As I was eating breakfast, I was informed by the BBC that tomorrow there will be local elections ‘across England and Wales’. Technically correct perhaps, but for the peripheries – Wales, Cornwall, the rural south west, Cumbria and the rural north east, as well as most of the English midlands and East Anglia beyond Essex – there will only be the largely meaningless Police and Crime Commissioner elections, no doubt set to record the lowest turnouts in history.
Almost a half of the local election seats up for grabs are in southern England with most of these concentrated in the south east between Hampshire and Essex. This is where two-tier local authorities still exist, at least for now, as they nervously await bankruptcy after decades of Tory/Lib Dem and Labour Governments’ underfunding. Another quarter of the contests will be in the big city metropolitan boroughs of the West Midlands, Greater Manchester, Yorkshire and the North East.
This takes into account the many LAs with boundary changes, which makes direct comparison with the round of local elections in 2021 over-simplistic
Half-truths and sloppy reporting are not restricted to the location of these elections. There is widespread talk that the Tories could lose half their current seats, with Labour and Reform UK being the main beneficiaries. But, while Labour may gain seats in the metropolitan boroughs, this will be limited as they already hold 50 per cent of the seats being defended there. Furthermore, in much of southern England the obvious centrist non-Tory alternative is not Labour at all, but Liberal Democrats or Greens.
The scale of the Tories’ losses depends on voters’ willingness to vote tactically for the strongest non-Tory party, as they’ve been doing in parliamentary by-elections recently. But, given the less prominent media coverage, this may not be case in the locals.
Moreover, in the vast majority of wards Labour will have to compete with at least one of and often both Lib Dems and the Greens, not to mention TUSC and George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain. Meanwhile, on the far right the Conservatives face opposition from Reform UK in just 21 per cent of wards. Despite excessive hyping by the media, Reform UK’s local election intervention is less than inspiring and far below the levels achieved by its predecessor Ukip in the 2010s.
The electoral arithmetic is therefore working for the Tories which makes claims of 500 lost seats look a mite optimistic. Given the geography and contestation patterns of these local elections, those losses may also not primarily go to Labour. But who knows, given the unpredictable eighteenth-century voting system in England and the various voter suppression scams that have been quietly rolled out by the Tories.
Evan Davis: BBC garden gnomes for the Tories tendency
On BBC’s Newsnight last night Evan Davis said ‘Like the Premier league there’ll be winners and losers in tomorrow’s English elections’. There’s a big difference though. In the local elections we all know in advance who the losers will be. Partly because the BBC has lost no opportunity over the last couple of weeks to tell us.
Labour MPs, unsure whether they’re anti-semites or pro-Zionists, have walked right into the local election trap set for the party. Moreover, the small gang of irreconcilable Labour right-wingers on the backbenches have been vociferously seizing any soundbite going to help them do so.
What’s the trap? The trick is to overstate by a grotesque margin the number of council seats Labour is expected to gain. Then, when they don’t reach some absurdly impossible target, condemn their Leader as a useless vote-loser. Failed leadership candidate Liz Kendall for example has been quoted as saying Labour should gain 400 seats to be credible.
Speculation masquerading as sober analysis in i-news
The not-quite-Tory press (Guardian and Independent) have jumped gleefully on this. The Guardian editorial pronounced yesterday that ‘Labour needs to be making unambiguous gains in England this week‘, while reporting a forecast that 175 lost seats would be the ‘worst election performance in opposition since 1982’. Friday will inevitably apparently be a ‘day of reckoning’ for the evil leftist Corbyn.
Let’s calm down and look at a few facts. Local elections are normally compared with the last equivalent year in the four year cycle. That’s 2012. As it happens, 2012 was Labour’s best result in some years, when they gained over 500 seats. A loss of 175 would actually be a better result than 2008 or 2004. In those years they lost over 300 and over 400 respectively. The key words in the Guardian’s fatuous claim that Labour is facing its worst result since the Falklands war (is Cameron being subliminally equated with Thatcher??) are ‘in opposition’, although that’s not something either the Guardian or the BBC dwell on.
