As I was eating breakfast, I was informed by the BBC that tomorrow there will be local elections ‘across England and Wales’. Technically correct perhaps, but for the peripheries – Wales, Cornwall, the rural south west, Cumbria and the rural north east, as well as most of the English midlands and East Anglia beyond Essex – there will only be the largely meaningless Police and Crime Commissioner elections, no doubt set to record the lowest turnouts in history.
Almost a half of the local election seats up for grabs are in southern England with most of these concentrated in the south east between Hampshire and Essex. This is where two-tier local authorities still exist, at least for now, as they nervously await bankruptcy after decades of Tory/Lib Dem and Labour Governments’ underfunding. Another quarter of the contests will be in the big city metropolitan boroughs of the West Midlands, Greater Manchester, Yorkshire and the North East.
Half-truths and sloppy reporting are not restricted to the location of these elections. There is widespread talk that the Tories could lose half their current seats, with Labour and Reform UK being the main beneficiaries. But, while Labour may gain seats in the metropolitan boroughs, this will be limited as they already hold 50 per cent of the seats being defended there. Furthermore, in much of southern England the obvious centrist non-Tory alternative is not Labour at all, but Liberal Democrats or Greens.
The scale of the Tories’ losses depends on voters’ willingness to vote tactically for the strongest non-Tory party, as they’ve been doing in parliamentary by-elections recently. But, given the less prominent media coverage, this may not be case in the locals.
Moreover, in the vast majority of wards Labour will have to compete with at least one of and often both Lib Dems and the Greens, not to mention TUSC and George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain. Meanwhile, on the far right the Conservatives face opposition from Reform UK in just 21 per cent of wards. Despite excessive hyping by the media, Reform UK’s local election intervention is less than inspiring and far below the levels achieved by its predecessor Ukip in the 2010s.
The electoral arithmetic is therefore working for the Tories which makes claims of 500 lost seats look a mite optimistic. Given the geography and contestation patterns of these local elections, those losses may also not primarily go to Labour. But who knows, given the unpredictable eighteenth-century voting system in England and the various voter suppression scams that have been quietly rolled out by the Tories.
Kernowpolitico: notes from the periphery 