UK local elections, May 2018

[Pericles]

It'll be interesting to see how this goes. Problem is expectations are through the roof for Labour and conventional wisdom is that it'll be a Tory disaster, so a good result for Labour may end up being seen as underwhelming.

[Pericles]

Labour has had an underwhelming night it seems. Especially compared to expectations which they puffed up far too much. May is slightly safer and Corbyn slightly weaker(probably won't have a dramatic impact though).

[Pericles]

Hmm, seems a bit underwhelming all around. No great gains for Labour and a few troubling losses. Tories do better than expected but still tenuous. Lib Dems have a good showing but not the anti-Brexit wave they hoped for.

For those wanting an idea of the larger significance of these results so far, the Thrasher Projection, which calculates what result the party's proportion of the local election vote seen tonight would result in if the whole country was voting in a GE, came up with these numbers:

Tories: 305
Labour: 261
SNP: 35
Lib Dem: 26
Others: 23

https://twitter.com/faisalislam/status/992287533600948229

This would mean the Tories would lose the ability to govern with a majority by teaming up with the DUP. Labour, however, would still be a few seats short, even with all the other non-Tory/DUP parties' support. In essence, the hungiest of hung parliaments.

On those exact results, Labour could also get support from Plaid Cymru, maybe Sylvia Hermon(not sure) and the Greens(5 or 6 MPs in total currently), Labour+LibDem+PC+Green+SNP would add up to 327-328 seats. With 7 Sinn Fein MPs abstaining, that gives the governing coalition an 11 or 12-seat majority. Not very stable by any means but it would be mathematically possible for Labour to form a government, though slight shifts could make that a lot easier or enable the Tories to keep power and put Labour back to opposition.

[Pericles]

Ah well, my bad on Hermon, I remember hearing that she could have supported a rainbow coalition in 2010 but forgot about Corbyn's IRA links. Still, a Labour government would be mathematically possible, but maybe not politically. Certainly it seems neither party has been able to break away. Then again, 2017's local elections weren't very predictive of the election a month later-and there isn't even an election next month. But maybe that was more due to the shifts in the campaign and how bad the Tory campaign was, and this does seem to be a useful indicator, if imperfect, on the political environment.