Tories win Milton Keynes Local Elections (really!)

Last Thursday (2 May) saw Milton Keynes go to the polls with a third of council seats up for grabs.

The headline results in terms of councillor numbers suggest a good day for the Lib Dems and for Labour and a dreadful day for the Tories. The new composition of Milton Keynes Council is as follows:

• Labour – 23 seats (+2)
• Conservatives – 19 seats (-4)
• Lib Dems – 14 seats (+3)
• Independent – 0 seats (-1)

However, this both gives a very misleading view of who actually won the election and hides the underlying trends on vote share which seem far more concerning for Labour than for the Conservatives.

Who won the election?

Seats

Looking at the 19 seats up for grabs on Thursday, it is clear that the Tories have most to be happy about:

• Conservatives – 8 seats
• Labour – 6 seats
• Lib Dems – 5 seats

This is a better performance than both 2018 (Conservatives 6, Labour 8, Lib Dems 5+1) and 2016 (Conservatives 4, Labour 9+1, Lib Dems 5).

Popular vote

The Tories won the popular vote comfortably and, while they lost 4.1 percentage points of vote share from 2018, Labour lost substantially more – 7.2 percentage points.

On a like-for-like basis (ignoring the additional Newport Pagnell South seat elected in 2018):

• Conservatives – 35.0% (-4.1%)
• Labour – 30.1% (-7.2%)
• Lib Dems – 21.3% (+3.5%)
• Greens – 9.8% (+4.7%)
• UKIP – 3.1% (+2.5%)
• Other – 0.6% (+0.5%)

The picture looks even better for the Tories when you bear in mind that, based on 2018, the Tories will have lost up to 1 percentage point of vote share through their failure to register a candidate for Central Milton Keynes (the Tory candidate in CMK in 2018 got 704 out of the total 64,372 valid votes cast excluding the additional Newport Pagnell South seat).

Why did the Tories lose so many seats if they did so well?

The simple answer to that is that these elections were replacing councillors who were elected in 2015 which the Tories did astoundingly well in, boosted by local elections being on the same day as a General Election where the people of Milton Keynes voted overwhelmingly for “stability and strong Government” with David Cameron rather than “chaos with Ed Miliband” (that went well…).

At that local election, the Conservatives won an amazing 39% of the vote compared to Labour’s 28% (Lib Dems 15%, UKIP 12%, Greens 7%). This mirrored the Parliamentary results, with the Tories picking up 47% of the vote versus Labour’s 31% (UKIP 13%, Lib Dems 5%, Greens 4%).

This meant they picked up an unbelievable 13 out of 19 council seats that were up for grabs in 2015, with both Labour (Bletchley East, CMK, Wolverton and Woughton and Fishermead) and the Lib Dems (Bradwell, Newport Pagnell South) reduced to a small core. Remember that a single party has only had a majority of seats on Milton Keynes Council in only 10 out of the last 37 years to put that in context.

There was absolutely no chance of the Tories repeating that performance this time out.

Why did Labour do so badly?

Looking through the results, it seems clear that Labour lost a substantial amount of votes to the Lib Dems and the Greens. It would appear fairly clear cut that their poor performance overall was due to the political situation nationally and being penalised for their national leadership’s pro-Brexit stance. This looks likely to have cost them wins in Stantonbury and Bletchley Park (the latter by a margin of 16 votes) and very nearly cost them Stony Stratford. They also lost vote share in Central Milton Keynes despite the Tories – who won 26% of the vote in 2018 – not standing.

While the local Conservative Party are trying to claim the election is a result of voters punishing the incumbent administration for apparent poor performance, there is little sign of this – Labour and the Lib Dems together won over half the votes that were cast and the Tories lost one in five of their voters from 2018. However, it was undoubtedly an effective (if misleading in my opinion) local campaign that kept their vote share up in many marginal wards despite the ineptitude of their leaders nationally, notably in Tattenhoe (+6.5%), Stantonbury (+1.6%), Stony Stratford (+0.8%), Campbell Park (-0.6%) and Shenley Brook End (-0.7%).

What do these results mean for Milton Keynes Council?

In the short-term, Labour are now the largest party on the council and have a clearer mandate to govern within their partnership with the Lib Dems.

However, if these results are repeated next year – when Labour are defending 9 seats – this position will be reversed, with the Tories projected to be on 22 seats to Labour’s 20 seats.