Over at his MEN blog, David Ottewell has posed himself a question – was the congestion charge a factor in the local election results? David doesn’t think so, but I’m not convinced by some of his reasons.
Yes, a targeted campaign against Roger Jones, chairman of the Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Authority, saw him lose his seat. But his seat was already pretty marginal.
It’s certainly true that Irlam was already a marginal seat, but that doesn’t account for a result which sent shockwaves around the counting hall. Roger didn’t just lose. The Labour vote share dropped 15% to a distant third place and Roger got only 23% of the vote – in a ward that has elected Labour Councillors continuously for three decades.
It’s quite conceivable that Roger would have lost had he been a run-of-the-mill backbencher rather than the Chairman of GMPTA – but I suspect the margin would have been an awful lot narrower.
Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester city council, is another “face” of the transport innovation fund bid. He won on Thursday, by 1,200-odd votes. Is that result, too, a referendum on the congestion charge? If not, why not?
Sir Richard represents one of the safest wards in Greater Manchester for any party. Trying to draw conclusions about the congestion charge from Labour performance in Crumpsall is like trying to draw conclusions about the popularity of Boris Johnson by looking at local election results in Knightsbridge.
Bolton council was a major Conservative target. They failed to make significant gains, even though they did very well elsewhere. The Tory group in Bolton left people in no doubt they are opposed to congestion charging.
Whilst the MEN coverage of the local elections this year has on the whole been very good, I thought the coverage given to the elections in Bolton did not reflect the state-of-play at the start of the election period. Thanks to a strong performance in 2004, Conservatives were defending three wards that had been won by Labour in both 2006 and 2007. To hold on to two of those wards and still make a net gain of 1 Councillor is an excellent result. Indeed, Labour will have been bitterly disappointed not to make further gains and buck the regional trend.
You are certainly right about the swing against Roger, which was huge.
But the campaign in his ward was ferocious and targeted. I don’t think any _general_ conclusions can be drawn from the fact he’s gone (and by such a margin).
Where else was the c-charge a major factor? I think as a minimal condition you have to find somewhere (an entire borough, say) where the swing was disproportionately large… I just don’t see it.