A real ‘disaster’ would be for Labour to do even worse than did in 2004 and 2008 and lose over 400 seats. Losing anything less than 300 seats would be a better performance than either of those years, although lagging well behind 2012, its best year since the 1990s, the last time it was in opposition.
Comparing local election results over time is not so straightforward as it looks, however. The list of authorities with elections changes a little and there are always areas with boundary revisions, which means they face all-out elections rather than the usual retirement of a third of the councillors. To allow for this and provide a consistent comparison, I’ve run a PR simulation that compensates for all-out elections and is based on the d’Hondt method (as used in Spain). Here’s the results.
Labour will do very well indeed to get anywhere close to its 2012 performance. So expect the BBC and the Guardian to be braying for Corbyn’s head on Friday.
You might almost feel sorry for Corbyn. Almost but not quite, as he bizarrely compounded the trap yesterday by stating publicly that Labour would lose no seats at all. Either he’s a very brave man, or someone living in cloud-cuckoo land, or someone who doesn’t understand the psephology.
As the election ritual stutters on to its consummation in the bonfire of ballots in a week’s time, let’s check that the corporate press is doing its duty. How many headlines has each party got per candidate over the last month? (The source is the Nexis news database)
The SNP are so far out in front as to be almost out of sight. Of course, most of the headlines outside Scotland are not exactly complimentary. More like scaremongering, hysterical or just plain daft. The headlines for Labour, given the way the media has pounced on Ed Milibland’s meeting with Russell Brand, the spawn of Satan, are no doubt similarly negative. But, on the adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, Labour are holding up well in the corporate media.
Ukip are doing slightly better than the Lib Dems, who these days are not of much interest to corporate journalists or anyone else (which may explain increasingly desperate Lib Dem leaks). Plaid do better than both of these parties, given their candidate numbers. Even MK’s ten ‘headlines’ give them a better rating. But here we must note a small problem with using this measure. All the 10 MK ‘headlines’ were in fact topping opinion pieces invited from the candidates by the local press. Not one was a story about the party as opposed to a political policy position from the party. These ‘candidate pieces’ make up only a very small proportion of other parties’ headlines.
Why no Greens in the chart? Because the search facility in the Nexis database doesn’t allow an easy distinguishing between the political party and village greens, golf greens or even green tea.
When it comes to alternative socialist voices, TUSC, who have arguably produced one of the liveliest party political broadcasts, has only managed to generate eight headlines, despite having 133 candidates. That’s 0.06 per candidate, compared with around 4 for the Westminster austerity cheerleaders. So good to know our corporate press can still do its job and report these rituals fully and fairly, isn’t it.
