For a contest without many consequences, there’s been an awful lot written about the 2018 UK local elections.

One of the nice things about doing a weekly politics podcast is you get the chance to read up on a topic and then talk it through with other politics nerds people who’ve done their own reading. You can really dig into a topic and figure out what the real takeaways are.

Now I can say with a degree of confidence that the local elections were a bit of a damp squib. Labour made limited progress, winning control of a few non-London based councils, losing some others and consolidating their command of the capital without picking up any big symbolic victories that could form the basis of a narrative. The Tories held their ground despite the deepening Brexit malaise and Amber Rudd’s resignation. UKIP’s vote share collapsed from 17% to 5% and the Lib Dems and Greens failed to make any meaningful gains on the big two.

We’re back to solidly two-party politics and the British electorate doesn’t seem to be convinced by either.

The obvious move, for many pro-European Brits like myself, would be for Corbyn to finally commit to the Remain majority within his party. It would give him a stick with which to beat Theresa May’s government, because of their colossal failure to get anything out of the EU negotiations so far. It would, as Jonathan Freedland argued last week, let undecided voters take the plunge on Labour because they have a plausible shout to reverse or at least improve the situation (sorry Lib Dems). It would even help him shore up support with his most strident critics, the Parliamentary Labour Party, as MPs are now explicitly calling for his support.

But, as my co-hosts pointed out, the Conservatives made their gains in Leave constituencies while Labour did well in Remain areas. So perhaps the divide in the electorate already matches our two party system — therefore Corbyn’s non-policy on Brexit is already working and he only has Labour Leavers to lose. And, the Lib Dems have made Remain their central rallying cause without surging back into national relevance. Corbyn might just have more to lose than he could gain when it comes to the electoral politics of Brexit.

In this context, it is no surprise that the British MEP’s assistant I interviewed for this episode, Lewis North, works for the only Lib Dem left in the European Parliament. If you’re a young pro-European Brit, the Lib Dems are still the party that will help you get your start — and we need more millennials involved in politics if we want to make things better.

I did a podcast thing. Talk about working for @catherinemep and Brexit. Sounds like I was interviewed in a bucket of water (done over the phone), but hopefully you can hear! https://t.co/dia5hx9fcT — Lewis North (@Lewis_North90) May 7, 2018

Right now, Brexit hangs over all Brits, Leave or Remain, young or old, urban or rural. That sub-text was laid out nicely by Rafael Behr in his piece on the 2018 local elections,

“None of the big questions raised by Brexit – about the UK’s role in the world, its economic security, whether or not it is in cultural retreat from tolerance to outsiders – has an answer… Even if Brexit wasn’t uppermost in many voters’ minds, it sat like a blustery, unsettled weather front over the whole political field, its unpredictable currents blowing gusts in multiple directions, helping some candidates and hindering others, but with no simple tailwind behind the biggest opposition party.”

The Conservatives did not sweep the Leave constituencies, as Professor John Curtice shows in his exhaustive breakdown of the influence of Brexit on the 2018 local elections, but they did hoover up the lapsed UKIP vote much more effectively than any of their peers. He finds that the Government now finds itself “supported by a predominantly pro-Leave electorate” but, importantly, that electorate by no means gave a ringing endorsement of how May, Davis, Johnson et al have been handling the negotiations so far.

“…if anything, the fall away in the Conservative vote since last year was rather greater in Leave areas than Remain ones. There is therefore no reason to believe that the outcome of the local elections represents any kind of endorsement by Leave voters of how the government has been handling the Brexit negotiations during the last twelve months.”

To my mind, that means Corbyn still has an opportunity to make hay with Brexit. Curtice puts Labour and Tories neck-and-neck on 35% vote share at the next general election. There’s everything to be played for and the, ahem, momentum that has lifted Corbyn to unlikely heights has plateaued in recent months. The party has to make another play to reach out to more voters. Those could be the undecided. It could be the people who didn’t turn out to vote (only 36% turned out in the locals). It could be habitual Conservative voters fed up of incompetent, scandal hit governments.

You don’t have to host a weekly politics podcast to see that Labour has to make a move to go and get those extra voters. The tried and tested method of waiting for a long term incumbent government to alienate the populace isn’t working, partly because of the strangely consequence free political era we’re going through and partly because Corbyn is such a deeply unattractive figure to many mainstream voter.

They going to need a push. Something to rally around.

If not pro-Europeanism, what?

Coming soon

The last ever cohort of British MEPs have less than a year left in the European Parliament.

What are they up to? We’ve spent the last few weeks speaking with British MEPs about their experiences working in the European Parliament in a truly unique political period. Watch this space.

You know the drill:

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