After Not-So-Super Thursday

Now the dust has settled after the so-called "Super Thursday" elections, what should we learn from them?

The local elections were unarguably a humiliation for Labour (a projected 26% share of the vote, and third place), though less clearly an unmixed triumph for the Tories (in first place with control of 13 councils gained, but on only 38%, and having made little progress in urban areas). The Liberal Democrats may also be torn, with 29% representing a new high-water mark for them, but while they gained council seats they made a net loss in councils controlled; however, if these vote shares were really to be repeated in a general election, they would likely hold the balance of power in a hung parliament. Labour's performance failed quite to plumb the depths of John Major's government in 1995, when the Tory share fell to 23%, but it was certainly a worse performance than has ever been recorded by a government that was subsequently re-elected.

In the European elections, the message was simpler -- UKIP won, everybody else lost. Of the major parties, only the Lib Dems increased their share since 1999, and they scored well below their current "general election tomorrow" poll ratings, a very disappointing failure to capture the protest vote. The Tories won their lowest ever share in the vote in a national election, yet were still comfortably clear of Labour.

Nevertheless, the local election results should not be taken as a direct pointer to the next election, or even to the likely result of an immediate election. Labour has remained consistently ahead of the Tories or at worst a couple of points behind in all the conventional (face-to-face or telephone) general election voting intention polls. Indeed, such is the bias in the electoral system that even the 38-to-26 lead shown in the local elections would not give Michael Howard an overall majority.

The public have always been prepared to vote differently in local and parliamentary elections and, even though many say that national rather than local issues are the main factor in their council votes this does not imply that those who switch from their accustomed party have permanently abandoned it. On the contrary, with local elections seen as being far less important, many take the opportunity to "send a message" to the party they expect to vote for at the general election. Labour voters indicate their discontent with Tony Blair and anger over Iraq by switching to the Liberal Democrats, Greens or Respect; Tories similarly have laid down a marker over Europe by giving a respectable vote to UKIP, though naturally more so in the European than council elections. Except for the Lib Dems, few of the candidates to which their votes switched could hope to win seats, let alone councils, but voters are prepared to "waste" their votes to make a point at second-order elections. But the voters are not stupid, and know that at a general election they need to use their vote to make a choice between Blair and Howard for Number Ten: an ICM poll in the Guardian last week found only a quarter of those who supported UKIP in the local elections expect to stick with the party at the general election. Blair's biggest danger is not that voters will so prefer minor protest parties as to vote for them in a general election, but that they will see so little to choose between the two major parties that they stop caring which one wins, in which case they may not bother to vote at all. While that may happen, even local election results as bad for the government as this year's are no evidence of it.

Vote-splitting is a routine phenomenon in the USA, where voters frequently have to choose simultaneously between candidates for multiple posts from president down to county dog-catcher, and are often prepared to spread their favours between both parties' representatives. Multiple opportunities to vote in Britain have tended to be much rarer, but both the last two general elections have been held together with county council elections; this time Londoners had the chance to cast five votes at one (two preferences for Mayor, constituency and list votes for the Assembly, and their European vote), and in many other parts of the country where all the councillors in a three-member ward were up for election the public could vote four times. Hardly surprising, really, that they took the opportunity to let off steam; and the PR system for Europe and the London Assembly, giving a reasonable chance and therefore credibility to the minor parties who cannot win under first-past-the-post only exacerbated matters. Ken Livingstone, for one, benefitted from ticket-splitting, with the MORI/ITV News election day poll indicating that as many as two in five of the voters who gave him their first choice preference for mayor used neither of their two assembly votes to support Labour.

The fact that the councils in Leeds and Cardiff are no longer controlled by Labour, or that the Conservatives now rule in Swindon and the Liberal Democrats in Newcastle, will have little direct impact on national politics. Indeed, the only local government post with that clout, Mayor of London, was -- technically at least -- a Labour gain, since Ken Livingstone's re-election was under Labour's banner whereas he previously sat as an independent. Mayor of London is a high-profile post, partly because Livingstone has made it so, offering both a platform for dissent and powers such as those over public transport which can directly and visibly affect the public. With the extra exposure that London's Olympic bid entails, and the obligation for Mayor and government to co-operate on it, the post will be more sensitive than ever in the next year or so. While the government will, no doubt, have misgivings about Livingstone's maverick tendencies and the possibility that he will provide a focus for the party's anti-Iraq wing, they will far prefer it to the consequences had Steve Norris won. (So, for that matter, may Michael Howard, who might have found himself in an uncomfortable position had Norris become in effect the most powerful Conservative in the country.)

But the consequences of the local elections must be counted not only in statistical tables and short-lived embarrassment for ministers facing journalists, but in longer-lasting human terms. Labour has lost a net 479 council seats. Hundreds of Labour Party members, many senior and influential within their local parties, were councillors at the end of May and are no longer; others have kept their seats but lost council leaderships, committee chairmanships or memberships and perhaps even their turn as mayor. Most if not all will be blaming Tony Blair and his government for their personal disasters. But these are the very men and women on whom the outcome of next year's general election may ultimately depend, the grass-roots membership who organise local campaigns, knock on doors and stuff leaflets through letterboxes. Will they work as hard for Labour in 2005 as they did in 1997 and 2001? Though perhaps impossible to measure, the morale of the "troops" on the ground can be a crucial factor in an election, especially when the task is to turn grudging latent support into votes at the ballot box. Local campaigns do matter -- see the research reported by David Denver, Gordon Hands and Iain McAllister in the latest issue of the journal Political Studies. In both 1997 and 2001, Tory morale at local level was at rock bottom, and on each occasion in the marginal seats -- where all parties naturally concentrated their campaigning efforts -- they performed significantly worse than across the country as a whole. Michael Howard's elevation has certainly revitalised Tory morale, and the local elections will have helped cement that improvement in many parts of the country. If Labour morale has at the same time plummeted it is by no means impossible that next time round it is the Tories who will over-perform in the marginals, and the protection that Labour currently receives from the bias in the electoral system may begin to unwind.

The chaotic consequences of introducing all-postal voting on a trial basis in four regions may have another implication. The Electoral Commission are due to review the experiment in a report which will be published later in the year, but not only do initial indications suggest that it may have done comparatively little to improve turnout (which was higher than it has been recently in many areas with conventional polling stations as well as in the pilot areas), but it clearly caused administrative problems so severe as to throw the reliability of some results into doubt. (One defeated candidate has already indicated that he intends to take legal action to overturn the result in his ward, and others may follow.) There were numerous allegations in the press suggesting either direct fraud or at best unethical practices by some parties and campaigners, and the whole episode must have damaged public faith in the integrity of the democratic system. Clearly it should be politically very difficult for the government to extend similar arrangements to future elections without a substantial rethink of regulations and further piloting. However, the minister dismissed the opposition's complaints as irresponsible scaremongering in the Commons earlier this week, and press reports suggest that the government is considering going ahead with all-postal referendums on regional government in the autumn without waiting for the Electoral Commission's report. But the prospect that the promised referendum on the European constitution could be conducted postally without losing all credibility seems much lower than it did a few weeks ago; if maximising turnout in this way was part of the government strategy for winning the referendum, it may no longer be practical.