Local BBC TV has two outlets for its election coverage. First, there’s the daily dose of ‘news’ on Spotlight. I’d meant to monitor that but what with a couple of attacks of nausea and falling asleep in the first week, the project disintegrated as the will to live was rapidly lost. Which leaves the Sunday Politics South West show. There have been four offerings of this since the election campaign began. So what does it tell us about the BBC’s approach to the elections in Cornwall and Devon? The first conclusion is that Cornwall-based candidates do rather well, being given considerably more than their fair share of airtime. One can only suppose that this is because the BBC insists in claiming that coalition-coalition ‘marginals’ are somehow of great relevance to the election outcome. Whatever, of the 15 candidates invited to appear on the show (including the upcoming one next Sunday) we find that nine are based in Cornwall and only six in Devon, despite there being twice as many seats east of the Tamar. Two Tory candidates, one each from Labour, the Greens and Ukip and an incredible four of the six Lib Dem candidates in Cornwall have or will appear on the show. By constituency, four of the six candidates in Camborne-Redruth have been offered a place on the programme. St Ives has seen two of its candidates, while the other four seats have had one of theirs appear. Adding in the Devon-based candidates, we have a total of four Tories, four Lib Dems and four Labour, two from Ukip and one Green. Given their polling strength in Cornwall and Devon, the Lib Dems and Labour seem to have come out best. Overall, the total coverage (expressed purely in the number of seconds allocated to party spokespersons speaking) for the first four shows broke down as follows. If we convert this to percentages and then allow for the over-representation of Cornish seats in the show, and go on to compare that with the number of candidates, we get the following percentage breakdown …
Airtime
Candidates
Conservatives
28.3%
16%
Labour
26.0%
16%
Lib Dems
20.2%
16%
Ukip
16.9%
16%
Greens
8.2%
16%
MK
0.6%
9%
SNP/PC
0.0%
12%
There seems to be a bias towards the two bigger Westminster parties, while the Lib Dems and Ukip also get more than their number of candidates should entitle them to. The Greens don’t get their fair share of airtime. Meanwhile, neither does MK, which is almost invisible. Indeed, anyone relying on the BBC for information might be surprised to discover they’re standing in this election. They’d also be astonished to find that there are 12 other candidates, including three TUSC/Left Unity and two Communist Party candidates in Devon, one from the National Health Action Party in Cornwall and another half a dozen assorted Independents and odds and sods. Moving from quantity to quality, let’s review the four programmes we’ve had to endure. On the first (28th March) Phil Hutty for the Lib Dems was a bit out of his depth, admitting that his party would ‘take a hit’, a rather pessimistic conclusion one might have thought with over four weeks of the campaign still to go. There was some discussion of planning and neighbourhood plan referenda. Apparently, these are examples of ‘devolution’. Although the presenter did introduce this by the comment that the word ‘devolution’ conjures up an ‘image of nationalists in Scotland, Wales and yes, those in Cornwall waving flags and giving the English a hard time’. Thanks to the BBC for summing up SNP/Plaid and MK polices so succinctly. The possibility of a Cornish Assembly with powers over planning was raised in passing, although Phil Hutty wouldn’t promise any extra money for it, thus rendering it pointless given the level of Lib Dem/Tory cuts.
MK’s Andrew Long: seen but not heard, or even named
On the 12th April there was a piece on Declan Lloyd, Labour’s candidate in South East Cornwall, one of the youngest standing in the election. Declan had not appeared at a hustings, having gone on holiday with his mum instead. As the date of this election has been known since 2010, this seems an odd choice of holiday date. Although Declan might be forgiven as he was of course only 14 in 2010. No matter, as the hustings was shown it was stated that all the candidates for the other parties, including MK, were there. MK’s candidate Andrew Long was briefly seen although not named. The piece then interviewed three of the candidates about the missing Labour lad – but not Martin Corney of the Greens or Andrew Long. Corney was then mentioned by name but it was a case of seen, but not heard, or named, for Long. His name didn’t even appear on the list of candidates shown at the end of the piece!
MK’s Dick Cole: less time than Cameron
On the 19th a Cornish Assembly and affordable homes were among the topics. Any fair-minded and objective observer might have thought that here at last was a chance for the distinctive voice of MK to be heard on these issues. And yes, here was Dick Cole of MK, introduced inaccurately as the leader of ‘the Cornish nationalist party MK’, being interviewed. But not live in the studio. Instead he was given a generous 19 seconds to camera somewhere near St Dennis. That’s half the amount of time given to David Cameron, not believed to be standing in Cornwall. Discussion of a Cornish Assembly was left to Scott Mann of the Tories, Simon Rix of the Lib Dems and, peculiarly, or perhaps not given their outright opposition to it, Bob Smith of Ukip. Rix condemned MK’s plans as ‘too expensive and too extreme’, preferring more powers for Cornwall Council with devolution to town and parish councils. There was then some insipid discussion of affordable housing, with an interview piece informing us that the ‘biggest problem’ in Cornwall was the way nimbys prevent thousands of much-needed houses being built. This gem emanated from an estate agent in west Cornwall, one of those who definitelty have much need for more houses. No-one present cared to mention the need to meet developers’ profits first in the present failed market system. And second homes only briefly disturbed the screens, mentioned (by Rix) right at the end of the discussion.
