Labour’s performance looked a lot better at dawn than it did at 3am. Every year recently, the very earliest declaring councils have tended to provide some of Labour’s less impressive results – Sunderland, Basildon, Dudley, Harlow – and conditioned journalists and experts to start thinking about local elections in terms of Labour underperforming.
Measuring performance in terms of seat gains and losses also distorts the picture. In the big cities that elect a third of their councillors at a time, one seat will represent more than 10,000 people, while in the smaller rural districts there may only be 1,000 people for every councillor. Labour making solid progress in urban marginals does less for the seat count. Correspondingly, there is more room for the other anti-Conservative parties with better prospects in rural England to gain impressive numbers of seats.
