UK local elections, 2 May 2019

[vileplume]

Results so far does not look so good for LAB.  Perhaps all that talk of a CON wipeout triggered greater CON turnout and greater tactical voting by Brexit supporters for CON.  Of course it is very early.

Their main saving grace is the lack of UKIP/Brexit Party candidaes in most contests. Thus many Leave supporters, furious with the government over the failure to deliver Brexit, will have been 'forced' to vote for them as the most Brexitty Party on the ballot.

[vileplume]

So far most of the results are from the North.  I suspect when Southern results comes in the CONs will get killed.

Possibly in the strongly Remain areas. But remember the south (minus London which isn't voting) also voted Leave, some parts e.g Essex and Kent strongly so.

Remember also the Tory bloodbath that was predicted to happen in London last year didn't happen.

[vileplume]

Ultimately my take on this election as a poorly-informed American is this:

1. Liberal Democrats regaining support from their 2015 defeat
2. Tories and Labour are both incredibly unpopular so protest parties across the board did very well
3. As the traditional "protest vote party" the Lib Dems benefited massively from the unpopularity of the big two
4. The Lib Dems may have actually underperformed compared to historical norms because a lot of the anti-everything protest vote they traditionally would have won was instead directed towards the Greens and others who were better in some places at finding names to put on the ballots
5. This was a low turnout affair and most elections were actually determined by local concerns more than anything; anyone trying to produce a narrative about Brexit in either direction here is just cherrypicking evidence to match what they already decided to believe.

I would add that these results are a lot more 'local' than they are being portrayed and this goes some way to explain wildly varying results in areas with similar demographic make ups. For example the Labour adminstration in Bolton was extremely unpopular, the labour administration in the Wirral was riven by factional splits, the Tory administration in Tunbridge Wells is apparently even unpopular with their own activists primarily due to the fact they want build over the town's most historic park.

Of course national issues play in too but every local area has its own issues which you'll often find animate the locals far more than Brexit does. Due to these seats being last contested at the same time as the 2015 General Election the Tories (and to a lesser extent Labour) were massively over extended in their stronger areas due to the Lib Dem wipe out (and the fact that general election turnout damages small parties as a rule). This election can therefore be seen as a reversion to the mean and the ending of the complete dominance of one party in large swathes local government (which isn't healthy whomever's in charge).

[vileplume]

One thing that is rather important to add: there's always a tendency to project forwards from local elections, to try to read them as predictive. This was an error in the past and is an even bigger one now. The Conservatives performed poorly. Does this mean they will lose re-election at the next GE, whenever it shall be? No. Labour performed poorly in a different sense. Does this mean they will fail, once more, to break through and win a GE? No. The LibDems had their first good local election night since their post-2010 electoral collapse. Does this mean that they will recover just as strongly in a GE? No. Will even the patterns on display in the results, both in specific councils and aggregated nationally, necessarily be reflected at the next GE? No. The results tell us about today, not tomorrow.

This is definitely true for two main reasons. Firstly there are an awful lot of people that would vote Lib Dem locally that wouldn't nationally because in many areas the Lib Dems campaign a quasi-independents talking only about local issues and not about national ones (this is probably how they swept Chelmsford Council for example). Secondly general elections have much higher turnout than local elections and the types of people who don't bother to vote in local elections but do in general elections are disproportionately unlikely to vote Lib Dem (or Green for that matter) as most will vote for their government preference i.e. Conservative or Labour.

Still a good set of elections for the Lib Dems albeit from a low base. Arguably they deserved a good year after nearly a decade of dreadful or disappointing results.