable resource, and it can also be found on twitter: @ElectionMapsUK
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