UK Local Elections 2022

[EastAnglianLefty]

Prior to the 1970s councillors were elected to three-year rather than four-year terms. All councils work on an annual budget cycle. The major difference between councils electing all at once and councils using the thirds system is that in the former case it's easier to get away with doing unpleasant stuff in a budget because you've got more time for people to forget it.

[EastAnglianLefty]

It is, frankly, an obvious lie. The tipping point wards in RBKC have a higher proportion of baronets than they do of social housing.

[EastAnglianLefty]

It is, frankly, an obvious lie. The tipping point wards in RBKC have a higher proportion of baronets than they do of social housing.

Didn't labour win the constituency in 2017 and it was pretty marginal in 2019 ?

The Kensington constituency doesn't include Chelsea, which is very safely Conservative. North Kensington is very strong for Labour and there are a few other pockets of support scattered about, but Chelsea and South Kensington are incredibly wealthy and their electorates are rock-solid Conservative under any conceivable circumstances.

[EastAnglianLefty]

It is, frankly, an obvious lie. The tipping point wards in RBKC have a higher proportion of baronets than they do of social housing.

Didn't labour win the constituency in 2017 and it was pretty marginal in 2019 ?

The areas that now cover RBKC has long mixed ultra-poor and ultra-rich. The Kensington constituency covers the northernmost 75% or so of RBKC; the southern 25% is perhaps as posh as you can find in London. Labour has a massive hill to climb to actually win a majority in RBKC.

Perhaps a majority is out of reach, but couldn't the council got to NOC if the Lib Dems make gains in the rich southern bit ?

If literally everything goes wrong for the Tories, I guess it's possible.

It is, frankly, an obvious lie. The tipping point wards in RBKC have a higher proportion of baronets than they do of social housing.

Didn't labour win the constituency in 2017 and it was pretty marginal in 2019 ?

The Kensington constituency doesn't include Chelsea, which is very safely Conservative. North Kensington is very strong for Labour and there are a few other pockets of support scattered about, but Chelsea and South Kensington are incredibly wealthy and their electorates are rock-solid Conservative under any conceivable circumstances.

And, actually, if the Kensington constituency was its own council a Labour majority would still be a massive, massive longshot due to the spread of support in the seat.

So what you're saying is that there's a lot of Labour votes in Kensington, but it's concentrated in some wards in the north and thus inefficiently distributed?

The Kensington constituency is made up of 13 RBKC wards and a portion of another. Those 13 wards return 35 councillors, of whom one is a Lib Dem, 13 are Labour and the remaining 21 are Tories. Earls Court ward (2 Tories, 1 LD) is somewhat marginal, but there's only one other ward that would fall to Labour on a 10% swing since 2018 and that only just.

The Tory wards are very safe, the Labour wards are mostly even safer and there are almost no swing voters - you didn't even see them in 2018 when the backdrop to the election was the council's incompetence and lack of interest in its tenants leading to the deaths of over 70 people in the Grenfell fire.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I would be cautious about predicting big Lib Dem gains at the next election. They have done well in local elections before and then fell flat on their faces at the general election soon after. Their current big gains are in the context of polling below their 2019 general election performance (and for most of this Parliament they were polling quite a bit lower), which doesn’t suggest much success will be found outside of places where they have established themselves as the clear and credible non-Conservative challenger and targeted their resources fairly narrowly.

It's worth noting that the Lib Dems seem to have been incredibly successful at hoovering up the ABC vote in these elections. Which offers them a lot of potential in bits of the country (chiefly areas where they were competitive in the 90s and 2000s) but won't be as useful in places where they're starting from a very distant third.