The English Election Results

In the UK, we have a variety of local elections, for councillors and mayors, every year on a four yearly cycle, so roughly a quarter of the seats change every year. It so happens that this year in the cycle all the seats that were up for grabs were in England.

In addition, there was a by-election because the former Labour MP for Runcorn had stepped down after being found guilty of assaulting a constituent. Not a good look for an MP.

The big headline is that Reform UK won the Runcorn by-election. Labour losing is, perhaps, not a shock. Incumbent governments tend not to do well in by-elections, even in (formerly) safe seats like Runcorn. Turnouts are low, indeed the total votes in the by-election were lower than the votes the now disgraced MP got last year. There’s always a protest against those in power - every government has to make hard decisions and those upset people. Labour are doing that really spectacularly “well”. Removing the winter fuel allowance and the welfare reforms may make fiscal sense, but they’re not very Labour things to do, this is the party of the working classes, and the social security safety net - they’re removing that net in many people’s eyes. Add in an MP who attacked a constituent and this was always going to be a hard election.

It’s fair to say that the victory by Reform UK is unprecedented. Neither UKIP nor, prior to Thursday, Reform had won a by-election caused by a different party. Mostly, after a defection, their former MPs had stayed in post - there’s a long tradition of doing this, whatever I think of defecting to Reform, there’s no obligation to call a by-election just because you change parties - but a few did and some won their seats with a renewed mandate. This was the first time they took a seat from someone else. I don’t like the news, but that’s newsworthy. Meaningful? Harder to say. Obviously if the previous MP hadn’t assaulted someone this by-election wouldn’t have been called, but just how much impact it had is hard to judge. Were there seven people who either stayed at home or voted Lib Dem or Green instead of Labour because of just that? Possibly, probably even. And just those seven votes would have meant a Labour win and a very different story.

But, if you look at the wider picture, the story is not really Reform v Labour. In fact, it’s almost spooky how exactly it’s not. The “other parties” gained at the expense of the big two and, more sadly, the independents. But Reforms +677 and the Tories -676; Labours -186, the LibDems +163 and the Greens +45 (Others -20) are almost perfectly balanced. As always, these big numbers disguise the odd local battle where there has been a swing, Labour to Reform or Tory to Green or whatever. But what we’re seeing, overall, is the Tory vote continuing to collapse, and voters largely leaving them to the right, whilst Labour's incumbency is costing them votes to the other progressive parties. Whilst there are, undoubtedly, seats where Labour lost to Reform, the Tories lost to the LibDems and so on, at the overview level that’s not what we’re seeing.

Labour will not be complacent about these results. They will have expected to lose a bunch of seats but, from what I’ve heard on the news, the feedback will have brought home just how unpopular some of their policies are with their supporters along with how impatient for noticeable changes the population are. For example, I’m willing to give credit for the continuous, and quite big, falls in NHS waiting list numbers. It’s definitely an achievement. But if you get added to a waiting list and are told that it will be 11 months before you’ll be seen, that still doesn’t feel good. Likewise, under Labour, they’ve added some quite big number of extra GP appointments per week. I can’t find the exact figures now, but I think it’s about 40,000 each week. But if that means you’re waiting 2 weeks for an appointment instead of 3 and still can’t get an appointment on the day, it doesn’t feel good. Even with about a million appointments per week, an extra 40k each week is a significant increase. The system was groaning before, now it’s coping. Add another 40k per week and the waits will noticeably fall. But just magicking them up - that’s about 1,000 extra GPs, and their surgeries, support staff and so on, it’s not easy to do. Taking these two together, and a chunk of other things explains why we’re seeing messages about “doing better, faster.” They’re less than a year in and they are actually turning quite a few things that they said they would. It just takes time.

However, the Tories are managing to make things worse. Four years ago Johnson was in his pomp, vaccine roll out was a success, lockdowns were coming to an end but were seen as a success that we’d got through together for the good of the country and the Tories had a huge win in the equivalent elections. Today, Johnson is somewhere between a laughing stock and a disgrace. The Tories are somewhere between an omnishambles and a laughing stock. Their MPs are so disorganised that they tried to fix the leadership election and fucked that up. They got the leader they deserved, who is so disorganised she can’t even work out the date when a particular judgement was made, and the fact that it’s not a great attack line for PMQs because a) the judiciary are independent and b) it was made under a conservative government… oops. And when that’s pointed out to here, she’s too stupid to change lines.

