London: Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May both sought to put a brave face on local council results that suggested neither can break the electoral deadlock that delivered a hung parliament last June.
For Labour, setbacks in the Midlands and a failure to live up to sky-high expectations in the capital, where it had set its sights on Wandsworth and Westminster, took the shine off an unexpected victory in Plymouth.
Corbyn told Labour supporters the results showed his party was “ready for a general election whenever it comes” and insisted: “There’s much more to come and it’s going to get even better.”
He added: “Obviously, I am disappointed at any places where we lost a bit of ground, but if you look at the overall picture, Labour gained a lot of seats across the whole country; we gained a lot of votes in places we never had those votes before.”
The Conservatives took control of councils in Basildon and Peterborough, but lost Trafford, in Greater Manchester, and the Mole Valley.
On Friday night Tower Hamlets became the last council to declare, with Labour the winner. The party has been left with 74 councils, the same number as before the election. The Conservatives control 46 — down two. The parties hold 2,308 and 1,230 seats respectively.
The Liberal Democrats now control nine councils, up four, with 536 seats — a gain of 77. The Greens increased their share by eight seats to 39, while Ukip were the big losers, dropping 57 seats to hold just three. The far-right BNP were wiped out altogether.
The BBC’s projected national share of the vote, which uses the results in local elections to estimate the parties’ standing across the country, put Labour and the Conservatives neck-and-neck on 35 per cent apiece.
The prime minister toured areas where the Conservatives made gains — or seen off Labour’s advance. Greeted by cheering supporters in Wandsworth, she said: “Labour thought they could take control. This was one of their top targets and they threw everything at it, but they failed.
“We won’t take anything for granted. We will continue to work hard for local people and we will build on this success for the future.”
May later travelled to Dudley, another Labour target held by the Tories, who were boosted by the collapse of support for Ukip. “We’ve seen great results around the country, not just here in the West Midlands, but in London. We’ve taken Basildon and Peterborough and we’ve shown what hard work by Conservative councillors can do in delivering for people,” she said.
Justine Greening, the former education secretary, said the results revealed that Labour had reached “peak Corbyn” since last summer’s general election.
In spite of May’s claim that she wanted to “bring our country back together”, the results underlined sharp divisions between England’s towns and cities and between leave and remain-voting areas.
Professor John Curtice, the elections expert, pointed out that the Conservative party appeared to have made gains predominantly in leave areas, as it profited from the collapse of Ukip. “The electorate that it now has is disproportionately a leave electorate,” he said.
The Lib Dems also benefited from a Brexit backlash, with huge wins in two south-west London councils, Kingston and Richmond, both areas with a heavily pro-remain vote. The party picked up dozens of council seats elsewhere, from Hull to South Cambridgeshire, where they took control of the council. Sir Vince Cable, the party leader, said the results showed “a return to three-party politics.”
Lisa Nandy, the MP for Wigan, warned that losing ground in Bolton, Dudley and her own seat of Wigan underlined the fact that Labour’s message was failing to appeal to voters in towns where years of job losses had eroded the sense of community.
“People have looked to politics for some time to solve this and seen us obsessed with a city-centric model, which is reliant on the benefits trickling down,” she said.
“Unless Labour gets to grips with that, the next election is far from secure, with Labour piling up the votes in cities, and the Tories having a near-monopoly on the countryside. Whoever gets this town’s argument will win the next general election and the one after that.”
In London, Labour performed more strongly in boroughs where it already had a healthy lead over the Conservatives when the seats were last contested, in 2014.
Judged by the numbers of seats, Labour put in its best performance ever in a series of outer London boroughs, including Ealing, Croydon, Enfield and Waltham Forest.
But the biggest blow for the party came in Barnet, its main target in the capital, where it needed to gain just one seat to take control. Instead, the north London council moved into overall Conservative control, amid Labour recriminations about anti-Semitism.
Andy Burnham, Manchester’s metropolitan mayor, said voters had raised the issue of anti-Semitism with him on the doorstep.
“It is clear that anti-Semitism was a very real issue in this campaign, not everywhere, but in areas where particularly there is a large Jewish community,” he said. “That is true here in Greater Manchester. If you look at the Kersal ward in Salford, I was out there myself and it was a pretty sobering experience, to be honest, because the hurt and the anger is painfully real in those places.
“So what I would say back to Ken Livingstone and others who have made this argument that it’s all a smear designed to just undermine Jeremy Corbyn, let’s hope that these elections draw a very firm line under these arguments and basically knock it out, because the truth of the matter is there is a very real sense of rawness in the Jewish community.”
Grass roots campaign group Momentum said its thousands of activists had helped to boost Labour’s showing in a series of key areas, including Trafford, where the Conservatives lost control, and Wandsworth.
“We’re very pleased to see healthy gains in areas where Momentum campaigned hardest,” said Laura Parker, Momentum’s national coordinator. “This shows just how important it is to have an engaged, enthusiastic movement — people who will get out into the community and spread Labour’s message.”
While early predictions that Labour could take Wandsworth proved over-optimistic, Labour sources pointed out that a few hundred votes in several swing wards could have clinched it. Corbyn said his party had come “within a whisker” of winning.
