Local, Mayoral and PCC Elections, 2024

The 2024 Local Elections are in, and they need a little bit of unpacking.

The headline is clear: this is a catastrophe for the Conservatives. However, it’s worth remembering that the Tories had an unexpected high mark when these seats were last contested - it was just after the first vaccine rollout and they had a huge lift in the polls. Big losses were inevitable because they’re nowhere near that.

That said, in most parts of the country, they’ve lost, and lost badly to Labour. In places where they were up against the LibDems, they’ve lost to them. This is pretty much business as usual for British politics. While it is tricky to generalise from local elections to general elections, it would be fair to say this pattern reflects the national opinion polls and while you couldn’t say “this means Labour will win seat X” or “the LibDems will win seat Y” with any confidence but you can suggest that the LibDems will be a threat in seats where they were second to the Tories in 2019, while Labour will be taking seats from the Tories wherever they were second. Probably not everywhere, but in all kinds of places. While I’m going to reiterate that you can’t look at the list of places that Labour have taken councils and directly convert that into place they’ll win MP’s seats, the list reads remarkably like the list of constituencies where Cameron took seats back in 2010 on his road to No. 10 and places Starmer broadly needs to win to do the same this year.

Just a little aside, local council elections typically get about a 30-40% turnout, general elections about 60-70%. The party that does badly always trots out the line “our supporters stayed at home and will turn out for the general election.” History suggests that’s complete bollocks - it’s more that about twice as many people think it’s important enough to vote for a general election, but the proportions of those that turn out to vote are about the same. The distortions to the voter proportions between the two that you see come from two main sources:

1. Councillors get elected on small numbers. In my ward, which elected one councillor on Thursday, there were four candidates and the winner got 887 votes of the 2,083 cast, winning by 188. So a local patch might be, say, more Green in a wider more Labour region - the stereotypes would say an area of student accommodation would achieve this and might give you a bloc of ~500 Green voters which you can see could have had a big impact on the results in my council election, and in local elections that difference shows but in a general election it will be diluted when you’re talking about something more like 60-70,000 people voting.
2. Because the numbers of voters are small, and the areas are small, there is often a local ‘known person’ factor. For example, in the Tees Valley, the Tory Mayor has kept his position despite the council swinging massively Labour. This is mostly a personal vote for the person, although there are some other things going on that are too long to go into here.

The Mayoral Elections are also a disaster for the Tories, although they contain the only mirage of hope for them. In all but one of the Mayoral elections, there is now a Labour Mayor. Tees Valley is the exception and the mirage of hope: the mayor there is a Boris fan, didn’t campaign with any support from current Tories, with any Blue paper or anything similar and he still suffered a huge swing to Labour. He’s just popular enough locally that he survived. There were three new mayors created this time. Now, mayors tend to be associated with big cities - London, Liverpool, Manchester etc. - and those tend to lean to Labour, so most of those being in Labour control most of the time is not a shock. In the UK we don’t really have much opportunity for gerrymandering, and while there’s some history of mayors being associated with counties, South Yorkshire and West Midlands for example. If you’re not au fait with British geography, it won’t be immediately obvious that these counties are heavily urbanised - South Yorkshire contains Sheffield, Doncaster, Rotherham and Barnsley and parts of these you basically drive between without seeing anything green. There’s also a lot of rural areas too, mind, but it’s no surprise that they’re Labour. Of the new ones, “The North East” feels right geographically and it’s never going to go Tory, while York and North Yorkshire fits into same mould as South Yorkshire but is far less urban (Rishi Sunak’s constituency is in North Yorkshire for example) and that going to Labour feels like it reflects the mood of the country.

They also lost Police and Crime Commissioners in ten areas, holding on in 17. Some of the places that Labour won, like Nottinghamshire, are traditionally swing regions, others, like Norfolk, are traditionally Tory strongholds and count as disasters. All the places that they held are ‘true blue’ shires, like Dorset, Hampshire etc. but even in these places there were big swings away from the Tories, it was just that they were defending huge majorities.

Normally we’d be stopping here, but there are a couple of other things that are going on.

