Local elections May 26: significant implications

There are some really significant implications from last week’s local elections, as follows:

Death of the Starmerbot

If you come to power without a plan, you will be buffeted by the unrelenting 24/7 pace of government and end up inevitably being consumed by events. As one anonymous Labour MP said last week, Starmer is more toxic on the doorstep than Jeremy Corbyn ever was; that really is quite the statement. And since the local elections there’s been a gentle but steady stream of party grandees, union leaders and Parliamentary backbenchers openly calling for his head. And as we go to pixel, with one backbench MP now laying down the gauntlet to flush out a cabinet revolt as soon as possible.

Obviously the Starmerbot is trying to cling onto office, attempting to look in control with his distraction strategy of appointments and announcements. (Surely the ultimate sign of sheer desperation must be Starmer, statistically the most unpopular PM in recent times, reaching out to Gordon Brown, the second most unpopular PM, thinking it will help him). Everyone knows he is a dead man walking, so the question is how long will this slow motion car crash take? There are of course two ways one can look at this problem:

• It is an obvious truth that if the polls show that your leader is incredibly unpopular, then you either change your leader or accept you will lose the next election.

  
  

• But as the Tories have tested to destruction in recent times, changing the pilot of your kamikaze plane plummeting towards certain death doesn’t really make a difference; you are still going to die.

The Starmerbot’s plan seems to be to play for time and rely on the Labour party’s natural inertia reflex when faced with a leadership problem, viz Blair, Miliband, Corbyn etc. We all know the reckoning is coming, but when? He may stagger on for longer than he should unless Wes ‘let me through I’m the future PM’ Streeting has actually got the 81 signatures in the bag he needs, but he seemingly does not want to be the first hand on the knife. Big Ange needs more time because…well there is that pesky HMRC investigation to deal with. And St Andy of Burnham and his outriders need time to desperately dangle a peerage in front of any Labour MP who is willing to vacate their seat and take a bet that Andy can win it and then win the leadership race.

For now, the Starmerbot stumbles on malfunctioning.

New leader, new direction?

We have all heard the siren Labour voices from the usual suspects saying that Labour must move Left to get itself out of its funk with its voter base. That is what we might call the Mandy Rice-Davies analysis: ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they?’ In truth, this is palpable nonsense for three fundamental reasons:

• In poll after poll the two most salient issues with voters right now by a huge country mile are the economy and immigration. If you think moving towards the Greens is going to help you on either of these, then the REC team has a selection of very fine bridges to sell you.

  
  

• And if you didn’t notice that Reform took more votes, seats and councils from Labour than the Greens did last week, we’ve also got some nice magic beans we can throw into the deal at a very competitive price.

  
  

• No one, not even the Greens themselves, think that they can get anywhere close to being in contention to form the next government. Reform can, duh!

Moving Left is madness, but it’s traditionally what Labour does when under pressure. And if they think they can’t win the next General Election, then standby for all the Left hobbyhorse policies they usually are too frightened to let loose; wealth taxes, anyone?

The Burnham question

Much of the Labour dinner table talk is how will Manchester Andy get into the race, whenever it is. A few glaring problems here:

• This assumes there is a winnable Labour seat that Andy could easily win. Right now, after last week, that is quite an assumption. Wherever he stands, as REC’s droll Scottish MD said recently, ‘the circus will come to town’; every political party will take aim at that by-election.

  
  

• No one sems to have noticed that much of the North West red wall, let’s call it ‘Burnhamland’, just flicked two fingers at Labour and voted for Reform. The idea that St Andy of Burnham has some magic Manchester pixie dust that will get him elected seems a little questionable right now to say the least.

  
  

• And all the noise emanating from the Starmer-friendly NEC is that they ain’t gonna let Andy have a seat any time soon.

So poor old Andy may never get his chance unless something changes.

The incoming Reform challenge

It’s all very well winning elections. That’s great. Well done. But what do you do once you’re in power. In the last local election cycle and now this one, Reform is beginning to pick up meaningful numbers of local authorities, now in the mid-twenties. But to govern is to choose and there are never any good choices, only a long list of horrible ones because there’s never enough money and always too many problems.

