2023 UK Local Elections

[icc]

People are moaning that Labour are talking about the NHS and say they should focus on ‘local issues that councils control’- yet these are the same people who would ofc criticise anything vaguely radical at a local level and attack it as wasteful.

Well it's better than their campaign launch, when they were talking about how Labour councils weren't going to freeze council tax, a future Labour government wouldn't fund a freeze to council tax, but in a parallel universe where Labour was in power there would be a freeze in council tax.

[icc]

At the moment, maybe hard to beat Plymouth which has descended into chaos after some especially vicious internal Tory warfare.

Also trees. Cause it's always trees when the council is collapsing.  

Also on the wider point, liverpool are still under oversight from the appointed managers. Heck,  the new ward map that's going to be used this year was imposed by them,  and since it's basically all SMDs and 2MDs things could get interesting if voters want a change from local labour.

Most people still seem to be expecting a Labour majority, though. This is one place where memories of the LibDem coalition years are likely to last longer than average - and thus a drag on their support.

And, of course, those councils which have little prospect of kicking out the incumbents due to national factors are often the very worst. At the moment that has tended to mean some of the big Labour Mets or London Boroughs (Sunderland, Barnsley, Enfield spring to mind). Liverpool is probably hard to beat at the moment though (and has had issues with pretty shameless corruption, such as Labour councillors having parking fines 'let go').

A similar example on the other side of the aisle would have been Cotswold, though that did eventually catch up with the Tories in 2019 when they lost it to the Lib Dems. Shropshire (not up this year) may be another example on the Conservative side?

Croydon seems to have transitioned seamlessly from being an incredibly unpopular Labour council to an incredibly unpopular Conservative council.

[icc]

Can someone please explain why the Green Party has surged in East Herfordshire?

The greens have been playing a v long game in these sorts of areas- they’re a natural protest vote and they can oppose various developments/changes with the ‘protect the hedges’ which is a very potent and powerful line in English politics- you run someone well know locally who is nice and friendly and you spend your time talking about the church hall and the ghastly new development rather than the issues you see ultra online Green activists talk about.


there are lots of people in these areas who would recoil at voting Labour but would happily vote Green- the crude stereotype is people who shop at Waitrose, who watch countryfile and are very concerned about the local river being polluted.

I don’t know East Hertfordshire but as I said a few pages back the greens will imv win their next parliamentary seat in one of these areas.

Yep - the Green ‘brand’ (especially locally) in these rural areas bears very little resemblance to what the party actually stands for.

[icc]

The Greens also don’t operate a whip in local councils; this led to the farcical situation in Brighton where they struggled to past their own budget.

I also suspect though that these rural councils will be mildly easier to run than the ‘city’ councils who to be blunt have to deal with a lot of difficult problems with virtually no funding.

They don’t officially, but in practice they really do. For example, in the aforementioned Brighton, they expelled a councillor for voting against a motion supporting the legalisation of gay marriage. But yeah, running a district council as a Green basically means blocking development, doing localist stuff for the voters, and generally not being super incompetent.

The Lib Dem groups who claim not to have a whip do really. For Greens that isn’t generally true. For instance in Brighton during the bin strikes the then Leader was denouncing the strikers whilst his Deputy stood on the picket lines.

[icc]

There are a few places in the west where Alliance have done well; they've gained councillors for the first time in both Limavady and Enniskillen.

Yeah, Alliance aren't doing badly in the West (relative to 2019 - obviously they always do badly in the West), they're just doing badly in Derry & Strabane council area.