It is tempting to see today's local election results as Ukip’s ‘political earthquake’ but the reality is far more complex with many different interpretations possible
This is shaping up to be a paradoxical election: one in which completely different readings of the facts seem equally plausible.
All the focus is and will continue to be on the Ukip surge in the popular vote. That’s being written up today as ‘a political earthquake’ and as the dawn of four-party politics. Perhaps. But we shouldn’t forget that the same commentators said much the same last year and it’s not quite clear that things have actually changed on the ground.
Taken as a story about vote share it is a huge development. Combined with six out of ten people not voting, it’s hard not to see it as a wholesale rejection of the political establishment. We need to think seriously about what that means, what it tells us about how we articulate politics and the aspirations we have for our communities.
It is also, incidentally, one of the reasons why we need a re-localisation of politics: an ability to ground big political narratives in the concerns and ambitions of local communities. (Ironically, its obsessive focus on Europe and immigration makes Ukip just as bad at this as the other parties).
We can look at it in a completely different way, however. Taken as a story about the number of seats won, it seems less significant. Ukip is making huge relative gains in number of seats but the total number it ends up with will still be far fewer than the other parties. Taken as a story about political control, it is less significant still. Ukip does not control any local authorities (although at the time of writing there are rumours about a coalition deal in Castle Point).
The media are conditioned to treat local elections as an elaborate form of opinion poll on the state of the national parties. This is both lazy – it means telling one story rather than dozens or hundreds – and a disservice to the electorate who do not forget, as we should not, that these elections are about making hard choices over who governs local areas and how.
If we think about the Ukip vote in terms of how many councils will do anything differently on Monday morning, it looks much more like a case of ‘nothing to see here’.
Where there have been some real changes is in London where Labour has made huge gains including some unexpected triumphs such as in Hammersmith & Fulham. But here too, there is a paradox; in the rest of the country, Labour has done rather badly. They have haemorrhaged votes to Ukip, won an underwhelming number of seats and lost ground in a key target in Swindon.
A further irony is that the sense of London as a metropolitan island apart may play in to the Ukip narrative and further damage the Labour vote elsewhere.
It’s tempting to try and square away these paradoxes, but I think it’s a temptation we should resist. Localism will always be bumpy. A neat story like the ‘Ukip political earthquake’ may make life easier, but in the end it does us no favours in trying to grapple with the complexities of politics or of life.
Jonathan Carr-West is chief executive of the Local Government Information Unit
