ANDREW FISHER takes a look behind the numbers from Thursday’s election and finds lessons for Labour as well as the Tories

For all the “excitement” of Thursday’s elections, nothing much changed for Croydon.

Labour’s Sadiq Khan remains London Mayor, Conservative Neil Garratt remains our London Assembly member and the Conservatives and Labour each held on to the council seat they were defending in the local byelections.

But this apparent consistency hides some shifts below the waterline that will be analysed by all parties as we head towards the General Election that Rishi Sunak has promised “in the second half of this year”.

Across the country, the Conservatives did abysmally – losing nearly 500 council seats, almost half of those that they were defending. They also lost the West Midlands mayoral contest and Sunak even now has a Labour mayor in his own North Yorkshire backyard.

But back to London matters – and the election of London Mayor.

Hall gone: the Tory Mayoral candidate didn’t even try to disguise her dog-whistle politics

Here in the combined Croydon and Sutton constituency, voters backed Susan Hall but with a slight swing to Sadiq Khan of 0.7% compared to 2021. Hall added 400 votes to the tally achieved by Shaun Bailey in 2021, while Khan put on an extra 2,000 votes.

This will be quite disappointing for the Tory candidate whose strategy was to boost the outer London vote with her fierce opposition to ULEZ. Instead, Khan comfortably secured his third term – the first London Mayor to do so – with his widest margin of victory.

Khan will feel vindicated that he was supported for his bold policies to improve air quality and for social justice in providing free school meals

For the Tories, they really need to think about how they choose who to stand in our diverse and united London. A candidate who said the black community has a problem with crime, and who liked tweets praising Enoch Powell and referring to our capital city as “Londonistan” was never going to be a strong candidate.

Hall was also incompetent, too. She claimed she had been mugged when she left her Oyster card on the Tube, she didn’t know the price of a London bus fare or who owned Hammersmith Bridge.

In the end, whatever resentment there might have been over ULEZ could not overcome the deficiencies in the nasty, negative and incompetent campaign of Susan Hall. In 2004 when Ken Livingstone was up for re-election, there was much fear of a backlash against the Congestion Charge. But that failed to materialise, too.

Once all the results had been declared over the weekend, Christopher Herman, a Labour councillor in South Norwood, said: “London picked decency over lunacy. Croydon should remember how their local Conservatives said nothing and actively campaigned for this bigot. Shameful.”

You can understand why Jason Cummings, the council cabinet member for finance and the Tory candidate for Croydon East, looked less than enthusiastic when he attended Susan Hall’s campaign launch a couple of months ago.

Not Hall’s well: the usual board-waving, rictus smiles at Susan Hall’s Conservative campaign launch in March…

…. except for Croydon Tory Jason Cummings, above

Cummings, who has experience of working as a special adviser in Downing Street as well as managing a branch of Woolworths, told Inside Croydon that he was just fed up with the time taken to take the photograph. But the body language in the picture says something more than that…

In the London Assembly elections, Conservative Neil Garratt was returned to represent Croydon and Sutton, although there was a 2.3% swing to Labour from 2021.

Both parties’ vote shares reduced though (Tories down 6% and Labour down 2%), as the Liberal Democrats and Greens took a larger chunk of the pie than ever before – the LibDems polling above 15% for the first time and the Greens breaching 10%. The 7.8% polled by Reform is down on the 10.1% achieved by UKIP in 2016.

Overall, the balance of power on the London Assembly was largely unchanged with Labour on 11, the Tories on 8, Greens on 3, Lib Dems 2 and Reform 1.

In the Croydon Council by-elections, the Conservatives were defending Park Hill and  Whitgift, while Labour was defending a seat in Woodside.

‘These elections have sown the seeds of a future neglect’

Due to boundary changes, Park Hill and Whitgift will form part of Croydon South at the next General Election, so the contest had extra pertinence for Conservative MP Chris Philp as well as his challenger, Labour’s Ben Taylor.

The Conservatives won the contest, albeit with their majority halved. A 9.5% swing to Labour is significant, but slightly short of the 10.5% Labour needs to take Croydon South from Philp. Park Hill and Whitgift is one of the wards Labour would need to win to defeat Philp, given many in the south of the constituency look very safe.

Not squeezed enough: Labour could not take Park Hill and Whitgift, a ward they need to win if Ben Taylor (selfie-ing above) is to become MP for Croydon South

That said, Labour may take heart that they can squeeze support from the Greens and LibDems at a general election, when the stakes are higher.

In Woodside, Labour won comfortably with a 1,300 majority – with the Tories slipping further behind with just 21.7% (down from 26.5% in 2021). The Greens in third increased their vote from 10.4% to 13.7%.

Woodside is one of the safest wards in what will be the new Croydon East constituency, and this will be a reassuring result for Labour parliamentary candidate Natasha Irons.

So it’s much the same as before in London and Croydon following Thursday’s elections, but the small shifts reflect the national picture – Labour, the LibDems and Greens up, and the Tories and Reform drifting downwards.

As I wrote yesterday in my column for the i newspaper, “The polls are right, the public want the Tories out, and, barring some unforeseen and unprecedented turnaround, Labour will win the next election…

“But while Labour is comprehensively beating a deeply unpopular and floundering Conservative Government, it is losing voters too…

“These elections have sown the seeds of a future neglect that, left unchecked, could potentially be even more damaging to Labour – the loss of two interlinked parts of Labour’s core vote: younger progressive voters and Muslim voters…

“Labour voters have got somewhere else to go. The Green Party and well-organised independents have hoovered up seats that could both prevent Labour gains at the next General Election, and even lose some currently Labour-held seats.

“That sentiment will only deepen and spread unless Labour stops neglecting voters who are disenchanted with the party over issues like Gaza, tuition fees and the environment. Labour’s housing policies are far from bold enough to convince young people they have the answers, either.”

• From 2015 to 2019, Andrew Fisher was the Labour Party’s Director of Policy under Jeremy Corbyn. Fisher is also the author of The Failed Experiment – and how to build an economy that works, and now writes columns for InsideCroydon, the i newspaper and is a regular pundit on BBC and Sky News programmes

Andrew Fisher’s recent columns:

• May 2’s election day will show how bad things are for Tories
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• Finally Labour members will have a say in Croydon East saga
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• Click here for more by Andrew Fisher

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