Before the election, senior Tories were out, touting the line (perfectly reasonably in fairness to them) about how popular they’d been four years ago, how unpopular they are now. All true, they might have padded the details a bit, but they were basically telling the story I outlined above. Even if things were going well for the Tories still, they’d expect to be losing a load of seats from four years ago, in the current state, that became a hell of a lot. They would then go on to manage expectations. In the early days you’d hear “we have to expect to lose about 400 seats.” As the election campaigns went along this crept upwards, 450 and in the week of the elections 500.

Although it’s not my real area of expertise, I’d suggest that around 300 seats is a decent estimate for the excess that the Tories won back in 2021. They added 100 then 150 then 200 to this to manage expectations, given just how soft support for the Tories is right now. And they fell under that by a further 176 seats! That’s an unmitigated disaster. It’s not fair to blame all of that on just how crap Badenoch is. Some of it, absolutely, but not all. But she's also been incredibly slow about saying what she sees as the way forward for the Tories. Now, to a small extent, I had some sympathy with her stated intention of taking things slowly, learning the lessons from the huge defeat before starting out afresh. Then came this election…

I’m never going to vote for either the Tories or Reform. That won’t surprise anyone reading this. But I can vaguely imagine being in that situation. If any of the selfish, hate-filled madness that either of them espouse appealed, who would I be inclined to vote for? One party has clear (if facile and stupid) answers to everything. The other can barely clearly answer who they are any more. Voting for someone who actually stands for something is a relatively easy choice.

We’re three or four years out from a general election. Predicting from now that far ahead is a mugs game. Back in 2021 people were, with a straight face, talking about a decade of a Johnson premiership. Look how that turned out! Local elections are almost always a bad indicator for general elections too, the turn out is usually around 30%, it was this time, and it’s around 60% in a general election. The 30% are the die-hards, “it’s my civic duty to vote” crowd or the activists. The remaining ~30% vote differently. The activists are always going to vote for their party. The civic duty crowd are mostly set in their ways too. There’s just enough swing voters there to cause the changes over time. Local elections are also seen (arguably wrongly) as less important. Local government actually delivers a lot of the services we use, national government makes new laws and distributes tax money to let them do it. It also runs a few things, like defence spending. But, because of that sense of lack of power, people are more likely to vote for smaller parties. At a general election, people who might vote, say, Green locally are more likely to vote Labour and not “waste their vote.”

Could Reform UK wipe out the Tories come the next general election? Sure, sort of. Honestly, much though I hate the Tories, I despise and hate Reform so I find myself hoping that the Tories find the way back from the wilderness. If only to render Farage an irrelevance once again. But this election has not done that. What it has done is increased the chance of another Tory party regicide. But I want to circle back to my original answer to the question I started this paragraph with. Why, sort of? Over most of my life the Tory party has been a broad church on the right, the Labour Party correspondingly so on the left. This is why we’ve largely had a two party system with some fiddling around the edges to keep it interesting - with the exception of Northern Ireland and Scotland of course. But if the Tories were a broad church, then their voters range from floating voters who would move between parties to centre right to further right voters. Reform UK has what I should call a platform, however risible I find it, which is really only going to be attractive to those on the far right. Voters absolutely don’t vote on the whole manifesto, but they do vote on a sense of it and, although I’m not in a good position to judge, I think too many centre right voters will look at Reform and go “hard no.” They are also likely to look at Labour and go “hard no” just as much as I’ll never vote Tory. They might vote Green, green issues are not as left-of-centre here as they are in the US, although the Greens are pretty left wing imo. But the LibDems are the historically obvious choice. They arose from a centre-ground party. They’re not as left-wing as the left-wing of the Labour Party, although they’re more to the left than the current centrist leadership. But the LibDems have been the opposition to the Tories in a lot of southern England. Reform might be becoming that. However, a lot of those 30% of voters that stayed at home in those south of England seats are, I suspect most likely to vote Tory if they think there’s a chance that will make a difference, and either stay at home or vote LibDem if they think that’s a better option at the next general election. It’s possible that Reform kill Badenoch, the LibDems kill the Tories.

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