Letter from London – The Impact of a Stunning Set of Local Elections
Print off this briefing and brandish it before my eyes sometime in 2029, when the prediction I am about to make may be proved hopelessly awry. I reckon UK politics is on the cusp of monumental realignment; at the next election for the first time since the Great Reform Act of 1832, the Conservatives will no longer be one of the two largest parties in parliament. The one small saving grace for my old party is that the dominance of any duopoly, a characteristic of UK politics under the current electoral system, may also be on its last legs.
Analysing the Local Election Results
The number-crunchers within the Westminster village and amongst the political parties are still hard at work trying to make sense of last Thursday’s local election results. The picture has been distorted at the outset by the fact that only 1641 county council and a random selection of district council by-election seats were up for grabs. The relative paucity of contests came about because of the government’s desire to standardise the structure of local authorities leading to postponement of elections until future years in many English counties.
But whichever way you look at it, the results make for stark and sober reading for the two political parties, Labour and Conservative, that have dominated UK politics for over a century. Before each set of local elections, a little ritual is played out in the media with party chiefs deliberately downplaying expectations. So, in recent weeks both parties tried to convince political commentators that up to half of the council seats they were defending might be at risk. Although these predictions struck most political insiders as vastly exaggerated, they turned out to be wildly optimistic; Labour and the Conservatives ended up losing two-thirds of the seats they were defending and in the case of the Tories losing each and every one of the 15 county councils they had run, many for an unbroken period going back over several decades. By contrast from a base line of zero, Reform UK soared to 648 county councillors, winning ten councils outright across England – from Kent to Leicestershire to Durham - as well as the highly symbolic parliamentary by-election in the Labour heartland of Runcorn and Helsby.
The Rise of Populist Politics
Rather ironically in the circumstances the outcome of this momentous set of municipal elections shows that some pan-European, multi-party trends are now playing their full part in UK politics. The rise of populist politics now threatens to upend the UK’s hitherto stable ‘first past the post’ voting system. The UK’s version of populism, as practised by Reform UK, acts as something of a bridge or hybrid between the distinctly nationalist and paternalistic European model and the more libertarian and entrepreneurial version espoused by Trump and camp followers like Elon Musk in the US. What has been little remarked upon is Reform UK’s corporatist approach to populist economics – it was Nigel Farage who led the charge before Easter towards nationalisation of British steel – which means it is not strictly accurate to describe the party as ‘right wing’. Critics may accuse Farage of incoherence, but as ever his finger is firmly on the pulse of public sentiment. Others point out that he is, and has always been, an acquired taste, but in a world of fragmented party politics, securing the support of three in ten voters may prove sufficient for victory. Many note with disdain that he is skilled at exploiting grievance, but let’s be honest there is a plenty of division and grievance about at the moment.
Reform UK's Impact on General Elections
Reform UK became the insurgent force of UK politics at last year’s general election. At that time, the deeply unpopular and hopelessly divided Conservative government was in its death throes after 14 years in office; apparently out of nowhere (in truth its forerunners, UKIP and the Brexit Party, never fully went away even after our departure from the EU) Reform UK secured over four million votes, although the vagaries of our electoral system meant its 14.3% vote share saw it secure only five parliamentary seats. But this has proved a crucially important bridgehead. In parliament Reform UK’s MPs have been energetically presenting themselves as the only authentic antidote to the entire failing, discredited and incompetent political establishment. They now have not only the Conservatives, but also the woefully underperforming Labour government – who hold 89 of the 98 seats where Reform came second – in their sights.
Stealthily, over the past year Reform UK has been on a fast-track to becoming fully professionalised. Its local organisation has consciously mirrored the Liberal Democrats’ passion for pavement politics; urgent attention has been paid to the previously vexed issue of candidate vetting and it has rapidly set up a national campaign headquarters now with a larger staff than the cash-strapped Conservative HQ, whose paid-up party membership is now estimated to be barely two-thirds its the size.
Challenges for the Conservative Party
As I observed at the beginning of the year, here in the UK we have become accustomed to writing off the chances of any new political party upending the century-long duopoly enjoyed by the Conservative and Labour. Four decades ago, the SDP failed in its mission to break the mould of UK politics because to do so required it to destroy the Labour Party. Back then the Labour Party never fell below 207 parliamentary constituencies (roughly one-third of the overall total seats) and even in that calamitous 1983 election it retained representation in its urban heartlands and the northern English, south Wales and central Scotland manufacturing belt. By contrast today’s Conservative Party, having been reduced to a rump of 121 seats, lacks any such reliable bedrock of support to ward off the advances of Reform UK…...or in more affluent parts of the country, the Liberal Democrats (more of that later). In the short term, the Conservative Party may both be too historically entrenched to die, yet too weak to recover as a viable contender for government. Almost certainly, even in these volatile political times, the damage done to the Tories’ brand by the failures of its most recent period in office means it almost certainly needs more than a single political cycle to restore its credibility.
