UK Local Elections, 4th May 2017

[IceAgeComing]

I'm pretty sure we're counting in the morning - that's what they've always done ever since they brought in STV.  I believe that its a computer count though so it should be relatively quick: just a job of scanning the papers for all of their preferences; double checking any that the thing doesn't read in case they have valid preferences on them and then press the button and see how everything works out.  Even if they do it by hand it ought not to take very long; there aren't that many votes being counted after all...

[IceAgeComing]

christ, the tories have a councillor in bloody Shettleston which must be the first time they've managed that for a very long time

[IceAgeComing]

East Lothian (NOC Hold):

Labour 9 (+1)
Conservative 7    (+4)
SNP 6 (−3)
Independent 0 (−2)

#LabourSurge

The Tories are gaining councillors in lots of odd places in Scotland - they have Councillors now in Shettleston (Glasgow) and Ferguslie Park (Paisley, part of Renfrewshire Council) which aren't traditional Tory land by any means.  Part of that is STV and the Conservatives aren't exactly doing to be winning seats there in June, but its not good...

[IceAgeComing]

That Edinburgh council is a mess and I can't see anything other than a Labour/Tory minority coalition coming from it - the Greens there would rather work with Labour over the SNP but I can't see them ever backing a Tory-led administration; who knows what the Libs do...

My hunch is that the main change is that Labour voters are now broadly preferencing the Tories while in 2012 they definitely weren't - they probably didn't go anywhere very strongly then; I don't have any data though.   That would explain why they've lost councillors despite an (apparent) increase in first preference votes from 2012.

[IceAgeComing]

Just looking at the Stirling Council results; Labour seem to have needed a load of preferences to get elected: in every ward they finished behind the Conservatives.  This includes Bannockburn which is very much a not-Tory place; yet the Conservative candidate got 640 votes while the two Labour candidates got 408: the final result was 2 SNP and 1 Labour which suggests that Labour do very well on preferences with non-unionist parties (the Liberals got 62 and we got 104: there's also any SNP quota floating around - actually looking at it the result makes no sense: there might be a typo since I don't see how Labour get ahead of the Tories).  They've done much better that I suspect they expected - in the Dunblane ward they got both of their candidates comfortably elected in the first round: they had a 100 vote surplus afterwards.

They haven't published the stage-by-stage breakdown yet so there's nothing 100% definitive at this point though...

[IceAgeComing]

That's actually not a terrible result for Labour in Scotland; considering everyone's expectations.  We've picked up our vote and gained a few councillors which is always nice - really the SNP are the ones that ought to be dissapointed...

[IceAgeComing]

It'd be interesting to see a comparison between that map and the map in the last set of local elections in which the Tories did comparably well.  I'm not sure when that would have been though: probably one of the last set of the two-tier council elections but the smaller wards and different voting systems would skew things