While Labour, overall, have made huge gains, they have had losses in two areas.

1. In some old-Labour heartlands that skew left and younger they have lost seats to the Greens. That drift of votes to the Greens will probably continue at the general election and it might cost them a few seats but enough to matter - to reduce the majority rather than prevent it.
2. In predominantly muslim areas they have lost votes, and councillors. This is seen, probably correctly, as a protest about their stance on Gaza. I say probably because I’m not connected to the muslim communities involved, so I’m relying on the reporting. But that reporting characterises the “Labour to Green” shift as “radical and young” but I’m one of the people that voted Green on Thursday and no one would describe me as young, so I’m treating is as an oversimplification.

This combination probably accounts for most of the ~4% fall in Andy Burnham vote in Manchester. All the smaller parties picked up votes, but because the Tories did even worse, this was still a 3% swing to Labour in a seat where they were down to 64% of vote. The Tories, in an almost invisible second place got 10% of the votes! In West Yorkshire, where you might expect the same sorts of issues, the Labour vote went up by almost 8% and there was an 11% swing to Labour. It’s possible that Burnham's apparent loss of support - remember he still basically got two of every three votes cast - is more a case of complacency than anything else. Everyone was so sure he’d win that some folks didn’t bother to vote this time that had last time, so the motivated protest voters show up more clearly.

Electorally neither losing votes to the Greens nor because of Gaza, individually or together, will do more than dent the Labour majority at the next election - much like it caused a tiny reduction in the total vote for Andy Burnham. However, come 2029 or 2034 as the majority dwindles, and potentially the unrest and defections grow, they have the potential to be more of a problem. Labour shouldn’t be sitting on them, even if they don’t care too much right now, because in the medium term they will be a problem, at least from a Labour perspective.

The Tories also have a problem, something of an identity crisis. In the build-up to Brexit we had UKIP. While I looked at UKIP as a bunch of right-wing racists, if you looked at how it affected the main parties, it drew support from both Labour and the Tories, about twice as much from the Tories, but there was measurable, appreciable support from both of them. The LibDems, who remained staunchly pro-EU didn’t lose anyone. While we can argue about why there was an uneven pull to UKIP, it’s not relevant here. However, with Brexit completed, UKIP collapsed in a puddle of irrelevance. From that puddle, something nasty oozed. Called Reform UK it only appeals to those voters for whom this hard-right leaning version of the Tory party are too liberal. Their only sitting MP is Lee Anderson, who was removed from the Tory Party for being too publicly racist, even for them, and then joined Reform.

Reform UK is more like the shameful historical parties of the past. The BNP, the NF and the like, back to the BUF. It’s little surprise that they don’t speak to any recognisable number of Labour voters, it’s scary that, while the Tories have lurched so far to the right, they are able to steal so many voters from them, speaking for people even further to the right.

Exactly what this will mean at the general election remains to be seen. Reform gained hardly any seats, but stole votes from the Tories. They didn’t stand everywhere, but where they did, the loss of votes by the Tories was about 10% higher than elsewhere. Depending on how they stand at the general election that could have no impact, if they only stand in seats that already have Labour MPs, up to a massive impact if they stand where there are Tory MPs and shift the vote in the same way, moving marginals to safe Labour seats and safe Tory seats to marginal Labour ones. The same logic applies in Tory-LibDem contested seats. They could just strip the Tories of, potentially, scores of seats without winning any themselves.

Overall, the Tories lost nearly 500 council seats. They lost them to everyone: mostly Labour, but LibDems, Independents†, Greens†, and Reform. (Arguably Labour lost more seats to Independents and Greens, but the Tories did too.) They lost PCCs and one of their two mayors. They haemorrhaged votes even in the places where they held on to their PCCs. They’re losing votes to Labour, to the LibDems and to ReformUK. They’re losing votes in places like Newcastle that, honestly, don’t matter - these are heartland Labour territory - but in the ‘Red Wall’ seats that famously voted for Boris and Brexit in 2019, in the traditional swing voting areas and, in traditional ‘Blue Wall’ voting areas. This is, however you slice, the recipe for electoral disaster. The only question is “how big?”