The moral of the local elections is that Brexit is a dead issue ... for now

Brexit is over. That’s the big story of English local elections that you might, understandably, have missed amidst the Coronation and yet another long weekend. That story is bad news for Rishi Sunak and the Tories, though it may also one day pose some challenges for Sir Keir Starmer too.

It’s stating the obvious to say that those local council results were bad for the Conservatives. They lost more than 1,000 councillors as Labour, Lib Dems and even the Greens captured places once represented by Tories.

Councillors are valuable foot soldiers for any political party: you can rely on them to hand out leaflets, knock on doors and know a bit about local voters. Many of the defeated will remain active volunteers, of course, but any who now give up on politics will be sorely missed in the year before a general election.

But the Tory losses are about more then personnel. What really hurts is where Labour took votes from Conservatives. Separate analyses by two leading political scientists, Rob Ford of Manchester University and Will Jennings of Southampton, produce the same, significant conclusion: Labour’s biggest gains were in places that voted Leave in the EU referendum in 2016.

It may seem odd to discuss a 2023 local election in terms of a European vote held seven years ago but that referendum was hugely important to the way many people voted in subsequent elections. Brexit effectively changed the way some people saw themselves and behaved politically. They became Leavers or Remainers and put those political identities ahead of any others.

Such “Brexit identities” help explain the voting that gave the Conservatives a hefty majority back in 2019. Boris Johnson’s promise to “get Brexit done” — and his personal credentials as the Leave campaign’s figurehead — allowed his Tories to build a new electoral coalition that included not just traditional southern heartlands but also bits of the now-famous Red Wall of seats in the north of England.

In both policy and politics, the Conservatives have broadly followed Johnson’s three-word agenda. Britain’s EU membership formally ended back in 2020. This year’s Windsor Framework settled many questions over Northern Ireland’s status — and took the B-word out of the headlines.

Politically, Sunak’s Tories continue to pitch to what they see as the concerns of Leave voters, especially over small boats crossing the English Channel. Tory complaints about human rights lawyers and European rules that prevent Britain from robustly controlling its maritime borders are taken straight from the Vote Leave playbook.

But that strategy is facing a grave problem: voters are starting to move on. People who voted Leave aren’t as likely as in earlier years to give their votes to the party that seems to share their ideas and values over Brexit and related issues such as migration. Partly that’s down to the passage of time: 2016 was a few years ago, and an awful lot has happened since then. But largely it’s because there are just much bigger things to worry about, and vote over: when the weekly shop costs more than you can afford and you’re not sure if an ambulance would come if you needed one, does it really matter who voted for what in 2016?

As the Brexit effect fades from British voting patterns, normal service is being resumed in a way that’s inevitably bad for the Conservatives. After 13 years in power, inflation in double figures and serious problems across public services mean it should be unsurprising that the incumbent government gets a kicking at the polls. And without that Brexit effect to bind them together, keeping hold of the very different parts of the 2019 Tory coalition will be even harder.