The counting has begun in the English local parliamentary and Scottish and Welsh parliamentary elections, and with a long weekend ahead, I approach today’s analysis with some trepidation.
What we do know so far – with only a few dozen English councils having declared, and most of them having elected only a third of their seats – is that UK Reform is performing strongly across the North and Midlands of England.
The most striking results I have seen so far are in Hartlepool in the North East, Newcastle-under-Lyme in the West Midlands and North East Lincolnshire in the East Midlands. In each case, the pattern was the same: Reform swept across the board, taking nearly every seat up for election from Labor and the Conservatives in almost equal measure (in Lincolnshire, a single Lib Dem advanced while Reform won 14 of the 15 seats available). Nigel Farage said this morning that the two main parties had been “wiped out” and positioned Reform as a force that transcends the traditional left-right divide in politics.
Labour’s official line is that local elections are a poor predictor of general election results and that governments have often recovered from poor mid-term performances. The party is even drawing comparisons to the 1999 local elections, when Tony Blair’s New Labor lost more than 1,100 council seats just two years after his landslide victory (although this overlooks the fact that Blair still won that election in both the vote share and seats).
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But beyond the necessary evasions and sugarcoating of damage control, harsher calculations are being made within various wings of the Labor Party, and post-mortem arguments are already beginning to emerge.
From the right of the party, there are already confident claims that the results vindicate the politics of Shabana Mahmood and other figures who have advocated a hard-line approach to immigration to attract potential reform voters. They believe Labor needs to do more to neutralize Reform in the party’s previous centres. I wonder how well this argument will survive contact with the inner London statements later today, where Labor is expected to be surrounded by the Greens. The left of the party, meanwhile, will argue that this is precisely the consequence of following that political brand.
The soft left’s argument against a shift to the right is also taking shape this morning: that Reform performed so well yesterday, in part because the Green surge took votes away from Labour, allowing Farage’s candidates to win by a strong but unspectacular margin. Their response to this disaster is therefore to consolidate progressive voters behind a more overtly left-wing Labor leadership. A figure on Labour’s soft left predicted this to me only recently: that the large number of seats won by Reform could prompt renewed calls for Labor to move further to the right, and that their wing of the party needed to prepare to resist a Thermidorian backlash.
The main story of the next few days will be Labour’s post-mortem, most of which will consist of people using the results to validate what they already believed and to argue for the policies and strategies they were already advocating for the future of the party.
But we also need to keep an eye on the bigger picture. The Conservative Party’s attempt to advertise a “Kemi boom” has not translated into a national recovery. Like Labour, the Conservatives are suffering from reform. They will no doubt show some positive results – they have already held onto their old stronghold of Westminster City Council by a whisker – but questions about the leader’s strategy will grow stronger as the party tries to revive itself despite the government’s unpopularity.
And keep an eye out for discontent within the Liberal Democrats over Ed Davey’s alleged “asleep at the wheel” leadership. His party was once the main beneficiary of the discontent with the two main parties. After yesterday’s election, that no longer seems true.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; get it every morning by subscribing to Substack here
(Further reading: Live results map: Wales, Scotland and local elections)
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