by liberal japonicus
If you are singing along at home, it should be ‘Britannia rues the knaves!’ Suggestions for the second line gratefully accepted.
Anyway, a post to discuss the shitshow in the UK. I’m taking the liberty of lifting up some comments because I can’t bear to write something that would require me to look back at this dumpster fire.
From GftNC
Meanwhile, Reform have so far gained almost 900 seats in local councils, and Labour (and the Tories) have lost around 500 each (I’m too disheartened to catch up with their exact figures). The Greens have done quite well, but given that their leader Zack Polanski is currently dealing with accusations that he has been fiddling his council tax by misreporting where he lives, and has been proven to have lied about e.g. having been a representative of the Red Cross, things don’t look too great for them either. It’s true that the latest accusations about Zack Polanski surfaced very near the end of the campaign, as did the news that Farage had accepted an undeclared “gift” of £5 million from a Filipino-resident crypto billionaire just before deciding to stand for parliament, so just maybe those stories didn’t have time to cut through. Although this election was just for local councils, I still think it is a very ominous sign of where we are going and what the British public is prepared to overlook.
and this
The count is done in Wales, Plaid Cymru won the most seats (43), but 6 short of a majority, Reform won 34, and Labour 9. Labour had been in power there since 1922, according to Wikipedia the longest winning streak in the world for a political party in a democracy. The various commentators (and voters) seemed to indicate that a good proportion of the electorate voted Plaid tactically to keep Reform from power. In Scotland, the SNP won the most seats, but not enough for a majority (they would need 65). Labour (17) are slightly ahead of Reform (15), and there are still 7 seats to declare. The English numbers are much worse than when I posted before, with 7 still to declare. If you look at this link, make sure to click on “How this election works” for each of the three nations, they’re all different.
I listen to the New Statesman podcasts and they are agonizing over Starmer, essentially ‘he’s a nice guy, how can he be such a [put your own insult here]’. This one was done as the smoking ruins of the Labour loss were coming into view. A lot there about how things in Westminster are going to shake out, but if this debacle is any indication, one of the problems has been a concentration on Westminster politics to the exclusion of the rest of the country.
Haven’t seen much about Polanski’s issues with council tax (and it is darkly fascinating to me that similar issues have been weaponized against Angela Rayner), but I have seen a bit more about Farage’s sugar daddy. However, I don’t think people who voted Reform were voting for Farage, they were voting against Labour’s inability/absence of desire to put some folks up against the wall. The New Statesman had an earlier interview with Starmer where he refused to say that the country was broken. I’d also note that i have not seen that once popular meme of Question Dog sitting at a table with a mug of coffee while a room is engulfed in flames. Too close to home, I guess.
Unfortunately, we are going to get a lot of speculation about the leadership challenge to Starmer and all the inside baseball (to use a US metaphor) of how all that works, which I’m happy to chat about, but am not going to front page because it seems like a lot of bullshit.
Anyway, as they say, go for your life.
Well, for anybody who wants a more up-to-date (and hugely more informed) update on the election, here it is from Comment is Freed:
Seven things we learnt from the elections
Sam Freedman
May 10
Hopefully Comment is Freed readers will have felt a sense of familiarity as election results came in over Thursday night and Friday.
While I certainly didn’t get all my predictions right, with a few exceptions all the contests played out along the lines set out. I forecast the correct result in 107 out of 136 English councils, and close to the exact Welsh Senedd results. If you’re interested in a more detailed analysis of what I got right and wrong I’ve included an appendix at the end.
In my last post I said there was no plan from any of the main candidates to challenge Keir Starmer for the Labour leadership after the scale of their losses became apparent, but that these things can spiral when MPs and members are at their most angry and frustrated. Yesterday’s intervention from backbencher Catherine West, who has said she will challenge Starmer tomorrow if no one else comes forward, it a perfect example of this. It seems unplanned and, in part, a response to a friend losing their council seat.
Whether she succeeds in forcing a challenge will depend on how others react. 80 MPs are required to trigger a contest, and there are many more than that who want Starmer gone. But lots want Andy Burnham to replace him and so need a longer timetable while he finds a way back into Parliament. Others, who support Wes Streeting or Angela Rayer, will be waiting for a signal. Plenty who are uncommitted will be spending the day furiously WhatsApping each other and trying to figure out what to do. If it doesn’t happen now, it will happen at some point. Starmer’s authority has been gone for some time.
