If Labour’s chief mission in the North East at these local elections was to steady the ship after a rough couple of years, then it would appear to be job done – for now at least.
The historic loss of Durham County Council 12 months ago and a number of headline-grabbing Conservative incursions into the Red Wall since 2019 have made it tough going for Labour in a part of England that has for so long been a stronghold. The party’s biggest fear here going into Thursday was the prospect of ceding control of Sunderland City Council for the first time in its history, having haemorrhaged nine seats there last year.
But, despite weeks of Tory predictions to the contrary, Labour stopped the rot. Only one red seat fell on Wearside this time and council leader Graeme Miller successfully retained his Washington South berth. And what had threatened to be a dangerous night for Labour in Newcastle, after a stormy few months that had seen Nick Forbes ousted, also proved fairly sedate – as in Sunderland, just one seat dropped to the Lib Dems.
Read More: Labour maintain control of Sunderland City Council as Lib Dems celebrate only gains of the night
There were a handful of losses elsewhere in Tyne and Wear too, with the Lib Dems and particularly South Tyneside’s Greens the main beneficiaries, but there appears to be no overwhelming threat to the party’s dominance in North Tyneside, South Tyneside, and Gateshead.
However, it is clearly far from plain sailing for Labour. Any optimism gained from the ballot box on Thursday, including stealing three Tory councils in London and the new Cumberland authority, was quickly overshadowed by news that Keir Starmer will now face an investigation by Durham Police over the ‘Beergate’ claims that he broke lockdown rules in April 2021.
And there remains a sizeable question mark over just how much of Labour’s limited success at these local elections, which also saw a lack of progress in Hartlepool, is more down to a backlash against Boris Johnson and the Partygate scandal than a ringing endorsement of Mr Starmer.
North of Tyne mayor Jamie Driscoll has likened the party’s position to being “1-0 up at half-time, but that is because the opposition captain has scored an own goal”. The left wing mayor, who was backed by Momentum and was a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, has called for Labour to set out a more radical policy agenda if it wants to win a majority at the next general election – including a pledge to reverse savage cuts to local government funding.
He said: “We have to set out what we are going to do. People are hurting because of the cost of living crisis, there is a lot of worry about the climate emergency. We need to start saying what we are going to do about it.”
Asked if Mr Starmer, who he calls a “man in a suit”, was the right person to lead Labour back into power, Mr Driscoll added: “He can be the man to do it, he has the intellectual ability. It just depends who he listens to.”
Labour’s Northumbria Police and Crime Commissioner, Kim McGuinness, paints a more optimistic picture of Thursday’s results, though. The PCC, who last year said Labour had a mountain to climb in the North East, told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that 2022’s poll marked a “gradual return of voters that departed to other parties in the run up to 2019”.
She added: "Yes, there will be some, including in the Labour Party itself, who want to criticise the results, but they need to look at the detail in the results and the hard work of our members, councillors, MPs and the party nationally and see the bigger picture. If this was a General Election the result of our hard work winning back trust would be Labour as the party with the largest vote share and we’d have won scores of seats.”