MK’s Loveday Jenkin: rendered anonymous by BBC
Last Sunday on the 26th we again had the spectacle of presenter Martyn Oates refusing to name an MK candidate on air. Loveday Jenkin was transformed into just an anonymous ‘opposing candidate’, despite being at the receiving end of one of Michael Foster’s alleged anger management problem episodes. The Greens’ Tim Andrewes had been invited onto this show, the first topic of which was defence. He was then duly lectured by the pair of pompous right wing Labour/Tory candidates for his ‘pie in the sky’ temerity, for daring to propose that this fine country of ours could possibly survive without Trident and the ability to blow Russia or Iran to kingdom come, as well as the rest of us. We might have no money, a point made several times by the Tory, but can apparently still afford to spend billions on nuclear bombs. As soon as Andrewes made the point that austerity was a political choice he was unfortunately cut off and the ‘regional’ opt-out abruptly terminated. Phew, narrow escape, almost a glimpse of a real issue there. (And again, did I miss the discussion of global warming or environmental issues?)
The airtime devoted to party spokespeople broke down as follows …
On this measure, it seems that the TV news, from which the majority of voters are brainwashed get their information has an inbuilt bias in favour of the Tories. In relation to their current polling figures Labour did not receive its fair share. Neither did Ukip and the Greens. On the other hand the SNP and Plaid did very well (unlike their Cornish equivalent MK), receiving over four times their polling share. The other clear TV winner was the Lib Dems. Although only polling slightly above the Greens they got seven times more coverage and their share of airtime was over twice as generous as it should be, based on levels of support.
We’re told that the social media comprise an increasingly important battleground in the run up to the general election. The Westminster parties certainly appear to have taken this on board, all their candidates in Cornwall having Facebook pages. Strangely, the challenger parties seem less convinced.
Their candidates may blog regularly, but MK in particular seems reluctant to use Facebook, with only Stephen Richardson at Truro/Falmouth dipping his toe in the water. Ukip’s Graham Calderwood (St Ives), Bradley Monk in South East Cornwall and David Mathews at St Austell have no Facebook pages. Both Monk and Mathews have websites though and the young Monk is active on twitter. For the Greens, Steve Slade at St Austell/Newquay and Karen Westbrook (and before her Sharron Kelsey) at Truro/Falmouth are also not using Facebook to promote their electoral chances. Or at least no pages that I can find.
Looking at Facebook use by party, it seems that on average Greens (those that bother), Labour and Tory candidates make most use of the medium. Ukip and Lib Dem candidates are less keen, with a couple of exceptions (Andrew George at St Ives and Ukip’s Julie Lingard in North Cornwall). In fact, North Cornwall is the constituency where the social media scrap on Facebook is most vigorous, although even here Dan Rogerson is remaining aloof, or hiding, not using his Facebook page which steadily gathers dust. (Neither does his neighbour Steve Gilbert at St Austell, while his other Lib Dem neighbour Phil Hutty in South East Cornwall isn’t seen often on Facebook either).
So whose page is the most liked? Here’s the top ten as of 16th March.
Whose likes are growing at the fastest rate? Andrew George’s leapt up from 800 to over 2,500 in a week, which looks a bit odd. His Office of Andrew George MP Facebook page (catchy title) was amalgamated with his other page, but does that really explain all the growth? Not surprisingly, challenger parties, starting from a lower base, are seeing the biggest hike in their likes.