The purpose of this post, though, is not speculation on Labour’s leadership but to look at some of the broader trends and shifts that have become apparent during these elections and have long term significance for the future of British politics.
I’ve discussed some of the more obvious ones before. We’re experiencing a transition into a more fragmented European-style multi-party system. Labour and the Tories are facing competition for their core vote in a way they never have before. As a result they are struggling to identify strategies that allow them to retain previously loyal voters, while appealing to the centre, as Reform and the Greens hoover up the right and left bloc votes. The result is a paralysis of indecision and an increasingly dissatisfied electorate. And so the cycle continues, made worse by an electoral system unsuited to our new politics that encourages a narrow tactical approach from parties.
In the rest of the post I’m going to focus in more detail on how this is all playing out in practice. How do we assess results in such a messy system? What are the strategic challenges facing all the main parties? Is Reform on track for a majority? What can the Greens realistically achieve? What are the best options for the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems? What can we learn about PR from what happened in Wales? Most of all – is there any route out of the paralysis induced by a fragmented system?
The battleground model is the right one
In my preview post I broke England down into five types of battleground where the contests would all look very different. This is what happened. In the first type – lower income, older, whiter towns – the kind that are often called “left behind” and suffered most from deindustrialisation, Reform did extremely well, taking control of councils in places like Barnsley, Sunderland, Gateshead, and Walsall. Whereas in the “middle England marginals” battleground, places like Swindon and Milton Keynes that tend to vote for whatever party is in government, Reform made gains but not on anything like the same scale. In younger urban wards with lots of graduates the contest was largely between progressive parties.
This is partly about the post-Brexit realignment that has led people to polarise more on age, level of education and values. But it also reflects voters trying to figure out what the effective two-party system is in their area. There’s no longer much point voting Tory in Barnsley because Reform is the only viable right-wing winner. Whereas in Swindon there’s still a genuine split on the right, with the Tories winning seats off Labour too. In London councils where there was no prospect of a right-wing party succeeding, like Lewisham and Hackney, voters clearly felt more comfortable voting Green than in Wandsworth or Westminster where the Labour vote held up more.
This all means that models of election outcomes based on projections of national vote share are no longer much use. Both Sky and the BBC used their projected shares to calculate seat numbers at a general election, but the results didn’t make much sense. Sky suggested the Greens would only win 13 seats on a 14% vote share. But clearly these votes would be highly concentrated in certain types of constituency. I can think of more than thirteen seats they’d win just in London if these results were reflected at a general election. Likewise, Reform would be unlikely to get to their projected 284 seats because, outside of their strongholds in deindustrialised towns, they can be stopped with tactical voting.
We are going to need different and more complex models, including a lot of qualitative insight, to make sense of a multi-party world with an unsuitable electoral system.
Reform didn’t break through in places they need for a majority
Outside of London, Reform won nearly all of the councils I said they would and a few similar ones that I thought they’d just miss out on (Sandwell, Calderdale and St Helens). But they didn’t win Swindon, which polling suggested they should have done. Nigel Farage launched his campaign here, so it was a major target. Had they won it would have indicated they were on track to become the next government. But generally speaking the Tory and Labour vote held up better in these kinds of bellwether seats like Harlow, Crawley, and Milton Keynes.
These are all constituencies Reform would need for a majority, given they won’t win many in the big cities or Scotland (and Plaid Cymru may now be a barrier to them taking constituencies in Wales off Labour). Winning places like Doncaster and Barnsley won’t be enough to make Farage prime minister.
Reform’s overall vote share was down to 26%, from 30% in the previous local elections, which is consistent with a drop in their polling since last summer, and worsening approval ratings for Farage. So while they have obviously had a successful eighteen months, becoming a serious force in British politics, there is plenty of evidence that they are now moving backwards, or at least failing to build on their momentum.
As I’ve written elsewhere they are caught between trying to appeal to a radicalised online supporter base, some of whom have defected to Rupert Lowe’s Restore UK, and focusing on reassuring waverers, in places like Swindon, who are worried about voting for a more radical party. The more they cater to the extreme the harder it is to win these places and the more people will be willing to vote tactically against them. Yet they really do face a threat to their right. Notably Restore won the only seats it stood in around Lowe’s Great Yarmouth constituency, which blocked Reform from taking outright control of Norfolk county council. Had they stood nationally it would have likely stopped Reform winning dozens if not hundreds of seats.
