22 November 2024

Labour is losing big in the council by-election sweepstakes

The electorate is more fluid than ever. How worried should the government be?

On many Thursdays, thousands of voters go to the polls to elect new county, district or borough councillors. It’s important – councillors are the people responsible for voting through council tax rises. As a consequence of incumbents’ death, imprisonment, suspension or resignation, they happen with relative frequency. They’re not opinion polls. They’re not damning proof of this argument or that, or this event at Prime Minister’s Questions or that news item in the midday bulletins; but in aggregate they can serve as decent indicators of the general direction of the country.

I’ve been watching them since 2012. Labour’s latest go at defending council seats – as a landslide-winning administration – marks one of the worst performances we have seen in recent history.

Let’s compare what happened under the last landslide administration, 1997. When Labour came into office that year, a slew of independents, Liberal Democrats and Conservative candidates ate into Labour’s local seats. The party lost two in every ten seats it was defending, and suffered on average a loss of 6 percentage points of support.

But today? In the first 150 days of the Keir Starmer administration, Labour has lost almost four in ten of the seats it went out to defend.

In council by-elections incumbent parties typically suffer a lowering in their support. So far, these by-elections are showing Labour’s vote is down and it’s losing nearly 40 per cent of the seats it’s defending. If this is repeated in next May’s county council elections, it will lose upwards of 80 of the 400 seats it’s defending.

But next year’s council elections should fall along slightly more complex lines than that. The last time these seats were up for election was in 2021, and they are predominantly in the rural English shires. In 2021, Labour trailed the Conservatives by 10 percentage points. And despite the odd opinion poll saying otherwise, Labour still has a lead over the Conservatives nationally. In isolation, Labour is losing support; but when up against the Conservatives it is a different story.

This is worth remembering. There is every reason to think that if the Conservative fall from grace continues, along with the split in the rightward vote, that Labour might even gain seats.

These council by-elections are showing something else – an improvement in the Reform vote. In previous by-elections, Ukip generally performed poorly – it couldn’t generate a ground game to cling on to its precious wins. Admittedly, there are few Reform-won seats for the party to defend. But of that number, Reform looks likely to hold on – the party’s vote is up an impressive 11 percentage points.

So what do these numbers mean for the government? Labour is losing almost four in every ten of the seats it set out to defend, but in comparison to the general performance of incumbent administrations it is not that bad. Consider Margaret Thatcher in 1983, or indeed coalition-era Conservatives, or Theresa May’s shock 2017 result. The main point of consternation for Labour now should be that this has happened off the back of a landslide. Though, as we have discussed several times, that was thanks to more complicated forces than enthusiasm for Labour.

It speaks, ultimately, to this more fluid and swingy electorate; an electorate that isn’t particularly loyal to any given party. Labour’s landslide came from extremely disgruntled voters. Let’s not be surprised if the voters continue to be just that.