Let’s try a live example: Reform has just won control of the London Borough of Havering. Great. Have your website picture taken. Get a new email address. Jockey for position for a cabinet job or committee role. Start banking that allowance. But…

Havering is in a mess. Hopelessly in debt, it apparently needs £20 million of cuts ASAP. How much are you going to put up council tax? Which services are you going to cut? Again, to govern is to choose. And the voters end up hating you for those tough choices.

So as nice as it is to pick up councils, as ever with public office, that is the start of your electoral demise.

Tory/Reform cohabitation

The media have long asked the question, when will Reform and the Tories merge, work together etc. The real answer is, when they have to. Up until now, they have been locked in a battle to kill each other off. But the Tories haven’t got close to dying despite Reform’s success. So we might now soon be reaching that moment.

The truth is the Tories are probably more up for this than they pretend as they are pretty desperate. But the hardcore team around Farage are true Tory haters. They want to kill the Tories and assume the automatic position of the ‘go to’ right of centre party. So it will stick in the throat to even contemplate this for them.

How this plays out will be interesting. With all these new ‘no overall control’ councils we may see some local Tory/Reform cooperation, to keep right of centre council control from Labour, the Lib Dems or a left of centre coalition. (Bear in mind that lots of the local Reform activists and councillors are ex-Tories, so they know each other well). We could see either or both parties issuing edicts to their local parties not to cooperate, as Labour has done with the Greens. We could see local parties ignoring central party edicts. We could even see local Tory/Reform cooperation spreading up to national level. It’s all to play for.

But ultimately, they both know the lesson of the 2019 General Election, when the then Brexit Party stood aside for the Tories to “Get Brexit Done”: united they win, divided they fall.

Schizophrenic Greens

Putting aside the recent ‘Polanski poll plumet’ as it has been dubbed, which inevitably hit the Greens results – take Richmond for example where they lost all five Green councillors in what should theoretically be a target council for them – the question is will the real Greens please stand up? Are they the:

• Mostly white, middle class, older ex hippies and young, very online graduates, who are eco warrior tree huggers living in metropolitan England wanting to legalise hard drugs and party hard at LGBT rallies with gay, bondage wearing go-go dancers, or

  
  

• The newly joined anti-Israeli, pro Gaza Muslims supporting deputy leader Mothin Ali, an Islamic studies teacher?

How these two entirely opposite factions can possibly work together is rather unfathomable; oh to be a fly on the wall at a Green Party leadership meeting. How is this going to play out?

And as the lengthening dubious back story of David Paulden, sorry Zack Polanski (it’s difficult to keep up with all his names), has begun to come under ever closer media scrutiny – the best tabloid headline being ‘Walter Titty’ – how long before the new messiah himself implodes?

#Indyref2 on steroids

The SNP did well – albeit their vote share was down in every single Scottish constituency, they did not win an outright majority in Scotland and in fact lost six Scottish Parliament seats. The question therefore is will they do a deal like previously with the Scottish Greens to achieve that ‘independence majority’? But remember the previous arrangement descended into acrimony not long ago. The scars are barely healed.

And if they do, or even if they don’t, are we back to what The Times’ Fraser Nelson previously called the ‘neverendum’ where the SNP anti-English grievance machine cranks back into life endlessly demanding a second referendum.

Plaid Cymru sensed they would not win outright so explicitly downplayed their own independence messaging in the run up to the elections. But how long can they resist their natural urge? It’s quite possible Plaid Cymru, leading Wales for the very first time, could get in on the act too, possibly in concert with the SNP. But they too have a minority government with no natural allies to bolster them like the SNP in Scotland. And when taking all parties in the Senedd into consideration, there is a clear majority for the Union. So how will this play out? Will an ever desperate Labour government cave in order to seek nationalist support before the next General Election?

Fiddling while the UK burns

The big issues facing UK politicians right now are:

• How to deliver desperately needed growth to our flatlining economy

  
  

• How to massively increase defence spending when we are broke

  
  

• How to deal with our enormous debt crisis

  
  

• Where to position the UK geopolitically in the post-Brexit Trumpian world

Not one political party nor any single UK politician has anything approaching coherent thinking on any of these issues nor frankly wants to address them, preferring ideological displacement activity they can boast about to voters on social media. It’s a problem.