3. The Tories are becoming the Liberal Democrats of the right
These results weren’t quite as bad for the Conservatives as last year, but they were still dire for a party that’s supposed to be the main opposition. They lost all six county councils and all the ground they’d made post-Brexit in “left behind” places like Walsall and Newcastle-under-Lyme. They came fourth in Wales and fifth in Scotland, having come second last time in both.
They did best in more affluent right-wing areas like Barnet, Bromley, and parts of Hampshire. This is essentially what’s happened to the Liberal Democrats in reverse. Ed Davey’s party has become the “left bloc” choice in wealthier parts of the country where Labour has always struggled to win. In areas with lots of remain-voting graduates like Richmond, Surrey, and Tunbridge Wells they’ve consolidated this vote very effectively. But it also means they will always be the junior partner in the left bloc at a national level, and dependent on tactical voting for their victories.
Likewise, the Tories are increasingly reduced to being the right bloc choice in areas that are bit too genteel and well qualified to vote Reform. They even benefitted from some anti-Reform tactical voting in places like Bexley where they explicitly positioned themselves to progressives as the best option to beat Farage. This is something the Lib Dems do in places like Haringey and Southwark when they’re trying to beat Labour.
It’s a strategy they could lean into by focusing on economics over culture wars and being more willing to criticise Reform than Kemi Badenoch has in the past, and is probably their best bet to avoid being wiped out completely in 2029. But it does mean accepting that they’re the junior partner to Reform in the right bloc and have no route to a majority unless Farage’s party implodes. We will now see this play out in councils like Hampshire and Peterborough where Reform and the Tories will need to work together to govern.
4. The Greens are limited by a lack of infrastructure and vote concentration
Though the Greens won five councils and hundreds of seats they did a bit worse than their polling would have suggested, which stopped them taking several more London boroughs. This may be due to bad publicity the party received over antisemitic comments from a number of candidates and Zack Polanski retweeting criticism of the police over the Golders Green stabbings. His approval ratings dropped considerably in the last few weeks.
Their lack of experience showed more widely in these elections. They won in Hackney and Lewisham where they’ve had a relatively strong presence for years and came second in parliamentary seats in 2024. In other areas where polling would have suggested similar success, like Hammersmith and Ealing, they did considerably less well, in part due to an absence of infrastructure and activists. If they’re able to build this out, as Reform has done over the past few years, they could do better in the future.
A bigger long-term challenge is they have a more extreme version of Reform’s voter concentration problem. Polanski’s “left populist” strategy speaks much more to inner city private renters angry about their economic precarity, than it does to older Green-curious voters in more rural areas whose main interest is conservation. This was reflected in the results. The Greens made nearly all their gains in London, and picked up lots of seats in Manchester and Newcastle, as well as taking Norwich and Hastings where they’ve been building a presence for some time. They did make a few gains in rural counties, but had nothing like the same vote share across those areas.
The Polanski strategy could feasibly win 50 seats at a general election, maybe 100 if they keep building momentum and get better at dealing with extremism in their ranks. But not more than that given this concentration of their voters. Reform could feasibly win a majority, even if they’re not on track to do so at the moment, but the Greens can’t. Which means that, if they can maintain their position, no left bloc party can win a majority. If this remains true as we get closer to 2029 there’s going to be endless speculation about deals between parties and “coalitions of chaos”. The Greens democratic approach to internal policy-making makes this particularly tricky for Polanski as it will make it harder for him to renounce some of their quirkier ideas.
5. The Lib Dem strategy is running out of steam
Over the past decade the Lib Dems have run a successful strategy to become the left bloc choice in large parts of the south. This has involved avoiding too much in the way of national campaigning, so as not to take positions on issues where there are differences of view across their target seats, while placing a lot of emphasis on local issues and being best placed to beat the Tories. In these elections they made more incremental gains using the same approach. They won both of the new Surrey unitary authorities, wiped the Conservatives out of Sutton and picked up a few of their long-term targets like Stockport.
But it’s an approach with diminishing returns. They gained proportionally fewer seats this time than in recent years and it’s trapping them in a certain type of area. They were notably unsuccessful in winning a lot of the wards they targeted in London boroughs like Southwark that don’t have the demographics of Richmond or Kingston. They even lost some wards to Labour (like the one I live in in Haringey). In places like Manchester or Islington, where they have previously benefited from dissatisfaction with a Labour government, it was the Greens who provided the main challenge. The Libs national vote share hasn’t budged even as the government’s poll ratings have halved.
