Gains from the Tories
There's a bit of a myth developing that last Thursday's council elections did not see Labour progress against the Tories. This is because gains from the LDs by the Tories in rural areas which are not General Election battlegrounds for Labour offset the Tories' losses to us.
There were 837 Labour gains and 61 losses, not including the councils with new wards.
The Conservatives had 657 gains and 641 losses.
Of the 837 Labour gains, 415 were from the Conservatives. In the councils with new wards there are now 72 more Labour councillors than before, and six fewer Conservatives.
I.e. almost exactly half of Labour's gains were from the Tories, not the LDs.
posted by Luke Akehurst at 2:13 pm
8 Comments:
Luke,
Thanks for the update on the results, fascinating stuff if not entirely surprising but it is very good that you are stating the actuality of vote transfer.
Ralph Baldwin
10:32 pm, May 10, 2011
I was agent May5 for the ex-leader of the Tory SEFTON council group who defected to Labour and stood for Labour Victoria ward, Crosby, Liverpool.
He won whilst the other parties got the same numbers as in the last C. elections 2007. His vote doubled.
Chart on my Blog here :- http://wp.me/1beI8
11:37 pm, May 10, 2011
Any idea how many Tory gains from the LDs were caused by votes switching from LD to Labour?
Casual inspection of the results suggest the answer is "most". The LDs have lost their tactical, anti-Tory voters.
We're heading back to two party politics and that will mean some Tory gains. We need to be ready with to spin these as LD failures - you can be sure the media will treat them as glorioius Tory victories.
BobC
10:16 am, May 11, 2011
Answers the wrong question though. The issue isnt whether Labour did gained from the Tories, the issue is whether Labour made inroads in the currently Tory-held swing areas.
2:06 pm, May 11, 2011
Thanks for the figures. I was wondering how many seats were gained and lost by parties behind the overall number. Where are the 60 Labour losses?
10:30 pm, May 11, 2011
"i.e. almost exactly half of Labour's gains were from the Tories, not the LDs"
I certainly hope this statistic is not lost on Ivan Lewis MP, who, in today's Guardian, seemed to show a great deal of contempt for
'the poor, benefit claimants, immmigrants and minority groups'.
It should be borne in mind that relatively few of the 5 million votes that the Labour party threw away been 1997-2010 were actually lost to the Conservative Party.
1:55 pm, May 12, 2011
My understanding is that in the South East, South West, and Eastern region we gained 169 seats, or approx 20% of the total. While this may be disproportionately low compared with the Midlands / North, as evidenced by the numbers of seats won per authority, it's still good news. According to the New Statesman, the local election results if translated into general election results would mean a Labour majority of 18. I think the reason why we didn't do as well in the South, especially the South East, is because the Tories are ogrnisationally very strong. What isn't immediately obvious is that in places like Crawley where only 1 seat was gained they came within 5 votes of a second. And in Basingstoke we came within 101 votes of taking a third seat - the Tories panicked in the last 3 days and it was enough to keep them in.
Andy McCormick
4:02 pm, May 12, 2011
Completely agree. Our performance has been dubbed as poor yet we took hundreds of seats and many councils. The result in Scotland was deeply dissappointing and we've got to look at why that occured.
I'm a 16 year old young Labour activist and have just started up my own blog, it'd be great if you could have a look and if it could feature on your blogroll I'd be very appreciative. Many thanks
http://a-week-is-a-long-time-in-politics.blogspot.com/
7:02 pm, May 12, 2011
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