Results wrap
According to Wikipedia, Reform won 30% of the BBC’s Projected National Share (up 28 from the 2024 council elections), Labour 20% (down 14), the Lib Dems 17% (steady), the Tories 15% (down 10) and the Greens 11% (down two). If changes are measured from the last time these wards were contested in 2021, Reform is up 30, the Tories down 21, Labour down nine and the Lib Dems steady. It’s the first council elections where the combined share for the Tories and Labour has been below 50%.
With all 23 councils that held elections declared, Reform won 677 councillors (all new), the Lib Dems 370 (up 163), the Tories 317 (down 676), Labour 99 (down 186) and the Greens 80 (up 45). Councils controlled are 10 Reform (new), three Lib Dems (up three), zero Tories (down 16), zero Labour (down one) and ten with no overall control (up four). Of the six mayoralties contested, Labour won three, Reform two and the Tories one.
Live Commentary
8:48pm Slow progress in the council elections, with just over 150 out of over 1,600 total seats declared so far. Reform has 81 councillors (up 81), the Tories 42 (down 66), Labour 14 (down 13) and the Lib Dems nine (up five).
3:14pm Reform has GAINED Runcorn and Helsby from Labour by just six votes.
2:35pm Labour won the West of England and Doncaster mayoralties. In Doncaster, Labour was down 11 points to 32.6%, just ahead of Reform on 31.6% with 26.0% for the Tories. In W of England, Labour won25%, Reform 22%, the Greens 20%, the Tories 17% and the Lib Dems 14%.
1:55pm Labour won the North Tyneside mayoralty by 30.2-29.4 over Reform with 20.5% for the Tories. But Labour’s vote was down 23 points from 2021, while the Tories were down 11.
1:49pm There’s a recount in Runcorn and Helsby. It appears Reform were leading Labour by four votes going into the recount.
10:59am John Curtice says in nine wards that had the same boundaries as in 2021, the Tory vote is down 23 points and Labour down 10. The by-election declaration is expected about 12pm, which I’ll miss.
10:46am Friday So far Reform has won 15 councillors (up 15), the Tories six (down five) and Labour one (down nine).
Guest post by Adrian Beaumont, who joins us from time to time to provide commentary on elections internationally. Adrian is a paid election analyst for The Conversation. His work for The Conversation can be found here.
A UK parliamentary by-election will occur today for the Labour-held Runcorn and Helsby, with polls closing at 7am AEST Friday. Labour MP Mike Amesbury resigned in March after being sentenced for assault. At the 2024 election, Labour defeated the far-right Reform in this seat by 52.9-18.1 with 16.0% for the Conservatives, 6.4% for the Greens and 5.1% for the Liberal Democrats. Two seat polls conducted in March gave Reform 3-5 point leads over Labour. Elections covered in this article all use first past the post.
UK local government elections will also be held today. These are held every May, but on a four-year cycle, so most seats up at these elections last faced election in 2021. The BBC calculates a Projected National Share (PNS) for each year’s elections, which allows results for a particular election to be compared to the previous year’s election, and also to the election four years ago. Only English councils are included in this year’s elections.
In 2021, the last time these seats were contested, Boris Johnson was popular, and the Conservatives won the PNS by 36-29 over Labour with 17% for the Lib Dems. In the 2024 local elections, held two months before the general election where Labour won a landslide, Labour won the PNS by 34-25 over the Conservatives, with 17% for the Lib Dems and 12% for the Greens. Usually, PNS only gives vote shares for Labour, the Conservatives and Lib Dems, but Reform should be included this year.
The Election Maps UK national poll aggregate gives Reform 25.4% of the vote (up 1.5 since my April 19 article), Labour 23.9% (down 0.5), the Conservatives 21.3% (down 1.2), the Lib Dems 13.7% (up 0.1) and the Greens 8.9% (down 0.1). Reform has overtaken Labour to lead. If these vote shares are reflected at the local elections, Reform will make massive gains at the expense of the Conservatives, with Labour also slumping. Polls conducted in April gave Labour leader and PM Keir Starmer a net approval below -30.
We are unlikely to see results from the parliamentary by-election until several hours after polls close. I will be out for two hours from 11am Friday. Given the proximity to the Australian election, I don’t intend to follow these elections as closely as I normally would.
Canadian election wrap
At Monday’s Canadian federal election, the centre-left Liberals won 169 of the 343 seats (up nine from 160 of 338 in 2021), the Conservatives won 144 seats (up 25), the separatist left-wing Quebec Bloc (BQ) 22 (down ten), the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP) seven (down 18) and the Greens one (down one). The Liberals were three seats short of the 172 needed for a majority.