Local elections May 26: what actually happened

Context

The reason these local elections were so significant is because, almost two years into this Parliament and spread across the entire country including Scotland and Wales, they are about the nearest thing we have in the UK to US ‘mid-terms’. They had been positioned by the opposition parties as, in effect, a referendum on the malfunctioning Starmerbot.

If the June 2024 General Election was the ‘apathy election’, where as a nation we just wanted rid of the Tories – so Tory voters either stayed at home or defected to Reform, thus giving Labour a landslide their anaemic share of the vote increase did not warrant – then this was the ‘angry election’, where we voters were so fed up with the two mainstream political parties that we just wanted to give them a good kicking, with a significant number of us supporting Reform or the Greens.

What we are thus experiencing is what we might call the ‘Europanisation’ of UK politics; the long-standing two party system is done, and we now have fractured multiparty politics, arguably a seven party system if one includes the SNP and Plaid Cymru, similar to most European countries. Which of course has inevitably led to an increasing number of councils being in ‘no overall control’ and therefore we will likely see lots of fractious and even surprising coalitions in town halls across the country.

After the high point in the 1950s, Labour and the Tories have together usually maintained a combined share of the vote of comfortably over 50% for the last 70 years. Since the start of this decade this has plummeted and is now down to around 36%. The demise of this previously formidable duopoly has opened up the space for smaller parties to run riot.

Party performance

Reform obviously had a good election, which was inevitable and predicted. But it has long been fashionable to sneer at Reform, disparagingly labelling them as Far Right loons and racists. Well, who’s laughing now? Reform is a serious national force in UK politics with significant numbers in the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd as well as serious numbers of English councils and councillors. It has considerable funding and is self-evidently a formidable election winning machine. If politicians are still sneering now, then they’re idiots because they are dissing their own voters who are leaving them in droves as they prefer Nigel Farage’s message. Wake up!

On first take the electoral map may not look as if it is covered in Reform teal. But that belies two important lessons:

• Most of the English council elections were for just a third of their councillors. Whilst Reform piled up the councillor numbers, the number of councils that could actually change control was therefore much more limited.

  
  

• What the electoral map cannot show is just how many times Reform won all or the majority of the councillor seats up for grabs in any one local authority or indeed how many times they came in second place. They are thus positioned to hoover up many more councils in the next rounds of elections.

Labour has found itself squeezed on three fronts: haemorrhaging votes to Reform in the previously red, now increasingly teal wall, losing recent trophy wins back to the Tories in Westminster and (in effect) Wandsworth, whilst shedding bucket loads of Left and young voters to the Greens in metropolitan, graduate heavy areas. Some examples:

• Exhibit A – Labour controlled 23 out of 27 red wall councils in the North West in 2020. After last week, that’s down to 10, the Lib Dems now having one, Reform four and the other 12 in no overall control with Reform breathing down their neck.

  
  

• Exhibit B – Labour lost 10 London councils, two to the Greens, one to Reform and the Tories each and the remainder to no overall control.

  
  

• Exhibit C – Looking forwards, in the numerous MRP polls in recent months, then somewhere between 50-100% of the Labour cabinet are currently at serious risk of losing their seats at the next General Election. Last Thursday’s local election results were broadly in line with these poll projections.

With over 40 councils and over 1400 councillors lost, it was quite the shellacking. Things are a little existential for Labour right now.

The Tories had a mixed result; not as bad as they had feared, a few decent wins notably in Westminster and Harlow, but frankly with Reform continuing to steal their votes in their Essex and East Anglia strongholds and the Lib Dems killing them in their South East heartlands of Surrey and Sussex, they are still in the electoral doldrums. The voting public hasn’t moved on enough to like them again.

The Lib Dems cruise on in a charming state of delirious delusion, thinking that one cringeworthy media stunt after another, by what many see as a buffoon of a leader, is actually helping them. With both main parties in freefall, they should be doing much better. In reality, they are effectively flatlining in the polls with no significant movement for them since the 2019 General Election, winning some here, losing some there. They either haven’t noticed the Greens have now stolen their position as the automatic recipient of the left of centre protest vote in between General Elections or simply have no idea how to stop this happening.

And what happened to the ‘Green wave’? The Greens were a dog that barked loudly beforehand but then had not much of a bite. Heralded by the liberal Left media in advance of the election, they truthfully did not perform as well as they should have done or as was expected, only picking up 5 councils. One can view the Greens as a bubble that is already beginning to leak. The more they are exposed to media scrutiny, the more people realise that despite the slicker online TikTokery, they are still a party with a ragbag collection of unserious policies. Their failed hypnotherapist leader can seemingly briefly inflate polls better than he can breasts.

