In Manchester, Labour should think twice before celebrating
Article published: Monday, May 9th 2011
Thursday night was grim for Manchester’s Liberal Democrats, losing all eleven of their seats up for election, including that of their leader, Simon Ashley. With a third of their councillors disappearing in one swipe, the ward constituency map has been painted red. Yet despite now running a city with a rump opposition, the Labour Party should keep their celebrations subdued.
On the face of it, Labour have plenty to be happy about. Overall turnout increased from 27 per cent in 2008 – the last time there were local elections without a general election – to 31.6 per cent this year. Across the board, the Labour vote improved indicating both that their grassroots is slowly returning since the glum days of Gordon Brown and that Lib Dem protest voters are bolstering Labour incumbents. However, analysing the results and comparing them to 2008 reveals that this was more of a Lib Dem defeat than a Labour victory.
The party’s biggest wins came in wards where they wiped away incumbents, but it was also in these wards that the turnout approached figures more usually seen during a general election. In Chorlton it grew from 46 per cent three years ago to 51 per cent, in leafy East Didsbury, a 45 per cent turnout – up 7 per cent – gained Labour 1,500 votes, while West Didsbury’s turnout increased by 10 per cent to 37 per cent and Levenshulme’s by 12 per cent to 38 per cent. In 2008, the average turnout in wards that returned a Liberal Democrat was 31.2 per cent. This year, in wards that the Liberal Democrats lost to Labour, it was 40 per cent.
That the number of people casting their vote was exceptionally higher than average in the wards that swung from Lib Dem to Labour suggests not a mass-mobilisation of core Labour supporters, but rather a protest from the students, professionals, and Asian communities that turned to the Lib Dems over the past decade. This has led to the roles of the Lib Dems and Labour reversing: now Labour is the party who benefit from protest votes, and this is hardly a secure long-term election strategy, as the Liberal implosion has demonstrated. Manchester Central MP Tony Lloyd was therefore correct when he said it was a “good night for the wrong reasons”, but not when he claimed the result was “an endorsement of what the council has been doing”.
In fact numerous community-based campaign and protest groups have turned their fire on the council over the last few months. In Levenshulme a successful campaign managed to keep a local swimming pool open by forcing a u-turn. Similar campaigns have grown around the gutting of the city’s youth service and the ending of free legal advice, yet the council are clearly reluctant to engage with these groups. Parents organising to save Manchester’s Sure Start centres were recently accused of “hijacking” the campaign by council spin doctors, who also instructed Children’s Services staff to “not provide them with any information” and refuse to deal with them. Last week, parents discovered that despite council leader Sir Richard Leese pledging to hold 12 weeks of consultations before coming to a final decision on the fate of the centres, the council has already begun outsourcing some of the city’s crèche services. Even as early as March, Leese was booed as he spoke at a protest defending Sure Start.
The Lib Dems had no choice but to enter the election by distancing themselves from the cuts, and this in turn meant that they had no choice but to lie in their election material. But Labour are not the anti-cuts party, and have been pursuing privatisation and neo-liberalism for so many years that they were the cuts party long before it became popular. If the elections really were a ringing endorsement of the Labour Party then the turnout would have increased substantially across all wards, not just in those held by Liberals. That it didn’t strongly suggests that neither the council nor Ed Miliband have encouraged faith in those in the city and the country who are to be worst affected by the cuts.
If Labour had a clearer identity and anti-cuts agenda, then maybe this would change. But their progressivism and radicalism disappeared completely over the last half of the twentieth century, and we are now left with a party that seems to think success is guaranteed as long as it complacently assumes itself the government in waiting. It happened in 1997, and it seems to be happening again now. Yet their Scottish disaster has shown that protest votes and safe seats can’t be relied upon forever, and in Labour’s citadel, Manchester, it seems likely that campaigners with no party to turn to will instead take the fight into their own hands. The future is a politics of community, not politicians, and if Labour sincerely wants to join the anti-cuts campaign then they will have to rediscover the radicalism, militancy and local action that led to their birth in the first place.
Tom Fox
More: Election, Manchester, Opinion
Comments
No comments found
The comments are closed.
