Northern elections will test Tory strength in the ‘Red Wall’
29 April 2022
By Greg Cook and Declan McHugh
The local elections on May 5 mark the half-way point of the current parliament and with the Conservatives now well behind in the opinion polls they will prove a stern test of the Prime Minister’s electoral appeal.
The bulk of the contests are in Scotland, Wales and London where every single councillor is being elected, but for those who will be analysing their significance for the next general election as much attention will be focused on the North of England.
Tory gains in this part of the country, many of them seats which they had never won before, were responsible for Boris Johnson’s 80 seat majority in 2019 and these elections will be one of the few opportunities to assess whether the Red Wall, as these seats are collectively known, is sticking with the Prime Minister or whether Keir Starmer’s message is breaking through.
One of the more vulnerable sections of the Red Wall is in the north of Greater Manchester where the Tories hold six of the ten seats in Bury, Bolton, Rochdale and Wigan, four of which would be lost on a swing of only 1% to Labour in the general election.
Of these four councils, however, only Bolton has so far slipped from Labour’s grasp but this year they will also be concerned about Bury where their overall majority is just five seats and every councillor is up for election. The two constituencies in Bury are on paper among Labour’s easiest potential regains and the defection of MP Christian Wakeford should have made their task even easier in Bury South, so to lose the council would be a severe embarrassment to Keir Starmer.
With the Tories behind in the polls the main challenger to Labour in much of Greater Manchester will once again be the Liberal Democrats who have been performing well recently in local by-elections, for example winning a former Labour seat in Manchester’s Ancoats & Beswick.
Their focus will be on Stockport where the Lib Dems will want to entrench their position as the largest party and where they have two former parliamentary seats which they want to regain, but they have pockets of support in most boroughs and may make significant net gains across the North.
Labour will be looking for progress in East Lancashire, especially Burnley, where they have lost both their MP their majority on the council, and in Hyndburn where several councillors have recently left the party. They also need only two extra seats to regain the Rossendale Borough.
Further north there are elections for two new unitary authorities in the county of Cumbria; Cumberland and Westmorland & Furness, which are replacing the county council and six districts.
The likeliest outcome is that no party will win an overall majority in either but the elections are again a crucial test for all three major parties. For the first time in over one hundred years Labour does not have a single MP in the county but they will want at least to be the largest party in Cumberland.
Liberal Democrat MP Tim Farron will also want to ensure that he retains a large group of councillors in Westmorland & Furness with the abolition of the Lib Dem-controlled South Lakeland District.
Liberal Democrat MP Tim Farron will want to keep a large group of councillors in Cumbria
Despite their lead in the national polls Labour will probably find it hard to translate that into many new councils, especially in the North of England. One possible gain is in Kirklees borough in Yorkshire which contains two of their 2019 losses; Colne Valley and Dewsbury.
But the Lib Dems need just three gains in Kingston-upon-Hull to snatch that council from Labour control, while there is also a real possibility that the Labour stronghold of Sunderland could be lost to a combination of Lib Dem and Tory gains.
The latter is just a few miles north of Hartlepool where the Conservatives won a sensational by-election victory just a year ago and where the loss of Sunderland Council, while on balance unlikely, would be another huge blow in Labour’s old heartlands of the North East.
Labour will probably be relieved that there are no elections this year in Liverpool where commissioners appointed by the government are running the authority and the turmoil in their local party has continued with the recent resignation of several local councillors.
They will hope at least not to lose any more seats in Wirral where the Greens have recently been picking up seats, while in Sefton the main parties will all be slugging it out in Southport which is one of the few three-way marginal constituencies in the country.
Once the local elections are out of the way, the main parties will shift their attention to the Wakefield parliamentary by-election caused by the resignation of Conservative MP Imran Ahmad Khan. This is really a “must-win” for Labour who held the seat continuously from 1945 to 2019.
The 3.8% swing which they need to win it would be sufficient for the Conservatives to lose their overall majority nationally, but it would still mean they had well over 300 MPs, so the Labour have to win Wakefield by a comfortable margin to convince sceptics that they are competitive once again.
But no leader can afford to become an election loser, and Red Wall Conservative MPs will be looking closely at all these results to assess whether the Prime Minister is still the best person to lead them to victory next time.