Under Ed Davey this isn’t going to change. These kinds of tactical incremental victories are what he does best, and what he knows. There is a growing unhappiness within the party, though, about the absence of greater ambition. When they do change leader (not something I’m expecting to happen soon) this question will be at the centre of the debate.
6. Labour is going to need a very different approach
Labour actually did a bit better than I expected them to, particularly in London where they held councils like Merton and Redbridge I thought they’d lose. But it was, obviously, still a disastrous set of results, especially in their northern heartlands like St Helens, Sunderland, Gateshead and South Tyneside. They’ve been struggling to hold these areas for some time, as their base has shifted to being more urban, educated, and remainer, and now Reform has emerged as a receptacle for voters’ unhappiness.
There’s a lot of debate about the exact nature of the voter flows here. In most places where Labour lost to Reform they lost more voters to the Greens, so there’s certainly no case for chasing Farage’s vote (and to the extent that’s been tried it’s failed anyway). But there are also places, like Halton or Sandwell where the scale of their losses cannot be explained by defectors to the Greens or Lib Dems. The swings are just too large. There will be an element of differential turnout here. We can see from turnout figures that Reform managed to attract a lot of people who don’t usually vote, and may not have voted Labour in the past. But there must have been some direct switchers too.
In any case, trying to chase the Green vote won’t work any better than chasing the Reform one. Labour can only win by finding a way to hold together a coalition who don’t agree on issues like immigration. The best way to do that would be to stop worrying about narrow political strategy and just focus on governing well. There are things this coalition does agree on, like wanting NHS improvements, that a successful government could campaign on.
But given the current state of things, and the Gulf crisis which is going to lead to yet another miserable budget this autumn, they may need, at some point, to try a bolder strategy to survive. Increasingly, I suspect this will involve seeking a mandate to renegotiate Brexit because, as I said in a previous post, it’s the one issue that is polarising enough to get attention and can bring together enough of Labour’s 2024 coalition to win.
Clearly there are downsides to this plan. The EU might not appreciate the issue being so politicised again, and they have a say over whether negotiations are going to happen. It might mean sacrificing some seats in the most Brexit-y areas to Reform (though, perhaps counter-intuitively, more than a fifth of Reform supporters say they want to rejoin). It would mean a lot of other important issues were ignored in the campaign. But the dynamics of the system we’ve ended up in means it will be increasingly tempting. (It will also depend on the leadership contest assuming Starmer does go at some point. Some of the candidates would be much more likely to embrace this idea – possibly during the contest – than others.)
7. PR wouldn’t be inherently more fragmenting than first past the post under current conditions
For years the argument against PR has been that it would lead to something very like what is now happening in England – a messy multi-party system.
Ironically, we also had our first fully PR election for a parliamentary election, in Wales, and it produced an emphatic two-party result, with Plaid and Reform miles ahead of anyone else. One of the benefits of PR is it gives voters clarity about their options rather than forcing them to try and figure out the best tactical vote. Had the election been fought under first past the past, the results would likely have been more fragmented as people felt they needed to vote Lib Dem or Labour in some seats to beat Reform.
I’ve thought for a long time that we will eventually end up with PR for national elections but that it will probably require a couple of messy hung parliaments for it to happen. That it still probably true but the case is now overwhelming – it is just not reasonable to expect voters to navigate a multi-party system like this. We had seats won on 20% of the vote this time.
More importantly than the complexity, the inability to identify broad-based political strategies that work across multiple types of battleground is paralysing our politicians. If we don’t change we can look forward to an endless string of election campaigns built around narrow tactics, demographic targeting, and fear of the alternative.
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Appendix: what I got right and wrong
In my first preview post I forecast that the parties’ national vote share equivalent would be:
Reform: 27%
Greens: 20%
Lib Dems: 16%
Tories: 15%
Labour: 14%
The actual numbers according to the BBC were:
Reform: 26%
Greens: 18%
Tories: 17%
Labour: 17%
Lib Dems: 16%
Because I was a bit too low on the Tory and Labour percentages I overestimated their collective losses by 700 seats and overestimated Reform/Green gains by the same amount. Hundreds of seats were retained by the main parties by just a few percentage points. This shows how sensitive first past the post systems are to tiny vote share changes.
