British Local Elections, May 2024

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It was intended that there would be no risk of 'I've seen enough' poasts for the N.E. Mayor, but a decision was made by at least some council officers to break omerta:

https://twitter.com/danhollandnews/status/1786362583995367547

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https://twitter.com/danhollandnews/status/1786374664236741101

I would be fascinated by a lower level breakdown of this, but it shall never be.

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That is an Extremely Burnley map.

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McGuinness with a small lead in Newcastle. It's a shame that we won't get wards results, though I think I can make a good guess.

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Driscoll has conceded in a chat with journalists. Reportedly he immediately pivoted to talking about running again in four years time.

I wonder how much money is left over from the crowdfunding.

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If that NEV is anywhere near accurate

It isn't, which is why none of us ever take it seriously. It might be useful to assume that some of the regulars here do actually know what we're talking about.

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Fundamentally, of course, there will be a substantial number of people who will baulk at voting for Rotherham Labour in a council election for various reasons and will be for a while, even if voting Labour for anything else is no issue.

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Dudley is in - Tied council. But not at the 50-50 line. With 3 Lib-Dems and 1 Indie Labour will form a minority.  Less Labour seats than desired but still the tight result suggested by past performance.

LibDems started doing well in a usually Labour but sometimes Conservative ward due to a planning dispute (they were against the development, naturally) and now hold all three seats there.

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It's a shocking things I know, but local elections will often boil down to local issues.

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Low Traffic Neighbourhoods. Anyway, the specific difference between Oxford and Cambridge on this is that the administration in the latter lost a by-election over the issue and dropped it like a hot potato, and the former did not.

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Labour lost 5 seats in Bradford. Were these Muslim heavy wards they lost?

Yes. Labour did really badly in strongly Muslim wards in the Yorkshire Mets. They also lost Park ward in Calderdale to the Workers Party.

The Muslim communities in West Yorkshire - which for those who aren't aware are a mixture of Mirpuri Pakistani (especially in Bradford) and Gujarati - are amongst the most (small 'c') conservative in the country, which may be relevant in this context given the resulting stronger communal ties and organization.

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An especially foul result for the Conservatives came at Worcester, where they're down to just one seat now as their usual wards have been lost to the Greens and LibDems and Labour have down well in the sketchier areas. Who is this solitary councillor, this group of one? Because reality is entirely and absurdly unrealistic, it is somehow Alan Amos. Mr Amos, who had previously been a councillor in Enfield, was elected as the Conservative MP for Hexham in 1987 and seemed set for a fruitful career as cartoonish hard-right culture warrior and public moralizer until he was rather unfortunately given a police caution for public indecency on Hampstead Heath just before the 1992 General Election. His parliamentary career over, he attempted to return to Enfield council, but the local party would not have it. Shortly afterwards he had one of those Damascene Conversions, he said, and joined the Labour Party and, after diligently running as a candidate in a hopeless constituency in 2001, returned to elected office as councillor for the rapidly gentrifying Millwall ward in Tower Hamlets in 2002. Having lost that seat in 2006, Amos relocated all the way to Worcester (geography, as we have already seen, being no barrier) and was elected as a Labour councillor in 2008. His relationship with the group leadership deteriorated as soon as it became clear that they did not wish him to become the Mayor of Worcester for a year. Then, in 2014 and with the control of Worcester City Council on a knife-edge, Amos quit the Party to become an Independent, was elected as Mayor with Conservative votes and then himself voted to allow for the formation of a Conservative administration. A year later he rejoined the Conservative Party and, once again, became a cartoonish, hard-right culture warrior.

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I'm very confused about why the press are pretending it's a 'mixed seat of results' for the Conservatives.

The handful of good results in the council elections have nearly all occurred in places where the main opposition group is... problematic... and this also goes for the somewhat larger list of places where the results have been relatively good: and in the context of this set of locals, even the relatively good results have been objectively bad ones. Why there were some councils where Labour held up just fine in 2008 as well: this is the way with local elections and, well, it's meaningless.

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Labour winning because of a better performance in the Black Country boroughs despite everything else would be the single funniest possible outcome, if that is how things end up going.

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Yeah, it's unclear to me why it would only be in Coventry.

I would assume the agent has been able to convince the RO that there was some sloppiness in the counting that may have caused errors. I note that they've only been able to argue for bundle checks in the other boroughs.

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Street's lead in Walsall is about 6k votes, which is down from about 16k last time around.

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Street's lead in Dudley drops from c. 29k to c.12k.

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This is clearly extremely tight. The basic problem for Street is that a) Sandwell is Sandwell and that b) Coventry Labour did very well in the City Council elections.

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Byrne's lead in Coventry last time around was about a thousand votes.

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So, where does this leave us? With only Sandwell left, Street's lead is down to 11,455 votes. Last time around, Liam Byrne led on first preferences in Sandwell by 5,171 votes. If (and we don't know until we get the numbers) the patterns seen in the other Black Country boroughs and also Coventry are repeated in Sandwell, then Street has lost.

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Liam... those... clothes... my goodness... what on...

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Liam... those... clothes... my goodness... what on...

I'm afraid there are no decent clothes left

Can a chap reasonably eat his piping hot bowl of soup whilst wearing such pale colours?

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Perhaps their main miss was suggesting the independent Jamie Driscoll might win in the North East - this was put down to oversampling "highly engaged" and mostly online voters

Straightforward lack of SES weighting in that case, as I thought at the time.

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My opinion of Mr Beater, as we might call him, has generally not been positive various reasons, but this is a new low.

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The advance Tory spin was 450-500 net losses - so their targets met for the third year running!

The only set of targets that are regularly hit in Rishi Sunak's Britain.