English Local Elections 2023

Amateur psephology time again.

In, actually all of the U.K., we have local council elections every year normally, but only for about a quarter at a time. There are some weird wrinkles, England does a quarter of its seats each year but all of London is in one year (not this one). Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are all nationwide in a single year and so on.

So, the seats this year were last up for election in 2019. Teresa May (remember her) was still PM although basically at the bottom of her popularity as even her own MPs thwarted her at every turn (BoJo replaced her a bit later on, then called an election just before Christmas). Jeremy Corbyn was the Labour leader and whatever you think of him, he was also at the bottom of his popularity. So there’s an argument that, for both big parties, the only way is up. Contrariwise, the Greens and LibDems, who both do well at local elections, had basically done extra well in 2019 - someone has to win each election after all. In terms of the actual results in 2019, the Tories did somewhat better than Labour, the other two parties were quite some way back. You couldn’t forget them but nationally they were only 40% and 10% of the size of the biggest party.

As always, turnouts are low, so translating these results to next year is hard so there are always a load of caveats. In any given seat, broadly speaking, about half the people likely to vote in a general election just stayed at home. A roughly equal number are not going to vote in either type of election. If, and this is super-unlikely, all of these stay-at-home for the local elections but vote in the general election voters vote one way, that could totally change the result in any seat. It’s generally reasonable to assume that people who might vote for the current government will stay at home more for council elections when the government is as unpopular as this one is. But they don’t necessarily turn out if they don’t do better by the general election.

So, on to the actual results.

The Only Way Is Up?

Remember that I said both Labour and the Tories were pretty much at rock bottom in 2019? Well the Tories still managed to lose over 1,000 seats and control of a whopping 48 councils from that bad place… Ouch. If, like me, your politics are really “never Tory” rather than positively pro-something (although I’ll vote Green if that’s a sensible choice) with no risk of letting the Tories in, this is a great result.

Labour gained over 500 seats and control of 22 councils. This is a good result for them, however you slice it. In terms of swing to Labour it’s not great, and there is one really big, obvious reason for that we'll come to below. In addition London, Wales and Scotland didn’t vote this year. They’re all important in Labour’s plans and certainly Wales and Scotland have distinctive other factors that make generalising from English results extremely unreliable. Labour can point to victories in Essex, the Red Wall and the like that are, even allowing for their spin, genuinely important. Parts of BoJo's massive majority came from traditional Labour seats voting Leave and turning Tory. Until these elections that seemed to have remained solid, now it’s cracked. That gives Labour a route to regain their traditional seats and return with far more MPs. They can’t quite win by just restoring the Red Wall, but if they get a load of seats in Scotland too, and a smattering through the swing seats, they could form a majority.

Cast your mind back to where I said the Greens and LibDems had had a great time in 2019. Well they both improved on that, which is honestly pretty amazing. The LibDems gained 12 councils and just over 400 councillors, the Greens one council (their first) and 240 councillors. There are various independents, resident's association and others that make up the numbers.

Although this is a massive result for the Greens, on the bigger scale they have about 20% of the councillors of the big two, the LibDems are up to over 50% of their size. The LibDems have always had these odd pockets of support in the south west, they’ve largely expanded more into the Blue Wall - the traditional southern shires. This expansion of the LibDem and Green vote, for the LibDems particularly in the south, helps explain at least part of why Labour's gains were limited.

The Greens gained in smaller numbers and more spread out across the country. Where I live they became the main party of opposition, but the six Green councillors will be great at holding the 44 Labour councillors to account… although I voted Green, I’m going to discount them. They might get a second, at a push a third MP if things go like this and I hope so, but it’s not going to make a difference in the big picture.

The LibDems though, they’re stealing votes in the Tory heartland. For Labour to win an absolute majority that makes no difference, but for a minority government which might sensibly undertake and achieve voting reform - and give the small parties more MPs in the future - taking MPs from the Tories is just great. But it’s always hard to tell. The LibDems and more recently the Greens always punch above their weight in local elections compared to parliamentary elections. I hope at least some of his translates to the general election but we shall have to see.

The Winner Takes It All?

Casting ahead, with many caveats, what might this mean?

In the 2019 general election, and remember that was just 7 months after the disastrous local election for them, the Tories won 365 seats on 43.6% of the votes, Labour 202 seats on 32.1% of the votes. A lot of the missing 24.3% went to the LibDems (11.6%) and SNP, plus the parties in NI. There’s a scatter of other places (including the Greens). Despite only getting 3.9% of the national vote, the SNP were, by far, the third biggest party with 48 seats (they only stand in Scotland, obviously, and didn’t quite clean sweep it). Some of these numbers reflect the fact that in all of our seats we have multiple candidates standing. In the election on Thursday I had a choice of three candidates for example. It’s common for a candidate to be elected with less than 50% of the total votes, first past the post, the name we use for ‘highest wins’ rather than first to 50%, tends to magnify the differences and tends to return majority governments and this 11% difference in the polls returned a huge majority of 143.

