Pressure grows to sort Brexit after local elections 2019 – The Yorkshire Post says

The context is this. Local elections have, traditionally, seen voters take umbrage with the governing party – the UK equivalent of America’s mid-term elections. Yet, in another break from established electoral orthodoxy in these volatile times, they took out their frustrations on both main parties – and it did not appear to matter how the areas in question voted in the 2016 referendum.

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And while Labour appears, on paper, to have performed better than the Tories because Jeremy Corbyn’s party lost fewer seats, it should be remembered that these same seats were last fought four years ago when the Conservatives were very much in the ascendancy after winning a general election on the same day.

Though disastrous, but not necessarily catastrophic for Mrs May as the more indignant Tory activists call on the besieged PM to step aside, the outcome can hardly be construed as a vote of confidence in Mr Corbyn who has done well – until now – to mask his party’s own splits on Brexit.

This was self-evident in Wakefield where Steve Tulley – successfully re-elected for Labour – blamed local MP Yvette Cooper, and her Remain stance, for the party’s losses in a district which voted heavily in favour of leaving the EU.

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“There has been some wonderful candidates who’ve lost tonight. And it’s all because of the MP for Pontefract, Normanton and Castleford, who wouldn’t know what democracy was if it scratched her in the eyeballs,” he said in an astonishing attack.

Yet, while it is regrettable that many able councillors and candidates, individuals driven by a sense of duty to their local community, were punished because of national factors beyond their control, there is a hope – albeit a tentative one – that Parliament does now heed this wake-up call before the embarrassment of costly European elections on May 22 when Leavers had expected Britain to have already left the EU by now.

And although fringe parties, and Independent candidates, drew varying degrees of encouragement from these results, the fact of the matter is that the Tories and Labour do still dominate the House of Commons and it was always going to require some sort of accommodation between both of the main parties for some form of Brexit to be passed by Parliament.

At least Mrs May recognises this – albeit very belatedly – and cross-party talks have been continuing in recent weeks between the key players, with murmurings, and no more, that a breakthrough is possibly within sight on future customs arrangements. If only this co-operation had started at the beginning of the process rather than at the very end.

As such, the continuation of these talks is made even more important, and urgent, by a set of local election results in which voters have effectively put all MPs on notice that they expect Brexit to be sorted so that the whole country can finally move on after such an unsettling period of political history.