Mayors and ‘mares: A guide to the 2021 mayoral elections, part two

This time: the West Midlands, West Yorkshire, West of England and Tees Valley

May 04, 2021

This, as you’ll know from that helpful title just up there, is part two of my guide to Thursday’s metro mayor elections. You can read part one – on those races where the incumbent is about as likely to invade Denmark as he is to lose – here.

And now – onwards!

The West Midlands – Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Coventry and so forth

I have a cynical theory that it was the 2017 success here of former John Lewis boss and mildly atypical Tory Andy Street that saved the entire devolution programme. Theresa May, after all, was not really a great believer in loyal opposition – anyone who disagreed with her was likely to get The Glare – so it wouldn’t have been that surprising if, had every major conurbation voted Labour, the victorious mayors had discovered their days were numbered.

A helpful map. Image: West Midlands Lieutenancy.

But Street won, beating Labour’s Sion Simon by a nail-biting 50.4% to 49.6% in the second round: there were fewer than 4,000 votes in it, out of more than half a million cast. Partly this was because it was a bad set of elections for Labour generally; partly because Street was a pretty good candidate – and Simon, bless him, was not.

So this should probably have been an easy pick up for Labour this time round. After all: Street has been a decent but hardly spectacular mayor. He’s talked a good game, producing a fantasy metro map of the type ideally designed to get my attention, and has a curious habit of colouring his leaflets green, rather than Tory blue. But solid achievements are rather harder to point to – it’s an imperfect metric, but the Wikipedia page for the Mayor of the West Midlands talks a lot more about what the post could do than what the actual mayor actually has, while Street’s personal page, bafflingly, stops dead at the 2017 election. What’s more, Birmingham’s flagship branch of John Lewis – in whose cafe Street used to like to hold meetings, just in case someone had forgotten his last job – announced last autumn that it was closing for good, leaving a great big hole in the shopping centre atop New Street station. The “ex-John Lewis boss campaign in trouble” story writes itself.

But his campaign isn’t in trouble, Labour’s is. The party’s candidate this time is Liam Byrne, a former New Labour Treasury minister who made headlines for not one but two badly judged memos – although the “Working With Liam Byrne” note to civil servants, which merely made him sound like a tit, was on balance probably not quite as bad as the “I’m afraid there is no money” note he left for his LibDem successor David Laws, which dogged his party for years.

Byrne is currently campaigning on a worthy sounding platform involving doubling the number of affordable homes built in the region and pushing what sounds like a Brummie Green New Deal. But his campaign has a troubled air about it – disgruntled ex-staffers, leaflets full of typos, panicked phone calls to anyone who criticises it, you know the sort of thing – so even though this should be a winnable election (and arguably the biggest prize on offer in this round of elections) Street has seemed likely to win for a while.

And then this morning, the Times released an Opinium poll, putting Street 17 points ahead of Byrne, potentially granting him victory without even counting second preferences. Here’s Red Box editor Patrick Maguire:

If Thursday goes as badly for Labour as it seems like it will, there’ll be a lot of talk about the Tory victory in the Hartlepool by-election. But this race is a much bigger reason to think that Labour is stuffed.

Before we move on, a local messaged me to complain that nobody in any of the campaigns seemed interested in talking about either the West Midlands’ lack of 24 hour bus services, or the need for a Birmingham Crossrail to relieve New Street. I am noting these things here because they are relevant to my interests. Anyway, you can read more about the candidates in the official election booklet here.

West Yorkshire – Leeds, Bradford and around

The last major metropolitan region in England to get its own mayor will be picking its first on Thursday. Why did West Yorkshire fall behind the pack? Take your pick:

1. Local politics – that is, a lot of councillors in Wakefield, Huddersfield and so forth weren’t keen on signing up to be part of something called “the Leeds City Region”, because that would suggest that Wakefield, Huddersfield and so forth weren’t quite as important as Leeds.

2. Regional politics – large numbers of people, from 18 of Yorkshire’s 20 councils, spent years pushing the “One Yorkshire” devolution deal. That would have meant a single mayor for the entirety of God’s Own Country, a region with a population of 5.4 million, making it pretty much the size of Scotland.

This was in some ways silly. The policies needed to improve life in Barnsley have little in common with those needed to improve life in Richmond, North Yorkshire. City regions are far more coherent. Middlesbrough and its neighbours along the south bank of the Tees were already excluded; and neither Sheffield nor Rotherham wanted to play. But it didn’t really matter anyway because...

3. Party politics finished it off and the Tory party in Westminster, clearly concerned about the risk of plush, rural bits of Yorkshire ending up with a Labour mayor thanks to the people of Leeds, Sheffield and so forth, blocked such a deal anyway.

Another helpful map, this time of West Yorkshire. Image: Centre for Cities.