Vote shares were 43.7% Liberals (up 11.1%), 41.3% Conservatives (up 7.6), 6.3% BQ (down 1.3%) (27.9% in Quebec), 6.3% NDP (down 11.5%), 1.3% Greens (down 1.0%) and 0.7% for the far-right People’s (down 4.2%). Turnout was 68.7% (up 6.4%).
This election was far more proportional than in 2021. FPTP can be roughly proportional, but only if the two biggest parties get a high combined vote share, and there’s a small gap between these two parties. This election had the highest two-party share since 1958. It resembles the UK 2017 election, when the big two parties also surged.
The CBC Poll Tracker’s final aggregate of national polls gave the Liberals a 42.8-39.2 lead over the Conservatives, so the 3.6-point margin slightly overstated the Liberals’ 2.4-point election margin. Two of the three polls that had one-day surveys conducted the day before the election were very accurate, with Liaison giving the Liberals a two-point lead and Nanos a 2.7-point lead.
Seat estimates overstated the Liberals with the Tracker’s point estimate giving the Liberals a 189-125 seat lead. I said previously that I expected the Liberals’ vote efficiency to drop because of the crash in NDP support.
I believe the Liberals slid from a peak lead of 7.1 points in the Tracker on April 8 due to Mark Carney’s fading honeymoon from replacing Justin Trudeau as PM on March 14. Labor in Australia is not affected by a fading honeymoon.
The putative leader of the Reform grouping so the putative leader of Kent County Council was interviewed on BBC local news on Friday evening.
She was complaining that they weren’t allowed into county hall until Tuesday as though there was some scandal about that and forgetting it was closed for the weekend and our bank holiday on Monday and that councillors elected on Thursday don’t come into office until Tuesday anyway and only then if they had made the oath of office.
Even then they don’t have free rein to wander about looking into contracts and such like as until the Leader and Cabinet are appointed at the AGM they have no decision making powers.
I doubt many reform councillors have ever been to a council meeting before let alone read an officers report to a committee or looked into the councils budget and realise that they aren’t the masters of all they survey.
It will be a steep learning curve for them and I anticipate many will fall by the way side after realising being a councillor and dealing with constituent problems isn’t for them and they either resign or simply don’t attend a meeting for six months which leads to automatic loss of office.
It’s rather hard to “stop the boats” when you’re dealing with funding for social care and ring fenced school budgets and devising a transport or waste disposal strategy. And that most of the costs of migrants is borne by central government not local council tax payers.
Much of what they think of as “waste” are actually statutory functions a council has to provide and rather valued by the public.
Reform is far-right party bordering on neo-nazi tendencies. It doesn’t suddenly make it a normal right wing party because UK people voted for it.
It won because both major parties Tories and Labour have failed their people and people lost faith in them.
I thought British people will tend towards fascism. But there you go. When major parties fail, far-right/ extreme far-right parties will gain power like they did in 1932 in Germany and like 2024 in USA
There is no sugar coating to it whether people like BTsays likes it and accepts it or not.
Ven
“Reform is . . . bordering on neo-nazi tendencies.”
Hyperbolic nonsense, don’t believe all you read in the MSM.
Surprised also to see @ChrisC so dismissive, a lot of them will talk a lot more common sense then most of the current stale bunch.
Some councillors are perfectly nice people but I don’t think I’ve ever met a dynamic one yet that made you think “that’s just what we need to run a decent show and really get the area ahead”.
To have a whole fresh bunch from right outside the current ‘system’ if you like, is exactly what is required.
Of course they will make mistakes and there will be a few bad apples too – same as with all parties.
But give them a chance, some will fall into the same boring routine that their predecessors engaged in, some might be controversial at time, and some may actually do things differently and make a real positive difference.
But no need to be so condescending towards them – at least they put their heads above the parapet instead of the endless moaning you read from many of the right-wing online these days.
And. . . .they were democratically elected, so let’s respect that.
P.S. To round off, Reform did win both North Northamptonshire and West Northamptonshire, and of course Buckinghamshire ended as NOC with Conservatives as the largest party.
Northumberland was the only council other than Buckinghamshire where the Conservatives remained the largest party, with 26/69 seats and Reform with 23.
Considering they didn’t even hold a majority after the 2021 (34 seats), this was a creditable result for Conservative. Labour went down from 21 to 8 seats, so further evidence that the N-E is relatively worse ground for Labour than Conservative now, whereas elsewhere north of the midlands the reverse is generally true (perhaps not in very Brexity parts of Yorkshire with high WWC population).
Though the real point is that Reform are popular in this region as in most regions north of the Midlands outside the city and large town centres. Whereas they struggle much more in large areas of the ‘more genteel’ south where ‘do goody’ Lib Dems do very well.
The Midlands is very strong for Reform, and very poor for Lib Dems outside a couple of small pockets of support. Market towns are Lib Dems’ thing, the posher the better. The ‘teals’ in Australia would all be Lib Dems if in the UK.