Next week’s local elections across the nation, are likely to mark a turning point in UK politics.
With 5000 council seats in England as well as control of the Scottish and Welsh devolved powers up for grabs, they are currently on track to be a crushing reversal for the fortunes of both the Labour and Conservative parties.
While pollsters aren’t always to be believed – they were proven to be horribly out of step with the Brexit vote a decade ago and have misread the mood in crucial by-elections more recently – all the major polling and psephology groups are saying the same thing.
In England, Labour is projected to lose three out of every four seats it is defending, a predicted loss of nearly 2000.
And after a hollowing out of its parliamentary presence in 2024’s General Election, the Tories’ local government fortunes are showing no signs of recovery with 1000 wearers of the blue rosette expected to lose their council berths.
Mid-term elections are often seen as a ‘referendum’ on the performance of the ruling national Government – a test Kier Starmer and his cabinet are failing badly – but that doesn’t explain the continued slump in the Conservative vote.
Despite initial promise from Kemi Badenoch’s performances at the dispatch box, it appears the dislike and distrust for the Conservative brand is still running deep.
This drop in popularity and performance by the two leading parties has also coincided with a surge for nationalist and more extreme views. In Wales, Plaid Cymru are fancied to take clear control of the Principality and in Scotland, Labour are predicted to finish a distant third to the Scottish Nationalist Party.
Despite their core separatist ideology, neither the SNP nor PC are likely to advance their calls for independence, happy to pick up the votes of those disillusioned with the Labour or Conservative offer but not looking to leave the safety of the Union just yet.
But the big winner will be Reform. At least at the ballot box.
Last time out the far-right party picked up hundreds of seats but found itself ill-prepared for the consequence of having to actually run a local authority with adult social care, children’s services and hundreds of civic buildings, libraries, sports centres and theatres haemorrhaging cash.
This time, the pollsters see them winning anything up to 2500 seats, putting them idiomatically, ‘front and centre’ in town halls across the land. Whether much has changed in their ability to actually run local authorities in the past 12 months is unsure, but they will be tested this time, especially in London where every seat in each of the 32 boroughs is being contested.
Labour insiders are expecting a ‘bloodbath’ in the capital.
Currently leading 22 boroughs, the forecasts suggest that might fall to as low as 10 or eleven, the lowest point since 1982, peak-Thatcher.
Minority parties are also looking to pick up gains.
The noisy Greens, who currently have 49 elected members in London, could see that number grow ten-fold across the country, where they are positioning themselves as way out to the left of Labour and grappling with their legacy policies to legalise heroin and cocaine but demand dog owners are licensed, pay a universal income to all-comers and transition to a four day working week. Good luck.
The LibDems will have councils they are focussing efforts on, and in urban and metropolitan areas of the North and Midlands Independents will stake their claim – whether that is for a liberated Palestine, prevention of Green Belt development or just from a disillusioned councillor who lost his or her party whip but isn’t ready to give up the expenses claims just yet.
While the exact numbers are uncertain, there is little doubt we will wake up on Friday 8th May to a wildly different political landscape. New parties and untested leaders will be measuring up the offices in Town Halls, where no party has a majority, awkward coalitions and deals will be brokered between groups calling each other names only days earlier, and in Westminster the vultures will be circling over the PM and cabinet members deemed to have been the architects of the calamitous decline in fortune from a landslide majority in the General Election.
Five days later, fresh from appeasing President Trump, King Charles will make his Kings Speech, setting out his government’s plans for the next parliamentary year.
Politics watchers are confident it will include radical changes to the way the nation is governed, more devolution, electoral reform, closer ties to Europe and hard-hitting measures on immigration and welfare changes.
Who will actually be in charge to deliver it is less certain.