Putting the results into some context, last time these county council seats were fought was at the time of the vaccine bounce under Boris Johnson - four years and four Prime Ministers ago. As something of an antidote to all of the current excitable commentary (mine included!) it is also worth remembering that the near universal view in the aftermath of those May 2021 local elections was that Labour leader Keir Starmer was a busted flush, soon to be replaced; the 2020s were set to be the ‘Johnson decade’ of the Conservative Party in office and no-one even mentioned Reform UK for the simple reason that the legal entity of that name had only been registered two months earlier.
This cycle of elections was always going to pose a massive challenge for the beleaguered Conservative Party, but in its dismal aftermath, the risk is that it descends into a further phase of naval-gazing and infighting, culminating in defections and yet another cycle of challenge and change in leadership. In truth this is largely displacement activity; what few Tories had anticipated was how quickly the popularity of the Labour government would unravel, yet to their bemusement and frustration none of that voters’ remorse shows any sign currently of rebounding to the Tories’ benefit. Regardless of Kemi Badenoch’s perceived limitations, this would surely be the case whoever was leading the party. Nevertheless, the presence on the political sidelines – and weekly in the pages of the Daily Mail – of Boris Johnson is a constant reminder to disgruntled Tory Party members that they once had their very own answer to the populist appeal of both Nigel Farage, and (to an admittedly more niche taste) Donald Trump.
Reform UK's Opportunity
This encapsulates Reform UK’s current opportunity. It also sums up why for all the excitable chatter in the right-wing press, there is next to no chance of a pact being struck between the Conservatives and Reform UK. It is noticeable that calls to ‘unite the Right’ come only from Conservatives; they increasingly sound like a needy and desperate cry for help. But ask yourself this - what would be in it for Nigel Farage and his followers? The very basis of their appeal is that the British political system is broken and that there is nothing to choose between Labour and the Conservatives. Reform’s avowed strategy is to destroy, not work with, the Tory Party and after this latest verdict from the voters, they believe they are well on the way to succeeding.
It is worth noting, however, that voter disillusionment and electoral fragmentation is by no means restricted to the Right of the political spectrum. Already at the last general election, whose outcome threw up some of the strangest results in British political history, Labour swept to a near record landslide victory despite achieving its sixth worst vote share in the 22 General Elections since World War Two. The sense that a Labour victory was a foregone conclusion undoubtedly contributed to a splintering of its vote in its traditional strongholds as evidenced by the election of five hard-leftist pro-Palestine independents and a net doubling of the Green Party vote in Labour’s urban strongholds. These trends may accelerate and be given added weight by two further factors - a consolidation of Liberal Democrat electoral strength beyond their current best-in-a-century haul and a renaissance in Scotland of the SNP as Labour’s troubles mount up and their 2024 support falls away.
Future Prospects for the Liberal Democrats
Returning to that prediction at the beginning of the briefing; the Liberal Democrats have also been stealthily building up their firepower and if the Reform UK bandwagon runs out of steam in the years ahead, it may yet be the more traditional third party of UK politics that overtakes the Conservatives. Indeed, the challenging economic and fiscal headwinds that lie ahead for the Labour government are already being translated in a fragmentation in its support to the benefit of the Liberal Democrats. Unburdened by office and the diplomatic need to break daily bread with the Trump Administration (which remains hugely unpopular with UK voters) the Liberal Democrats are opportunistically setting themselves up to capture the support of many disaffected Labour voters. This spells further gloom for the Conservatives, who last year lost constituencies in vast swathes of the Home Counties and southern England to Liberal Democrat MPs who appear intent on positioning themselves as centrist, locally focused community representatives.
In places such as Oxfordshire, Shropshire, Devon and Cambridgeshire the Liberal Democrats built on those parliamentary victories by making further inroads at this week’s county council contests. History suggests (especially as today’s Liberal Democrats are not having to defend a record in government) that they will be difficult to dislodge. Not only did the Liberal Democrats gain virtually every seat they targeted against the Conservatives last year, but they picked up more besides – meanwhile all bar two of the next 20 seats on their list were (often narrowly) retained by the Tories, many with a now eminently squeezable third placed Labour vote in their sights. Electorally this weakness poses a far bigger threat to incumbent Conservatives than Reform UK, but this would be difficult to discern from the policy platform that the Tory leadership proposes.
The way things are going it is quite possible that at the next UK General Election no party manages to secure 30% of the popular vote and as many as four different parties secure 100 or so seats; forming a government on a basis so unrepresentative of voter opinion and support may also test to destruction the electoral system to which we have been accustomed.
Disclaimer: The views, thoughts and opinions expressed within this article are those of the author(s) and not those of any company within the Capital International Group (CIG) and as such are neither given nor endorsed by CIG. Information in this article does not constitute investment advice or an offer or an invitation by or on behalf of any company within the Capital International Group of companies to buy or sell any product or security or to make a bank deposit.