At any rate: a mere four years after the rest, West Yorkshire is finally getting a mayor, and voters have no fewer than seven candidates to choose from, including one from the Yorkshire Party (guess what they’re into), and an English Democrat with the suspiciously French sounding name of Thérèse. Then there’s the Tory candidate, Matt Robinson, who promises joined up public transport and “a plan to cut congestion” but also no congestion charge – no idea how he thinks he’s going to pull that off, but there’s what seems to be a TARDIS on one of his leaflets, which is cool.

By far the most likely winner, though, is Tracy Brabin, a former soap actress and current MP for Batley & Spen. For all the talk of the crumbling Red Wall, Labour won West Yorkshire by over 6 points in 2019, actually doing slightly better than it did in 2010. So the odds are that Brabin will be one of Labour’s big winners on Thursday, not to mention this country’s first female metro mayor. If she isn’t, the party really is in trouble.

You can read more about all the candidates here.

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West of England – Bristol, Bath and pals

The most annoying thing about this one is the name: the West of England to me suggests basically everything beyond Swindon, and not merely “Bristol, Bath and not quite all of their suburbs”. (The original proposed combined authority covered the same area as the short-lived county of Avon; North Somerset declined to play.)

A map of the region. Image: West of England Combined Authority.

The second most annoying thing is that Bristol already has a mayor – Labour’s Marvin Rees, who is also facing re-election on Thursday – which confuses things rather. This term just gone, Rees certainly made the running, partly because he runs the city council on which the region is centred; partly because he’s a whole lot more dynamic and, let’s be honest about this, competent than Tim Bowles, the Tory who’s been metro mayor since 2017.

Anyway, Bowles, who has the air of a mayor from a sitcom – his first campaign featured a lot of pictures of him standing in fields, scowling at cow pats – is standing down after it turned out the Prime Minister didn’t know he existed, and the Conservative party suggested that maybe it was time to explore other career options. (One Tory activist offers the following brief review: “Barking, and about as much use as a fart in a gale.”)

The interesting thing about the West of England is that it’s the closest we have to a genuine three-way marginal. In 2017, the votes looked like this:

Image: Wikipedia.

That could mean that the supplementary vote system on which metro mayoral elections run might actually come into play. A quick reminder: if nobody gets 50%, everyone except the top two candidates are eliminated, and their votes re-distributed by second preferences. In other words: it’s possible, just possible, that the candidate who wins the most votes in the first round won’t actually be the winner.

This time round, both Labour and the LibDems are again running former MPs: Dan Norris and Stephen Williams respectively. The Conservatives are running a local businessman, Samuel Williams (no relation). The most likely result is that the Tory Williams does well in the outer boroughs, but the Bristol mayoral election increases turn out in the Labour-leaning city. This is by far Labour’s best shot of a pick up.

Which is by way of saying, it’s going to be really disappointing when the Tories win anyway. You can see the official candidate booklet here.

Tees Valley – Middlesbrough, Hartlepool, Darlington et al

And so we come to the end.

The Tees Valley Combined Authority. Image: Wikipedia.

This was the race that hurt most in 2017. Labour’s candidate Sue Jeffrey, the leader of Redcar & Cleveland council, had clearly spent years working out how to use the mayor’s powers, how to get more such powers, how to drive the region’s economy forward, and so forth. Meanwhile, the Conservative Ben Houchen, leader of the Tory group on Stockton-on-Tees council, was promising to nationalise the region’s airport and disband the local police. He was basically campaigning as a Facebook troll – as my New Statesman colleague Stephen Bush said at the time, this was a real life version of the Leslie Knope vs Bobby Newport election from Parks & Recreation.

But unlike in that sitcom, Houchen won, which you got the impression even he hadn’t expected himself to. Now, he’s incredibly popular. I have spoken to multiple people on both sides of this race, and everyone thinks he’s going to be re-elected, probably by a lot more than the 51/49 margin he managed last time. He’s been helped by central government support, such as the decision to relocate 750 civil servants to the “Treasury North” campus in Darlington; but all the same, people love the fact that he spent £40m buying Teesside International Airport, and persuaded the government to give it freeport status. It would be cheaper, greener and vastly more sensible to reserve a few more paths on the East Coast Main Line for London-Middlesbrough trains, of course – but that wouldn’t put Teesside on the map, and so hasn’t really featured in the debate.

Neither, tragically, has Labour’s Jessie Joe Jacobs. (Here’s the guide to the candidates, if you want to know more.) A Survation poll of Thursday’s Hartlepool by-election has Labour a shocking 17 points behind the Tories in a seat it has always held. Somehow, the Tories have persuaded the people of the Tees Valley that the way to bring about change is to vote for a party that’s been in government for 11 years.

And oh look, it’s another poll, courtesy of that man Maguire:

That tweet here.

Houchen’s slight victory over Jeffrey was the most shocking of the 2017 mayoral elections. This time, he looks set to win by a landslide, and no one will even be surprised. Given that this is peak Red Wall territory, this weekend we can expect to hear a lot of vox pops with angry old people with big houses and fixed incomes, telling us that Labour is out of touch with working class folk like them.

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