John Biggs and the missing Labour votes

The predominant emotion in the Labour Party campaign when they woke up on Friday morning (or maybe even Friday afternoon) was probably not elation so much as relief. Although John Biggs won the Tower Hamlets mayoral election, he lost a large number of Labour votes in the process.

Mayoral elections – first preferences received by Labour candidates
2015    Biggs               27,255
2014    Biggs               27,643
2010    Abbas             11,254

The vote achieved by the then Cllr Helal Abbas in 2010 was an all-time low for Labour, so it is not much of a surprise that John Biggs AM has doubled that vote. However, in between 2014 and 2015, John Biggs lost 388 of his own voters. This is remarkable in two respects.

First: the 2014 vote coincided with the Council elections – with Labour candidates, standing in each seat, forming a solid boroughwide campaigning base. The 2015 vote coincided only with a by-election in Stepney Green, so there was no similar campaign base of candidates. However, there were plenty of campaigners. Labour had councillors, would-be councillors, the two MPs and over 1,000 party members in the borough to draw upon. The 2015 mayoral campaign had regional support – with appeals for help going out to some 60,000 members in London, and many teams arriving in London from around the capital (as can be seen on several twitter posts) as well as those seeking support for their own campaigns to become Labour’s candidate for London Mayor. It had national support, with a seemingly never ending stream of MPs turning up to campaign (or at least appear) in Tower Hamlets. The result of all this hard campaigning and high profile assistance was – a loss of 388 votes.

Second: Several Labour figures have indicated a view that the vote for John Biggs in 2014 was depressed by alleged intimidation by Lutfur Rahman and/or his supporters. If there are voters who did not come out to vote in the 2014 election because they were intimidated, why did they not come out to vote in the 2015 election? Labour figures conceded there was no obvious intimidation at polling stations and there were only just over a dozen complaints – so why did these previously intimidated voters not come out?

However, the loss is most marked when compared with the General Election result.

May 2015 (General Election)
Bethnal Green & Bow (Rushanara Ali) – 32,387
Poplar & Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) – 29,886
Total Labour vote:  62,273

June 2015 (Mayoral Election)
Tower Hamlets (John Biggs) – 27,255
Total Labour vote: 27,255
Loss of Labour vote between May and June 2015:
35,018 (56%)

Labour campaigned for the General Election from January and would have established a detailed database of electors’ voting intentions. With its army of campaigners from across London, the Party could not persuade even half of its General Election voters to come out and vote for a Labour Mayor.

This is far from a ringing endorsement. John Biggs will have to tread very carefully as he tries to manage the Council over the next three years.