Voters in England punished both Theresa May’s Conservatives and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour opposition in local elections, piling pressure on the two party leaders to resolve the Brexit crisis paralyzing British politics.
Britain’s major parties interpreted their poor results as an angry demand from a frustrated population to deal with Brexit, which has locked Parliament in a stalemate for months.
Cross-party talks to agree to a way forward for Britain’s divorce from the European Union (EU) are due to resume Tuesday. Senior Labour and Conservative officials will spend the weekend trying to work out whether they will be more damaged by compromising to wrap up a deal, or by sticking to their guns.
“I think there was a simple message from yesterday’s elections to both us and the Labour Party: Just get on and deliver Brexit,” May said in a speech to Conservatives in Wales.
“An arrangement has to be made, a deal has to be done and Parliament has to resolve this issue,” Corbyn said later, in comments welcomed by May. “I think that is very, very clear.”
Britain was due to leave the EU on March 29, but May has been forced to delay the departure until as late as Oct. 31, after failing three times to get her withdrawal deal approved by Parliament.
Against that backdrop, more than 8,400 council seats were up for grabs in mainly rural parts of England. No elections took place in London.
The ruling Conservatives paid the heaviest price for overseeing the Brexit chaos. With 233 of 248 councils having declared their results by late Friday afternoon, May’s Tories were down 1,211 seats, worse than most election experts had predicted.
Corbyn’s party has also struggled to cope with internal divisions over Brexit. Labour members of Parliament represent both strongly pro-Brexit and pro-EU constituencies and Corbyn has attempted to bridge that gap.
Labour had been expected to pick up many of the council positions the Tories lost, but instead found itself down 81 seats. The big winners were the Liberal Democrats, who were up 636 seats and nearly doubled the number of councils they control.
The other big winners were independent candidates, those not aligned to any party. In practice, these are often councillors who were in a party but have left it. Their success may reflect anger at the main parties.
The elections took place only in some parts of the country, mainly more rural areas where the Conservatives are much stronger than Labour, and neither Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party nor the new pro-EU Change UK party were standing. It is also normal for British voters to use local elections to punish the government.
All that makes it difficult to read the results directly across into what would happen at a general election. But the numbers were bad enough that neither the Conservatives nor Labour are likely to want to try to find out.
If May and Corbyn think this election is painful, in three weeks they face another dose. European elections — held because Britain hasn’t left the EU — will take place across the country. Both the Brexit Party and Change UK are standing in those and are likely to make life even more uncomfortable for the larger parties.
With Brexit stuck, politicians are increasingly desperate. Former Conservative Party Chairman Eric Pickles, a longtime loyalist who now sits in the House of Lords, said he could back a second referendum.
“If Parliament can’t sort it out, then — I can’t believe I’m saying this because I was absolutely opposed to a second referendum — then a clear choice has got to be put to the public in terms of what they want again,” Pickles told Sky News. “Do they want Mrs. May’s deal, do they want to have Brexit without a period of transition, or do they want to stay in the European Union?”
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Bloomberg’s Thomas Penny contributed.