In this election, Labour won 35% of the vote, the Tories 30%, the LibDems 19% and the Greens 8.2%. There were a smattering of others that essentially don’t register at general elections.

Now, this shows the difficulties we have interpreting these results. Labour are doing worse than the Tories did at the general election, about 9% worse, does this mean they won’t get such a huge number of seats? Maybe. But it’s fair to say that people vote differently in local elections than general elections - some of those Green and LibDem votes will probably be Labour votes at the general election. If they pull 5% from each (which is not unreasonable and leaves them both increasing their share of the vote - in a lot of places there’s no chance of electing a Green or LibDem MP, like here, but there is a chance of electing a Green or LibDem councillor), suddenly Labour are at 45% and an unstoppable juggernaut…

Labour can also, from what I can tell pretty legitimately, claim that their share of the vote has stayed steady or fallen back by 1-2% in totally safe seats, largely to the Greens. However, in the places they need to win to win an overall majority they gained a lot, and their share was higher. They call this “efficient voter gain.” With no council seats up for grabs in Scotland, predictions are conservative north of the border, and the SNP is not in as good a position as it used to be. How that will translate electorally is really unclear, but Labour should certainly expect to make gains in Scotland that aren’t reflected here. So, they certainly need to do more, but it’s a good, if not stellar, result for them.

The Tories took a kicking. In the same position - in 2019 they lost 1,000 councillors too - May resigned as PM, although how much was that and how much was the inevitable grind facing a party in pretty open rebellion I don’t know. But the official cause was losing 1,000 councillors. By contrast Sunak is very much “we’re doing a good job, tally ho!” And that’s despite losing an additional 1,000 councillors from May’s disaster.

Now, the situations are different. May had a party where she had no authority, they laughed at every deal she attempted to broker for Brexit and she had been clinging to power by her fingertips for about a year. Sunak has just been elected and, while there are a few discontents muttering, there’s no real desire to oust him. Three PMs last year, the Tory MPs are mostly looking for a bit of stability. While, as was supremely brutally illustrated in a vox pop on Friday, no one can remember any of his pledges, he’s got about 18 months to bring energy prices and inflation down (energy prices are not really within his power, but they’re moving the right way anyway) and sort out the massive wave of industrial disputes. The problem is, in my very non-expert opinion, the last 13 years of bad economics have left us in a bad place, capped off with Trussonomics and the economic chaos she caused. Rishi is gambling his legacy and place in history on 26 months to unpick 13 years of problems, with two guys who were chancellor for several of those years. Yeah, good luck. Good riddance too. IF inflation falls back to around 2% instead of around 10% by this time next year - so far, despite predictions, it’s stubbornly staying over 10% month after month, that’s despite the massive hike in fuel prices now being accounted for and interest rates fall back from their current high and there’s a long run with no industrial disputes, especially in the NHS and he manages the six months leading up to the election without any more scandals (unlikely, it’s a rare month we don’t have a Tory MP in some sort of scandal) then he might turn it around. Honestly, I’m biased on the first, I don’t trust them to diagnose and treat the problem, every time they say “it’s down to this” it turns out it’s not actually. If they can’t sort out inflation, interest rates will go higher, not lower, and their fall will lag a fall in inflation too. So he’s got less than a year to get inflation down to see interest rates back down low again. If inflation stays high and they maintain their mantra of “we can’t afford to pay you” public sector strikes will continue. And away from that, all the rhetoric about stopping the small boats hasn’t achieved anything in years, it’s not going to achieve anything because it’s a stupid piece of racist legislation that’s going to fall apart as soon as it gets challenged in court, if it actually gets through parliament. The gammons are going to lose faith too - they never wanted him anyway, when presented with a choice between a white girl and a brown boy, they chose the white girl, even though she was clearly insane. MPs avoided giving them a choice next time around. They’re going to stay at home in droves rather than turn out for five more years of Rishi, unless he really can deliver stability and growth. So far it really doesn’t look good.

This is a confusing election. It’s absolutely clear that the Tories got absolutely kicked. Everyone else gained a bit from them. There is a route for the Tories to recover but it relies on a lot of things going well and a lot of them are out of their control or are down to Brexit and their own stupidity.

All of Labour, the LibDems and the Greens had good days. Given Labour, at the 2019 general election, had a generationally bad day, debating which side of overall majority line the next general election will put them is an amazing result. But they will want to do better so they have an even better chance of majority government. The LibDems and Greens will be wondering if this is just their normal bump in fortunes during local elections or if they can maintain it in the next general election.

Interesting times.