The main parties’ vote held up best in London, which meant a disproportionate number of my council misses were in the capital. Labour held five boroughs I thought they’d lose (Merton, Redbridge, Camden, Islington and Barking) and the Tories two (Bromley and Bexley).
Outside of London I had a better hit rate – correctly forecasting the result in 93 out of 104 councils. Several of these misses were in those “middle England marginals” discussed above – Reform didn’t win Swindon, the Tories retained Harlow, Labour retained Crawley and Lincoln. A few were Reform gains I thought they’d get close to but not take in “left behind” areas (St Helens, Sandwell, Calderdale). The Lib Dems lost a couple of councils I thought they’d just hold (Hull, Gosport). There were no big surprises.
In Wales my predictions for the Senedd were:
Plaid: 39 seats
Reform: 33
Labour: 13
Tories: 6
Greens: 4
Lib Dems: 1
The actual result was:
Plaid: 43
Reform: 34
Labour: 9
Tories: 7
Greens: 2
Lib Dems : 1
In Scotland I thought the SNP would get closer to the 65 seats they needed for a majority than the 58 they won. They lost a few more constituencies than I expected. But I was right to think the Greens would benefit from a lot of tactical voting for the regional lists and would challenge for second place. In the end they just missed out, winning 15 seats, while Labour and Reform both won 17.
My main aim with the previews is to try and give readers a sense of the nature of contests in different parts of the country and an idea of the range of likely results and I think I did that.
Freedman makes a good point about the electoral system. The Labour and Conservative parties previously opposed any change to plurality voting (so-called FPTP), which was against their interests, but ought to change their view now: reform would be good for the country.
Sunak called the last General Election some time before he had to, because he knew the government would soon have to do unpopular things which he had put off for as long as he could. He was right that that would be bad for Labour, but wrong that the Conservatives would benefit correspondingly.
It’s distressing for those of in the reality-based community to see Farage’s party winning elections with the support of voters disaffected by the economic damage caused by the Brexit successfully campaigned for by Farage’s previous party,
A question for those in the UK: Has there been any serious consideration of Single Transferable Vote, rather than Proportional Representation?
I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that it’s superior both to PR and to the primary system variations that we see in the US.
A question for those in the UK: Has there been any serious consideration of Single Transferable Vote, rather than Proportional Representation?
In the UK, Proportional Representation is used to mean any electoral system less disproportionate than plurality voting (known, for some reason I haven’t grasped, as First Past the Post).
It’s obvious to me that the best system, in terms of encouraging people to vote for the candidates they want, and candidates to campaign on what they believe in, is Single Transferable Vote in multi-member constituencies (STV). (Albeit there can be geographical difficulties with multi-member constituencies in isolated areas.)
In the 2010 General Election campaign, the Liberal Democrats published a manifesto promising that they would introduce STV if elected. Shortly before the election Gordon Brown, the Labour Prime Minister, had suggested a referendum on the use of an Alternative Vote (AV) system: that was rejected by the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg – “I am not going to settle for a miserable little compromise thrashed out by the Labour party.” (AV is called Ranked-Choice Voting in the USA: the difference between AV and STV is that AV uses single-member constituencies.)
The 2010 election resulted in a hung parliament: the resulting government would have to be a coalition. The Conservatives had won the largest share of the vote and had the most MPs: the fair result in terms of popular support would be a coalition between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Negotiations resulted in Clegg conceding on almost all policy issues, in return for becoming Deputy Prime Minister. (Because of these concessions, the Liberal Democrat vote collapsed in the following General Election, in 2015.)
The Liberal Democrats had demanded a referendum on STV, what they ended up with was a referendum on AV, accurately described by opponents as “a miserable little compromise thrashed out by the Conservative party.” The referendum, in 2011, resulted in a decisive defeat for AV. I voted against: if offered STV I would have voted for it.
“first past the post” is a term from horse racing, IIRC.
First Past the Post was a 19th century betting rule under which bets paid out according to the initial winner of a horse race, regardless of later disqualifications. It encouraged cheating.
It makes no sense to me to apply the term to plurality voting. Or it didn’t, until the recent outbreak of enthusiasm for cheating in US elections, mostly from the Republican Party and its judges.
If we are considering the various extraordinary ways in which people get elected, regarding the people who say they would still vote for Trump, I wonder how many voters in the US are even aware of this kind of thing:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/12/trump-late-night-social-media-posts