Change in Likes, 25th Feb-16th March
1. Andrew George (LD, St Ives)
+1,923
2. John Hyslop (Ukip, Truro)
+178
3. Bob Smith (Ukip, Camborne)
+116
4. Tim Andrewes (St Ives Greens)
+96
5. Amanda Pennington (GP, North)
+55
A more useful measure than likes, which can come from people in Sydney and San Francisco as easily as Saltash or Sennen, is the activity on Facebook and the engagement (how many are responding, liking, commenting or sharing posts). When it comes to activity, the hyper-active Murray and Foster are up there. But they’re both eclipsed by the most recently declared candidate, Labour’s John Whitby in North Cornwall. He’s frantically trying to track down Labour supporters in the north, who’ve been in hiding since the 1940s. Tough task.
Number of posts in week ending March 16th
1. John Whitby (Lab, North)
26
2. Sheryll Murray (Con, South East)
22
3. Michael Foster (Lab, Camborne)
20
4. St Ives Greens
19
5. Steve Double (Con, St Austell)
16
Meanwhile, turning to engagement per post the top achievers are as follows.
Engagement per post, 25th Feb – 16th March
1. Julia Goldsworthy (LD, Camborne)
103
2. Michael Foster (Lab, Camborne)
47
3. Simon Rix (LD, Truro)
23
4. Steve Double (Con, St Austell)
13
5. Sheryll Murray (Con, South East)
13
Julia Goldsworthy’s top post in the week ending the 16th was about a reduction in local First bus fares, which she claims was a result of a Lib Dem campaign. This campaign might have been unnecessary had not the evil Government slashed bus subsidies by 23%. Like the other Lib Dem candidates Julia seems to be suffering from a worrying memory lapse when it comes to recalling that the Coalition Government actually includes her own party. Michael Foster’s top posts were about privatisation plans for NHS services, which Labour would never do. Any more that is. As there were very similar privatisation plans back in 2006, when the government was of course ‘run’ by Labour.
Simon Rix at Truro was also expressing his ‘grave concern’ over the future of healthcare as a result of Tory and, errrr, Lib Dem policies of the past five years. The loquacious Steve Double’s top post told us all about pasty-making in St Dennis and his first job as a butcher. This ought to be good training for all those cuts his party is planning when the post-election butchering of public services resumes. Finally, Sheryll Murray’s top post was about Commonwealth Day, which she thinks is a jolly good thing despite the rest of us not noticing it. But nothing to do with Europe so it must be good.
For sustained silliness and strangeness you don’t need to go much further these days than the West Briton. This week’s issue carried a feature under the heading ‘Close election race in constituency forecast’. It reported a poll, ‘revealing’ that there is a ‘tight three horse race’ in Camborne and Redruth. This was apparently ‘released by … Lord Ashcroft this week’.
Except that it wasn’t. It was actually taken in June last year and first released on the 19th of that month. This was rightly pointed out by Michael Foster, the Labour candidate, but buried halfway down the piece.
State of the parties in Camborne-Redruth
Unfortunately for Michael however, there’s been another constituency poll since June. This was released by Survation on 27th November. It basically showed a similar position to Ashcroft’s, except that Labour had slipped back. Needless to say, Labour doesn’t particularly want to draw attention to that poll. While the hapless journalists at the West Briton seem blissfully unaware of it.
At the end of the piece those eager to read ‘the first of the West Briton’s Q and As with the candidates’ by following the advice to turn to page 39 were also bitterly disappointed. For there’s nothing at all about the election on page 39. Crowds of angry readers no doubt gathered outside the WB’s offices in Truro to complain.
Was this a joke, or some ludic postmodernism infecting the West Brit offices? If it’s supposed to be a serious example of the quality we can expect from the paper’s election coverage then I suggest you don’t bother buying it again until after May. Stick to this site or others where more accurate information is freely available and furthermore not merely culled from Conservative leaning sources, as the West Briton‘s appear to be.
Kernowpolitico: notes from the periphery 