If one wants to know the level of popularity of the country’s political parties, there is a fairly reliable means to do so. Look at the opinion polls. These polls are based on representative surveys of voters asking how they would vote in a general election. In contrast, local elections – in which the public elects their local councillors, often based on very local issues – or by-elections – in which the public in a particular constituency choose their MP knowing that this will have no impact on who is in government – (both of which have notably lower turnouts than general elections) are unlikely to be reliable guides.
But these latter elections, imperfect measures though they may be, usually draw attention to what the opinion polls already tell us in a manner that makes them hard to ignore. Political reality is brought to life. We can therefore already have a fair guess as to what will happen after the results start to be announced in the early hours of Friday morning.
The big losers will be the Conservatives. Their share of the vote, according to the polls, has more or less halved since the last time these seats were fought. They are defending approximately 1,000 council seats, and will probably lose half of them.
Labour has also lost support since 2021, although not as dramatically as the Tories. Other than in straight fights with the Conservatives, it will be a poor set of results for Keir Starmer. Incumbent governments usually struggle in local elections, but not in the first year. The likely loss of the Runcorn & Helsby by-election to Reform will be uncomfortable.
Nigel Farage should be the big winner, not just taking Runcorn but amassing several hundred councillors. Neither Ukip nor the Brexit Party ever became serious forces in local government, Reform – which has put forward an impressive number of candidates – looks set to be different.
It should be a good set of results for the Liberal Democrats which might even make them the second biggest party in local government, ahead of the Conservatives. The Greens should also do well, even if the elections are generally not being held in Green strongholds, and increase their number of councillors.
Understandably, after the results come in, there will be much focus on what they mean for individual parties and, in the case of the Conservatives, the party leader. But it is worth taking a step back to look at what is happening to our politics more generally.
Thursday’s results will be further evidence that we are moving to a multi-party system. English politics (Scotland and Wales need to be excluded because of the nationalist party) has usually been a two-party or two-and-a-half- party system. Now we have a five-party system.
There is a view that this is merely temporary. The right, for example, will be united as the Conservatives and Reform come together (a topic for another day). Or there are a lot of protest voters, unimpressed by both the last and the current government, who will revert to the main parties at a general election. But last year already showed a strong movement away from the two big parties – they won their lowest combined share in history – and that trend is continuing.
Assuming this endures, our politics will change fundamentally. Coalitions will become much more common. A casual look at who controls our councils after Thursday might suggest that the dominant political party will not be any of the parties mentioned above but an entity called “NOC”. No overall control will sweep the board. Single-party administrations will become a rarity.
This will not be entirely novel for many councils, but a world in which multi-party coalitions become the norm will bring its own challenges. Power, for example, may more frequently change hands between elections rather than immediately after them.
More fundamentally, the credibility of our first-past-the-post system will be tested. Councillors and Mayors may be elected on very small shares of the vote. To take one example, More In Common has projected that the West of England mayoralty will be a five-way split in which Labour prevails with a meagre 23 per cent of the vote.
We already saw in last year’s general election that the average winning share of the vote and the average majority for MPs has fallen substantially. If this becomes the new norm, we are likely to see many seats change hands more frequently. Some will welcome this as increasing the power of the electorate over MPs, but this additional volatility will also mean that we see more changes of government and less experienced MPs. This does not necessarily result in better government.
There is also the question of democratic legitimacy. Labour won a huge majority on a small share of the vote last year (33.7 per cent). This was not in itself particularly contentious: the predominant message from the electorate was that it wanted a change of government, which is what it got. But a system in which one party – or one candidate – gains power on the basis of the support of a relatively small minority of voters is far from ideal. If that party or candidate has narrow support but is widely disliked by the wider electorate, this could prove to be very divisive.
This is why Thursday’s elections – in illustrating what the polls are telling us – could be important. The results will not just raise questions about the state of our parties, but raise questions about whether our electoral system is fit for purpose in a multi-party system.
[See also: One hundred days of autocracy]
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