2023 UK Local Elections

[JimJamUK]

Obviously still 5 months away, but some thoughts on each party:
Conservatives - Probably going to be pretty dire, but last time was as well so they may pick up a few of the ‘freak losses’ to smaller parties/independents while losing loads to Labour.
Labour - Should be very good, and benefit from the fact 2019 was an awful performance vs the smaller parties/independents which means they should be gaining a lot from everyone.  
Lib Dems - Arguably the biggest wildcard. They did very well in 2019 and their polling has been rather anaemic this Parliament so they could lose a lot of seats. Still, they’re competent at local elections and can pick up most of the ‘not Conservative’ vote in places they properly campaign. No idea how it washes out.
Greens - The party did very well in 2019 and will sustain some losses, but are better organised than they used to be so will be hoping to balance this out with gains elsewhere (and entrench in many of their 2019 gains).
Reform - Will they actually get into double figures? The party doesn’t seem to have much of an activist base and their by-election performances have been rather weak, but a party polling 5% or so should be able to get some decent performances, right?
Others - Minor parties and independents did very well in 2019 and will sustain serious losses this year. UKIP won 31 seats and will totally disappear, a lot of the independents only won on the back of the hideous unpopularity of the 2 main parties and will sustain net losses, probably even against the Conservatives. Still, you’d expect incumbency, the Conservatives unpopularity and the type of councils up this year to deliver a larger than normal cohort.

[JimJamUK]

What councils will people be looking out for results wise?

All of them, these are some notable ones from different points of view:
Bolton, Sheffield, Wirral - Can recent Labour underperformance be overcome by a strong national environment, pushing them close to a majority of seats?
Dudley, Walsall - Labour need a good result this year to take a majority next year.
Blackpool, Darlington, Derby, Hartlepool - Poor results in the 2019 general election for Labour but they should be making gains off the Tories this year nonetheless.
Bournemouth etc, Canterbury - Labour will expect strong gains in areas they were previously weak.
Bolsover, Middlesbrough, Stoke - Poor results in both 2019 local and general elections, but Labour should be making big gains off independents as well as some Tories.
Bath etc, Bedford - Three way contests, can the Lib Dems entrench their strong 2019 results?
Brighton and Hove, Mid Suffolk, Norwich - Can the Greens continue their recent advances?

[JimJamUK]

Take a close look at the Wirral results last year - Labour were *very* unlucky then in seats terms.

And in fact their recent Sheffield performances haven't been terrible either - again quite a few close results that they were on the wrong side of.

Bolton, yes totally agreed. Labour came back well in Sunderland last year though, so who knows.

(and re your last comment, I hear Labour are quite optimistic in Brighton - looks like next month will be really brutal for the Tories there and complete wipeout is not totally impossible)

Yeah, there’s been a general flattening of the non-Labour vote in a lot of metropolitan councils, so that in a good year Labour can make a lot of gains off other parties (the Tories, definitely).

Bolton will be a mess. Labour could gain/hold off a variety of different parties, and should benefit from a relatively well organised Reform UK. Still, their recovery in 2022 was rather patchy, suggesting some organisation issues that may prevent them doing as well as they should, especially against the Lib Dems/localists.

That make sense. They gained a seat off the Tories in a by-election and the previous Labour administration was a bit of a mess. How the current Green one is doing, I’m not sure (but it doesn’t look like the pr disaster the 2011-2015 one was).

[JimJamUK]

On my council of South Gloucestershire we could see a LD-Labour coalition if the LDs can play their cards right.

The Tories' national woes are compounded here by a deeply unpopular local administration.

Tbh, it’s more a shock they didn’t lose it in 2019. Their vote held up well back then (and perhaps the boundary changes helped?), so it’s certainly on paper one of the lowest hanging fruit for the Conservatives to lose.

[JimJamUK]

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.

You cannot run a national local elections campaign based on local issues. I don’t know what to say to the people who are advocating this.

