This week (Thursday, May 2) are the local elections in the UK. While city councils (and the functional equivalent for areas outside of the cities) have some powers, the primacy of the UK parliament (especially in England) often leads the vote for council members to be a way to express disapproval of the current government. While some share of that “protest” vote comes from some otherwise loyal supporters of the governing party who will return to the fold for the next general election, the results in the council vote is often seen as a referendum on the current government.
The vote this year is particularly significant. In the U.K., the national parliament is elected for a term of up to five years. While for a period of time, the U.K. flirted with having a fixed term similar to Congress, the “fixed term” law allowed for parliament to agree to an early election. In practice, it was impossible for the opposition to vote against an early election although the opposition could, to a limited extent, get some input on the date of the election. So the U.K. went back to the old law which allows the government to call an early election. We are now nearing the end of the current parliament’s term. The last election in the U.K. was in December 2019. In theory, the government could wait until the term ends to call the next election (which would then fall at the end of January 2025), but that would have the election period run through the holidays which would cause havoc with some of the deadlines related to the election. As such, the expectation is the government will schedule the parliamentary elections in the early fall.
Generally speaking, council terms in England are for four years. City councils fall into three basic types. Some councils elect the full council every four years. Some councils elect half their membership every other year. And some councils have a four-year cycle in which they elect one-third of their members every year (with a fourth “off-year” in which no members were elected. But vacancies can require special elections as part of the council elections to fill vacancies and boundary changes can require the full council to stand under the new ward lines even if the council election is normally for one-third of the council.
With all of that background, what are folks looking to see and why is the English method significant for American election junkies. On the looking to see, most of the seats up this cycle were actually due up in 2020. Due to Covid, those elections were postponed one year (extending the old term to five years and cutting the new term to three years). General approval of how the UK handled COVID resulted in decent results for the governing Conservative Party which won a plurality of the seats (985 to 966). Now the Conservatives trail Labour by around 20% in national polls. In short, the conventional wisdom is that Thursday is going to be a bloodbath for the Conservatives. Of the councils up for election, the Conservatives currently have the majority in 16 councils. There are 35 additional councils in which no party currently has a majority. So, the first question is how many of the 16 councils slip away from a Conservative majority (and do any of them flip to majority control by another party) and how many of the thirty-five councils in which no party has a majority end up with a Labour majority. The Conservatives are also defending two “mayoral” positions and approximately thirty “police commissioner” positions. (The quotes are because there are different titles depending on the location.) Some of these positions are in areas that are usually solid for the Conservatives. If these seats fall, that is a very ominous sign for the national elections.
The other thing to note is how these elections are run. Depending on the location, voters are facing one to three races to vote on. (If the entire council is up for election, each ward will feature a vote for X number with X being the number of seats in that ward.) That allows the U.K. to have a single ballot for each race. With only one race on the ballot, especially in “vote for one” elections, it is possible to do a relatively quick hand count of each race. By contrast, in the U.S. many areas have fifteen or more races on the ballot at the same time. That in turn leads to using one ballot, and the only way to quickly count that many races is to use optic scan counting devices. The far right in the U.S. does not get this and wants to simultaneously have faster counts and do them by hand.
The other thing is that U.K. elections are run by civil servants –nonpartisan bureaucrats. These individuals are not up for election to anything on the same ballot, and their jobs do not depend on who wins. That eliminates any temptation to bend the rules to favor any political party. As shocking as that may be some in the U.S. who like to force voters of the other party into difficult to get to precincts that have too many voters or to zealously purge voter rolls to make supporters of the other party have to reregister (on time) to vote, that is the way that most representative democracies run elections.
As noted above, regardless of the results, there will be a national election in the U.K. later this year. And as noted, things are not likely to go well for the Conservatives. Despite the fact that the much-delayed redistricting process for the U.K. is now complete (and as expected shifted some seats from the urban areas where Labour has traditionally dominated to suburban areas that have tended Conservative), the Conservatives are likely to get trounced. The Conservatives have been the party of chaos for the past six years (even more so than the Republicans), and the Conservative approach to government has resulted in inflation numbers that make the U.S. look good. In the last election, the Conservatives won 365 seats. (Between defections and special elections,, they are down to 345 seats.) Depending on different calculations of the impact of redistricting, they would have won something in the mid-370s if the new lines were in effect for the last election. Current projections are that the Conservatives will struggle to win 200 seats in the next parliament and are likely to end up with only 100 or so seats. (My personal expectation is that, when polling this far out shows a landslide of this proportion, there is likely to be a narrowing of the margins as the base of the party reverts to their natural preferences. So my hunch says that the Conservatives are more likely to be near 170 than near 100 in the next parliament. But barring an unexpectedly extremely strong performance by the Liberal Democrats — who are expected to gain a significant number of seats already — or Plaid Cymru — the Welsh nationalist party — Labour will get over 350 seats with 326 needed for a majority.)
