2023 UK Local Elections

[Filuwaúrdjan]

My suspicion is that if this all goes ahead, then at many polling stations the rules will be quietly ignored. British polling districts are usually quite small, so if you're a reliable voter, the poll-workers usually know you by sight after a few rounds of elections...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I commented on the other U.K. page but it seems very much like moving around armies than don’t exist when both parties talk about local councils- we have at least 3(?) who are bankrupt and several others that would be classed as failed states if they were countries.

Yes, local government in the form that we all grew up knowing simply doesn't exist now. There used to be such things as popular local administrations - imagine that now!

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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.

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There's something about Labour politics in the North-East isn't there?

It's machine politics hilarity in most of it, not so very different to South Wales really but Teesside... now... um... that's special.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

One thing to note is that the Conservatives will be much more vulnerable to losses vs. Labour than anyone else as the main feature of the (very odd!) 2019 locals was that the two big parties performed terribly against smaller parties and independents while holding up reasonably well against each other, with a small number of exceptions here and there.

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By this point it has become a thing that certain people in the media simply say for forms sake, I think.

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And we're off: it's actually a local by-election, but Labour have gained Chester-le-Street East (Durham) on a very large swing from 2021.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

General pattern of the Sunderland results so far are pretty ominous for the Conservatives, to whatever extent that means much. Substantial drops on last year in most wards; miles out of contention in some where they've been close in recent years, including polling less than half Labour's vote in a ward they came within an ace of winning in 2021.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Labour have gained the Barnes ward in Sunderland, which is a relatively notable result to the extent that individual ward results can be.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Tories gain a seat in Harlow overall, so that has to be a bummer for Labour, even though they were defending the lions share of the seats. However, I think their vote share went up across the council and of course won the vote overall.

They won some seats they lost last year and the seats they held narrowly then, they won comfortably. Just one of those councils that is particularly strongly affected by the oddness of electing in thirds...

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Strong rumours that Labour are heading for a majority in Monkeyville.

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Hartlepool. There's a story behind it.

They hanged a monkey because they thought it was a Frenchman.

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Huge Labour gains in Tamworth, apparently.

Edit: just checked the borough's website, and yes, it's true.

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Stoke is looking interesting. Clearly a swing to Labour with the collapse of the City Independent vote. Can’t work out if it’s going to lead to a Labour majority though.

City Independents have finally held a seat, though even there with a big increase in the Labour vote and the party vaulting from a poor third to a solid second.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I think Dudley is genuinely a bit disappointing, though I don't pretend to understand that place.

I think 2022 may have been an unusually good result for Labour in Dudley, yesterdays result is still perfectly decent imv.

The Dudley results are fine, apart from one ward which was randomly lost against the general swing because the incumbent councillor is personally unpopular.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Labour are doing well in the sort of areas (and so presumably with the sort of voters) they want to, so will be very happy.* What you aren't seeing is them sweeping all before them in places you would never expect in the way that happened in the 1995 locals for instance, but I'm dubious as to how much that actually means or if it's even possible given how local politics and local political organizations are these days. In a lot of the districts where that happened back then Labour just don't have a local organization to speak of now, whereas back then the still relatively recent legacy of the pre-1974 local government system meant that there were traces of organization all over the place.

As an aside, the fact that the Tories are losing a lot of ground to the LibDems in some areas compared to 2019 is impressively dreadful.

_{*There are random disappointments here and there, but there always are; much as there are always random rays of light in otherwise grim nights.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Conservatives lose Bromsgrove to NOC.

LibDems beat them in the more upmarket parts of Bromsgrove town, while Labour did well in the downmarket and white-flighty bits of it and also the very similar areas immediately south of Birmingham. They still held on to their rich commuter-rural base, but...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

This is actually a really impressive performance by the Lib Dems — they’ve only gained slightly over 100 fewer seats than Labour have (which is obviously a much bigger proportional gain) — and that’s despite the fact that in a lot of the relevant councils (especially those where the Tories are their main opponents), they already had exceptionally good results in 2019.

They've done better than could have been rationally predicted, which is not a thing that happens often. I wonder whether one issue is that so many Con groups in certain parts of the country don't have much functional campaigning strength these days?

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Whenever Amber Valley finishes it may end up being one of if not the place with the raw largest tory loss of councilors - redistricting made a mess of the wards, the Tories were at a historic high point, and everyone is up on the ballot. Labour are already fmaking mass flips.

Good God, Labour are sweeping Heanor. The Brexit Era really is dead.

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Big Labour majority on Amber Valley district (which includes Heanor), to complete Labour's eye-poppingly good showing in Derbyshire.

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One of the most interesting 'deep data' results from these elections has to be from the Black Country. Not that the Tories held on, no that's purely the product of the thirds system of electing councilors. If everyone was up, or if one of the 2021 or 2022 classes were then the region would be just as red as the rest of the country. More I think its interesting because the Tories effectively matched 2019 here, whereas almost everywhere else - including such safe areas as Lincolnshire or the rural eastern shires - saw the bottom fall out. But Labour didn't advance at all in the Black Country councils. This is in contrast to other urban Leave-voting areas that are demographically similar which are all going to have Labour administrations of one type or another thanks to big Labour gains.

I think that's reading a bit much into things: Labour had unexpectedly good results in Dudley borough in the 2019 locals and most of the wards not won this year will never realistically elect Labour councillors absent freak circumstances (the main exception was a ward randomly lost against the general trend due to the incumbent councillor being personally unpopular: other than that it's really just one ward these days. There's basically a division between the Black Country wards and the wards dominated by postwar suburbia), whereas in Sandwell the Tories essentially ran paper candidates even in their good wards in the 2019 locals (producing a genuinely surreal set of results that were noted as such at the time), making comparisons pointless. Walsall is different (where Labour had decent advances in a large number of wards but managed to gain none of them), but then Walsall always produces odd results: e.g. in 2021 Labour held up a lot better there than in other councils in the area, which was not expected.

Which makes one wonder if the 2019 results here are the good-for-Labour benchmarks.

Very much not: there are wards they won about two-to-one on Thursday that they lost about two-to-one in the General Election and that's not an exaggeration.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

What are peoples thoughts on the National Vote Share data?

It’s v funny how after an awful day when it was revised by Sky every single Tory is now claiming it was a terrible result for labour and things are actually fine.

Which seems bizarre as A.) the third parties won’t get 20+% B.) Labours targeting operation worked.

It's always been a bit of a joke (I'm old enough to remember all manner of implausible totals during the Blair era so have never been a fan) and this time around the figures genuinely don't line up with the results on display, which suggests that they've made severe errors somewhere. If there's a set of local elections in which Labour do very well in the North Midlands and in the grottier parts of Kent and your model suggests a Hung Parliament, then your model is clearly broken.

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For those that like a good laugh, Labour did pretty well in the constituencies of both Liz Truss and Matt Hancock.

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Hence why they were also so slow to realise the damage they did with the farming community

Talking of which, have you seen some of the results in agricultural wards in Suffolk? Oof.

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In Stockton they gained a lot of seats off right-wing independents in wards that were historically Conservative strongholds and have also benefited from a very favourable redistribution of seats.