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!”