[JimJamUK]

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.

You cannot run a national local elections campaign based on local issues. I don’t know what to say to the people who are advocating this.

Why not? Why focus on things a local council has no control over?

Because local councils have very little actual power, and that which they do have is not necessarily on issues where there is universal agreement between the national Labour Party and every single local council/candidate. You cannot promise anything on council tax given some councils face serious financial pressure while others are never going to elect Labour so they could promise anything. You cannot propose doing something on housing given some Labour councils will be overseeing significant housing developments while other local parties will be campaigning strongly on the need to stop them. You cannot promise to fund x service more when individual councils all have their own priorities and considerations to take into account.

Basically, it would be a campaign with little substantive to say and would be immediately contradicted by a load of Labour councils and local parties if anything concrete was announced. 

[JimJamUK]

On another note It should be compulsory for everyone in U.K. politics to talk to a truly normal person (no not your parents who subscribe to the Times) about local government- most people don’t know the difference between their directly elected ward councillors and the local council, let alone the bizarre way that council tax is increased, or how planning law works- you often see people referring to powers local councils haven’t had for decades! (E.g building control)

Yep, and don’t even bother asking people the difference between their district and county council, you’re not going to get a reassuring answer.

[JimJamUK]

For our international posters, it’s worth mentioning that voter ID is being rolled out across England for the first time this election. A non-negligible share of voters don’t appear to know this and/or will not bring an eligible form of ID to the polling station, so expect a bit of a car crash on election day followed by harsh criticism afterwards from some quarters. The partisan impact is unclear, Labour leaning working class voters are less likely to have ID, but so are very Conservative leaning pensioners, so who knows. If a significant number of in-person voters are disenfranchised, then the Conservative leaning and already relatively high turnout postal voters could make an important difference on the margins.

[JimJamUK]

Another set of Problem Administrations are those where there's a rag-tag-and-bobtail coalition, often in place because the party that usually has a majority has lost it. Most end up being total trainwrecks within months for obvious reasons.

Are you suggesting that a Labour-UKIP-Lib Dem coalition with Green and independent confidence and supply may not go swimmingly?

[JimJamUK]

But more seriously, it will be interesting to see the impact of the freak 2019 changes of control next month. The implosion of the 2 major parties, especially the Conservatives, led to some rag tag coalitions, and even outright majority switches (keep an eye on Uttlesford which went overwhelmingly Residents and has subsequently lost planning powers due to their NIMBYism). Some of these will prove popular and once again benefit from Conservative woes, a few others may prove to be the rare Conservatives gains.

[JimJamUK]

Redcar is a particularly weird council. I think it's a liberal & independent coalition; with Labour in third, but it appears to be one of those places were the previous Labour council imploded due to a feud.

The Labour Party might not even make up that much ground given their by-elections there, in stark contrast to neighbouring Middlesbrough.

[JimJamUK]

My reading of last years locals and the one before was that the Liberals and greens were much more effective at picking up seats off the Conservatives but equally voters were becoming a lot more tactical- these two factors plus a stronger Labour lead could all prove difficult bordering on awful for the Conservatives.

Although given the current Labour lead, there’s a risk that tactical voting could go wrong (both people voting Labour in places they won’t win, and people voting Lib Dem etc but Labour actually coming 2nd).

[JimJamUK]

Just a reminder that the Conservatives losing 1000 councillors would mean they were losing just under 1/3 of those up, overwhelmingly last elected in the disastrous 2019 elections. To lose 2000, as supposedly someone, somewhere predicted, would mean about they are losing 60% of their seats. I remain sceptical that even with a dire result in terms of vote share, the Conservatives will actually lose as many seats as people seem to be expecting from such a result.