In Scotland, with Labour collapsing in the polls disastrously, the SNP has experienced a Lazarus-like resurrection. Two years ago they were in a death spiral with an incompetent leader, the previous leader under police investigation for fraud and the previous but one leader, after having been tried for serious sexual offences, flunking off to start his own rival party. But two years is a long time in politics and Labour’s poll implosion, coupled with a dull but steady new leader, has gifted them a solid win, although no Scottish Parliament majority.

For Wales there are now serious questions about the future. Having voted Plaid Cymru into office for the first time, but again without a majority, where does Wales go next? Plaid is a completely untested team with little policy depth, so it remains to be seen what the future holds.

Projections

There are two academics supported by rival TV channels who try to project what any local election means for future General Elections:

• Professor Sir John Curtice (BBC) uses the ‘projected national share of the vote’, ie what each party’s national performance could look like when extrapolated from local election results. Under this measure, in simple terms, where the parties ended up last week pretty much mirrors where the opinion polls have had them for some time: Reform way ahead on around 27% and the others all bunched around the 16-18% mark, bearing in mind a +/- 3% margin of error.

  
  

• Professors Rallings and Thrasher (Sky) use the ‘national equivalent vote’ method which tries to predict how many seats each party would have in the House of Commons on their local election performance. Broadly what this shows is that Reform is way out in front but well short of the 326 seats you need to have a Parliamentary majority. They would need the Tories to form a government.

Conclusions

It’s a mess! At devolved and local government level, the UK resembles a wild patchwork quilt of political fragmentation across all three GB nations, with ‘no overall control’ doing very well. And at a national level, looking forwards to a 2029(?) General Election, it may well be messier still; ‘first past the post’ was not designed for this so is malfunctioning badly, throwing up slightly crazy unrepresentative results. In the words of Private Fraser from Dads’ Army: “we’re all doomed!”

How is Starmer still alive?

Good question easily answered. Let’s just take it for read that Keir has demonstrated clearly to all that he is incompetent, agenda-less, buffeted by events, the definition of ‘in office but not in power’. Even his ‘toolmaker’ dad – did you know his dad was a toolmaker? – would probably be saying to him: ‘son, step down, it’s becoming embarrassing’. So how is he still clinging on? Simples. For two reasons:

• First, a couple of weeks ago Labour MPs stared over the precipice and realised: I’m probably going to lose my seat at the next election, and if we do anything too crazy, I might lose it sooner than that. So Labour MPs blinked

• Second, none of the contenders want to own the catastrophic Gorton or 7 May local election losses. They’re on Keir. So bide one’s time and strike once he’s taken the pain

But, but, but…there’s another problem. None of the contenders look very certain to win. Here’s why:

Andy Burnham – Obvs. Not in the game. As Starmer blocked him from trying to win the Gorton by-election, Labour’s only real hope and a thin one at that.

Shabana Mahmood – In Labour terms so far to the Right she is probably unelectable for both the party membership and the unions, two of the three crucial bloc votes which decide the Labour leadership, the third being Labour MPs and peers.

Wes ‘let me through I’m a future PM’ Streeting – No one likes someone who is nakedly too keen, and no one likes a plotter. Now probably irreparably tarnished by his historically close relationship with Lord Voldemort (aka Peter Mandelson), and probably also too Right for the membership and unions anyway.

Lucy Powell – Not even Lucy’s mum thinks she has a chance of winning any elections although her ego has not yet caught up. But then she is a politician, so her ego is inevitably adrift from reality.

Angela Rayner – Although unbelievable for most sentient earth beings, Big Ange is actually a serious candidate. But could Labour possibly elect someone under live investigation for tax fraud? She is desperately praying that HMRC and Knacker of the Yard cease their enquiries prior to 7 May, so she could have a run at it, but that does seem like a stretch.

And this is why dear reader, we have MP newbies like Al Cairns – yes, who is he, we’re with you – constantly promoting their chances. It may well be that if all the above fail, a compromise, ‘steady the ship’, caretaker leader is needed. John Healey, anyone?