Livingstone reflects on Thursday’s results

After extremely poor turn out results across the country Labour leader Ed Miliband, to his credit, warned of a “crisis of politics” acknowledging politicians of all parties needed to win back people’s trust. Certainly the drop of 10% in turnout in London could partly be responsible for Livingstone’s loss last week as he failed to mobilise enough supporters to seize the Mayoralty back.

Giving his speech on Friday night, acknowledging defeat, Livingstone said that “the real storyy tonight is that… under Ed Miliband we have won in every part of the country, I want to congratulate Boris on his personal vctory… and I suspect this has also settled he question of the next Toy leadership elction.”

“I want to apologise to everyone who worked so hard in this eletion from Ed Miliband down to our youngest Labour party membership. I am truly sorry that I couldn’t pull this victory off.” He added to his victorious opponent that his loss on the Assembly meant that “Boris, this election is no mandate for a fair increase.”

“This is my last election. Forty one years ago, almost to the day, I won my first election on a manifesto promising to build good council housing and introducing a free bus pass for pensions. In that time I’ve won eleven elections and lost tree. But the one that I most regret losing is this. This is the defeat I most regret, because these are hte worst times in eighty year and Londoners needed a mayor that would help them get through this very difficult period… I am sincerely sorry to those Londoners who desperately wanted us to win.”

On Radio Four this morning Livingstone said that “for the first time of my life I’ve got a week without any meetings planned.” However it was the political situation that played most on his mind.

“For the last two years people have believed that the government’s austerity package would work and it clearly wouldn’t. For thirty years Britain has taken a wrong turn”, highlighting inequality and privatisation he mourned the changing shape of the economy.

“We need to make something that someone else wants to buy.” The last Labour government let people down because “the disappointment that many working class people felt, whatever their colour, that it didn’t create good jobs for working class people.”

If he had a criticism of Labour’s leader he was “too concerned about carrying the discredited old blairite wing with him” rather than distancing himself from the failed New Labour project.

Labour’s results

Despite reports that Livingstone was toxic in fact there was only 1% difference between Labour’s Assembly candidates and the Mayor. While this is a fall for Ken personally, as he is used to outperforming his party, it does not really indicate wide scale desertion by hard core Labour supporters.

However, a different candidate might have been able to achieve two things that would have marked the difference between victory and defeat. First they might have been able to drive Labour’s turnout up. Although Labour’s vote share was slightly up from 2008 the number of actual people voting Labour was down.

Secondly, Labour’s teamm was unable to land a single significant blow on Boris Johnson who, as a candidate, has a great number of weak spots and is not universally loved in the Conservative Party. Bogged down in personalised mud slinging or consistently having to defend the party’s policies which many did not find credible there was precious little of the campaign spent meaningfully putting forwards a credible campaign.

Although Livingstone himself seems to emphasise the fact that the press was against him and the BBC pulled out of a Question Time debate (which would have been watched by precious few floating voters) it has to be said that the media was far less hostile to Livingstone in this campaign than the last.

From this graph we can both where Labour’s strongest areas were and where the largest rises were seen. City and East (which contains Tower Hamlets and Newham boroughs saw an enormous rise in the Labour vote and there will be a great number of people, including police officers pouring over the detailed ward by ward results when they come out as they will reveal patterns in the postal vote that will either bear out claims of wide-spread electoral fraud in the area or a more even spread of vote that will simply indicate an incredible Labour surge.

Let’s look at the constituency by constituency results side by side;

The results are ordered by the diference between first preference votes and constituency vote.

Unsurprisingly we see Barnet and Camden heading the league table with the biggest drop in Mayoral votes as there was a consistent and effective campaign to unseat the sitting Conservative Assembly Member and many voters who would not have voted for Andrew Dismore (the Labour Assembly candidate) did so to sack Brian Coleman.

At a glance it appears that the weaker Labour areas were more likely to refuse to vote Livingstone even if willing to vote for Labour AMs. The best vote for Livingstone (where he out-polled his party) was in the largely left wing North  East constituency containing Hackney and Islington. It maybe that these areas like left Labour MPs like Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott but preferred the Greens in this area giving them their best result in the city.

So in essence there is nothing to indicate a strong toxic factor for Livingstone, even among New Labour supporters.

Where his weakness lay was the inability to enthuse more people to vote for him who had voted for him in the past. The arguments as to why are well rehearsed, dodgy taxes, a campaign that was not credible, negative campaigning and, quite simply, looking tired. Anyone who’d campaigned heard it time and time again that previous Livingstone supporters had turned away from him, while they did not vote for other parties it looks like that many of these people just did not vote at all.