[JimJamUK]

That 2019 comparison has seemingly messed with some analysis, because polling during the final days of May's government was bad for both Labour and Conservatives. But in the locals that ensued Labour was in an analytically bad position: both parties lost voters to Remain-focused Lib-Dems and Greens, but the lack of similar hyper-Leave Brexit Party candidates meant the Tories were the next best option in specific councils. So when someone says the Tories now have similar polling to 2019, that conflates the local and national, ignores how coalitions have shifted in the chaotic four years, and ignores how Labour is much higher than the Tories cause they are winning comparable numbers of Tory voters to those in 2019 who opted for a hard-remain or hard-Leave party.

Well done on doing all those councils, I tried doing predictions a few years ago and it took an age. I have to disagree on this point though. The 2019 locals were nationally basically a repeat of the 2017 general election in Labour vs Conservative contests. There were some Leave voting councils where the Conservatives did relatively well, but equally there were some where Labour did particularly well (think Bassetlaw, Telford etc). In practice, Leave voters who were pissed off at the major 2 parties, just like their Remain counterparts, voted for whatever minor party was locally active (and in some cases simply on the ballot), whether that was Lib Dem, Green, Independent, Localist or various hard right outfits. I remember it being remarked by John Curtice that Lib Dem gains had remarkably little correlation with Remain support, their surge in support was almost entirely localist and NOTA rather than Brexit based.

[JimJamUK]

I’ll be staying up so hopefully this thread will be some use to fellow posters. BritainElects is probably your best source for results, unless you feel like venturing into English local council websites (do so at your own risk).

PS: I wouldn’t bother trying to watch TV sources, they tend to be very spin heavy.

[JimJamUK]

Political editors all going for some variation on "Lib Dems ecstatic, Tories worried, who knows whether Labour will do 'well enough'..."

Robert Peston claiming that Labour may be struggling in “ex Red Wall Brexiter Midlands and north”. Well if the Tories are collapsing and the Lib Dems are doing well (disproportionately in the ‘Blue Wall’), then where the hell are the Tories losing votes to in these places then (and where are Labour gaining)?

[JimJamUK]

Big Labour gain. This is one of the Toriest wards in Durham (and the Green vote won’t have been completely closet Labour fwiw).

https://twitter.com/britainelects/status/1654243010773671936?s=61&t=I1DE8_cg...

[JimJamUK]

Small drop in the Tory vote, nothing too catastrophic. Caution, the first (?) Sunderland result to declare last year was relatively good for Labour (as in not just minimal losses), so obviously need to see more.

https://twitter.com/britainelects/status/1654249099611238400?s=61&t=I1DE8_cg...

[JimJamUK]

Redhill ward also a very easy gain for Labour from UKIP, with a better swing from Con to Lab. interestingly, Reform are 2nd on 15% which would indicate some people are finally actually voting for them (caveat that Sunderland council was in 2019 the sort of place where scores of people voted for anyone, and I mean anyone, who wasn’t from the big 2 parties).

[JimJamUK]

The first few results from Sunderland look largely much better for Labour than 2019, but not necessarily too much change from last year. It’s a special place and more to come of course.

[JimJamUK]

First non-metropolitan result. Pretty big swing from Lib Dem to Conservative. Probably absolutely meaningless.

https://twitter.com/britainelects/status/1654257402017988608?s=61&t=I1DE8_cg...

[JimJamUK]

Labour gain Barnes in Sunderland, which they haven’t won since 2016.

[JimJamUK]

The Tories have won a ward somewhere according to the BBC graphics. Not sure exactly where.

Their safe ward in Sunderland, albeit not very impressively.

[JimJamUK]

Labour have gained Washington South in Sunderland. As befits a ward that voted Green in 2019 on an incredibly fractured vote, it had actually swung Tory from last year and Labour were only 100 votes off losing it to them.

[JimJamUK]

First result from Stoke has seen a massive swing directly from Conservative to Labour. However, I must warn our international posters that Stoke is/was a psephological word for ‘batsh**t local politics” so don’t read too much into it yet.