So much has been written about the local elections that I am reluctant to add to the volume. There are, however, some important facts about them that have been remarkably lightly covered or systematically and deliberately been covered over because they are inconvenient.
Let’s start with the basics: how many people actually engaged with the whole process and cared enough to vote. There has been huge coverage of the importance of mayoral elections in places like London, the West Midlands and Teesside. The percentage of those registered to vote who actually bothered to turn up was only 40% in London, 30% in the West Midlands and 31% in Teesside. That speaks to a serious lack of confidence in the ability of the ballot box to make any difference whatsoever. The commonest opinion I heard on the streets was a further increase in complete distrust of anyone.
Support for smaller parties
The next thing that the results show is an astonishing increase in the votes of less mainstream parties. In the elections for local councillors the Liberal Democrats came second beating the Conservatives into third place. My own party, the Greens, was rubbished on the BBC all election week with the accusation that in Scotland it was too interested in identity politics which was routinely assumed to be a huge negative. Despite all that negative reporting, we increased our number of councillors in England by 74 and got 181 elected to take us above 800 seats.
This contrasts markedly with the performance of Reform UK in the council elections in England. They got just two local councillors elected in the whole country. Despite all their coverage and many more appearances on programmes like Question Time than their electoral performance justifies.
I’d like to argue that this means they are a bit of an irrelevance and will prove to be a temporary phenomenon. That might be a comforting thought, but it is not an accurate one. They achieved 10.9% of the vote in the East Midlands and 9.2% in the North East despite a first past the post system that disadvantages smaller parties. There are genuine grounds for continuing to be vigilant about what they might achieve if Labour gets in and doesn’t improve life on the ground in the red wall areas.
Independent candidates: prioritising the issues people care about
Yet the truly under-reported and virtually ignored phenomena of these elections was the performance of independents. Despite all the difficulties of campaigning without party backing they won an extra 93 local council seats recording 228 wins on the night. Even in desperately tightly fought races that were listed as gladiatorial fights between Labour and the Conservatives they recorded huge votes.
The reason the West Midlands election was close was less about the performance of Richard Parker and Andy Street, it was more about the 11.7% of voters who backed the Independent Akhmed Yakoob. A lot of voters cared enough about the death toll in Gaza to want to send a very clear message to both Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak.
Most of those independents presented themselves as not particularly interested in politics but in getting things done in a local community. Anyone who was perceived to be a genuine champion of their area did well. Even the deeply dodgy Ben Houchen benefitted from this. People seem to have cared more about the fact that he spoke up for the area than that he gave away resources intended to be used for their benefit to associates in highly questionable deals.
Those like Andy Burnham who used the mayor role to pursue more transparent gains reaped the reward at the ballot box.
Community trust
As for all those extra Green and Lib Dem votes, I believe the vast majority of them were driven by a conviction that the individual standing for that party was rooted in a particular community and would fight for it. I might wish to fool myself that when I got 79% of the votes in a usually Conservative seat in 2022 that it meant the people of Aire Valley endorsed every objective of the Green Party and had become enthusiastic environmentalists. I suspect most of them actually just thought I was honest, hard-working and local and could be trusted to speak up for them.
Nationally the desire to have something a bit different to the two main parties was so strong that it wasn’t intimidated by the first past the post electoral system to anywhere near the extent that political analysists assumed. Here are the total results from all 11 mayoral elections and over six million votes from across the country. Most opinion polls tell you about the views of around 2,000 selected people.
- Labour 46.7%
- Conservatives 25.9%
- Greens 7.2%
- Independents 7.4%
- Lib Dems 5.6%
- Reform UK 4.1%
- Other 3.1%
In other words, 27.4% of voters opted for a party that had little chance of winning because they wanted to send a message about their values. That message was much more often about ending the slaughter in Gaza and investment in green policies than it was about immigration or imposing a tougher Brexit. Importantly it may also have been a desire to endorse candidates that were perceived to be more honest and trustworthy than the mainstream.
General election predictions
It is tempting to try and calculate what all this means for a general election. My own prediction is that there will be huge regional variation producing significantly more seats for smaller parties, but that Labour will still end up with a 200-seat majority. I think the Lib Dems could have much less than half the votes of the Conservatives but gain more seats. I think the Greens will surprise everyone with their ability to translate local support into votes and seats at a national election.
But that’s not what I think is truly important to learn from these local election results. What everyone needs to know is that most people are desperately unimpressed by the whole process. We don’t want more cynical soundbite politics and more squabbling divisions. We want people who care about their community to get on with the job of improving the area and addressing local concerns.
Until more politicians, and more importantly the mainstream media outlets, get the message that the old style of confrontational boasting politics has to end, some very dangerous forces will continue to have the ability to mobilise cynicism for their own ends.
