What We Learned from Today's Local Elections

This year's local elections, usually fought on important local issues from rubbish collection to fly tipping, have been gifted a unique importance: for the first time in 30 years, a local election campaign precedes a general election in the same year.

Thanks to the snap election, the local and mayoral campaigns have been lauded as oracles, foreseeing the results of June 8th. It was a poor night for almost all parties, bar the Conservatives. However, as John Curtice pointed out on the BBC, yesterday's elections were predominantly in "Leave voting areas, possibly overstating Conservative support overall".

The election of a Tory metro mayor was one of the biggest shocks. The area encompasses Redcar, Darlington and Hartlepool and would traditionally vote Labour easily. Turnout, however, was 21 percent: lower turnout always hits Labour votes hardest, as Conservatives are more likely to turn up to the polling station. Interviewing people in Redcar late last year, the overall political feeling amongst the unemployed former steelworkers I met was one of apathy. They felt abandoned, had seen their hometown grow desolate, and pronounced politicians "all the same". This is a problem that has roots predating Corbyn by decades.

The Welsh result wasn't the Labour wipeout predicted: the loss of Merthyr Tydfil and Bridgend to overall control were blows, but holding onto Cardiff, Swansea and Newport will be welcome to Corbyn and co. Cardiff has been a battleground for Labour and the Lib Dems for years, and the failure here of the Lib Dems to wrestle control from Labour suggests the party is yet to woo students back into Farron's fold after Clegg's betrayal.

In Newport, one of the two MPs, veteran left-wing Labour backbencher Paul Flynn, is defending a slim majority that has the potential to turn blue; Labour maintaining control of Newport council suggests the Conservatives haven't seen the rise in support they'd hope for in the city. The loss of Glasgow council to no overall control is a huge blow, prompting questions on whether Labour has a future in Scotland, with the SNP having eaten up vast swathes of the country and the Conservatives functioning as the official opposition in Holyrood. Nevertheless, the SNP weren't over the moon: reports said they were expecting a minority admin in Glasgow, when previously they'd anticipated an outright win.

The results in Wales are not as disastrous for Labour as anticipated, but speak to an issue that is longstanding in post-industrial Britain: for the most part, people in areas riven with cuts feel left behind and forgotten by all political parties. Cuts handed down from central government have affected Labour areas the hardest; many voters recognise this, some don't. Either way, their lives are much harder because of them.

In Wales, devolution has seen Labour in control of the Welsh Assembly since its inception in 1999, meaning that under both Labour and Conservative governments the party has a degree of control over budgetary aspects of people's lives in Wales. For the poorest, in Bridgend and Merthyr Tydfil, neither central government administration changed their lives much, and having Labour in the Assembly seemed to do little to temper the effects of austerity on the most vulnerable. The result is a rise in protest votes: first for UKIP, now the Conservatives and Plaid Cymru to a lesser extent. When people feel left behind, they strike back at the ballot box: Wales voted marginally to leave the EU in June of 2016, and the shift away from Labour in the local elections warns of further retaliatory voting in June.

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While Labour's losses were expected, the results for the Liberal Democrats will be disappointing for Farron and his MPs, with the party losing one in six seats. Since the May 2016 local elections the Lib Dems had gained a net 33 council seats, and have now lost almost as many. Their campaign has focused on attempting to tap up the disillusioned Remain voter, pledging to fight against a "hard Brexit" and hinting at the promise of a second referendum in the unlikely event they get into power.

It was always a risky strategy – YouGov polling shows that despite some very vocal opposition to the triggering of Article 50 and forging ahead with Brexit, the vast majority of people, both Leave and Remain voters, think the vote should be respected and oppose a second referendum.

Last week, Farron appeared to acknowledge this riskiness, coming out to admit to being Eurosceptic himself: an attempt by the Lib Dems to have their Brexit cake and eat it, summoning stray Leave voters onboard after aggressively courting Remain voters who felt politically homeless.

It's a rocky start for the supposed Lib Dem fightback, and today's results seem to confirm both that the electorate have longer political memories than the party hoped, and that Brexit simply isn't the overriding political concern for the majority of voters. To win back votes, Farron will need to convince voters that the diminished Liberal Democrat party standing in this election is far removed from the party that was happy to prop up the cruellest aspects of Conservative social policy under the coalition, endorsing the bedroom tax, pushing through endless cuts, all the while claiming they were mitigating the worst aspects of Tory policy, in spite of the evidence.

If the Lib Dems and Labour feel hard done by, they only need to cast an eye over UKIP's results to buoy their souls, however briefly. After the referendum, UKIP have essentially got what they wanted; for many voters, that means they expect them to wind down and decommission the party. In droves, supporters abandoned them in polling stations mostly for the Conservatives. In the UKIP heartlands, however, the party campaigned hard for their seats. Though voters thought they were finished and defunct, UKIP candidates felt differently.

In Thanet, the Conservatives milled about the count beaming, as the seat Farage had fought looked to be fielding a strong Conservative victory. A friend from Lincolnshire found the party in the town centre each weekend on returning to see his family. They seemed to be speaking to barely any voters, and were wary of the eastern European shoppers approaching them. Nuttall has announced plans to stand in Lincolnshire, in Boston and Skegness in the general election, but the party was wiped out there, as they were everywhere in the country. If the results of this week's elections are replicated in June, the collapse in vote share could force Nuttall to stand down and the party to consider whether they go the way of Veritas and disband entirely.

For anyone on the left, the results are gloomy. But there are five weeks of campaigning to go, and even if winning looks impossible for Labour, closing the vote gap is doable. The results this week can't be directly extrapolated to the result of the 8th of June. Turn out is lower for local elections, and many metropolitan areas, where Labour do well, haven't voted at all this week.

@DawnHFoster