Local elections 2026: Some disparate thoughts

Early days yet, but let's take a punt anyway.

Photo by Benjamin Davies on Unsplash

Big day. We’re still very early in the process, with a minority of council seats declared. There’s lots of noise out there and very little sense. Some preliminary slapdash thoughts below.

So far, this is actually a pretty boring series of results

I know everyone’s very excited. The bond market is behaving like a child who drank too much Coke, bouncing around according to the implied probability of a Keir Starmer departure. The two party system is collapsing before our eyes - a phenomenon we’ve talked about for years but which is suddenly taking place vividly and at speed, right across the country.

And yet the results are honestly pretty boring. No surprises here. They confirm exactly what we expected. We are in an era of five party politics. Reform is out in front, currently securing around 25% across England and obviously doing particularly well in Leave-voting areas. So far - and again, everything can change - that’s basically in line with the polling. It’s impressive, they’re in the lead, but they are down from where they were a few months ago and not actually that much higher than the other parties, who are jostling around the 15-20% range.

Nothing has fundamentally altered. In fact, the story so far is a confirmation of the things we’ve said for months: Reform is leading, the Greens are doing well, the Lib Dems are chugging along, the two main parties are bleeding out, and people want change.

Most analysis at this point is basically a statement of your existing disposition

It’s far too early to get any sort of detail from the results, but of course that will not stop people insisting that it confirms their starting assumptions. This happens every election, and every election we tell people to stop it and they never do.

The crude version of this is that the Labour left will say Labour is losing votes to the Greens so it must turn left, while the Labour right will say Labour is losing votes to Reform so it must turn right. You can see this, for instance, from journalists like the Spectator’s Tim Shipman, who tweeted: “Whisper it quietly, but was Morgan McSweeney right to tell the Labour party Reform was a bigger threat than the Greens?” Incredible. That was then retweeted by Luke Akehurst on the Labour right, who wrote: “I’m shouting this as loudly as I can.”

Look at this image from Sky. When you see it, your brain will first think that Labour is losing votes to Reform. What else could explain those numbers? It is only once you think about it for a few more moments that you realise these sorts of results are possible without Labour losing a single vote for Reform. As plenty of others have now tried dutifully to explain - from John Curtis to Rob Ford to Adam Bienkov - Labour can lose seats to Reform by losing votes to the Greens, because the progressive parties cannibalise each other and Farage crashes through the middle. Was that a mixed metaphor? I suppose it was. I’m very tired.

Westminster is a very silly place indeed. People generally think it is profoundly silly but it is so much sillier than they realise. It is therefore perfectly likely that people will take away this message even though it is infantile, simplistic and demonstrably wrong.

There is no plan to stick with

There’s a handful of ministers out there on the airwaves today - proper hospital pass, that one - insisting that Labour should stay calm and stick with the plan. But there is no plan. If there was, the party would be in a much better place.

The basic truth of the matter is that Starmer has no strategy, no vision, no agenda, no narrative, no desired outcome, nothing. Watching him govern is like watching a play staged by mannequins.

Imagine if Starmer had accepted in opposition that he would need to raise taxes. His majority would be smaller, sure. But the increased revenue to the Treasury would have helped reduce the interest rate on our debt, lessened the uniquely severe attitude towards us from the markets, provided a good breezy bit of headroom in the fiscal rules and helped stabilise the economy, providing for a more stable investment climate and all the other good stuff that comes with that.

Imagine if he had started his time in power with a big announcement on social care. Yes, all hell would have broken loose. But then, it did anyway, on stupid pointless little measures like the winter fuel allowance and welfare reform which didn’t help anyone. Right now, Labour would now be halfway through establishing that system. It could be in place in time for the next election. It would be sold as the single biggest change to our health and wellbeing since the NHS. Everyone would understand what Labour was for. It would have a story to tell. It would have something to be proud of.

Imagine if Starmer had taken one of the opportunities available to him and announced a massive expansion in our defence capacity. This could have taken place after Donald Trump attacked Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, or after the Liberation Day tariffs, or when the war in Iran broke out. At any one of these moments, he could have levelled with the British public: It’s a dangerous new world, we’re outside the EU, America is not reliable, Britain must be able to protect itself, defend its allies and project its values. This is our great national project. It will require sacrifice, but we will do it because it is necessary. Instead, he wasted every crisis, bumbling merrily along, going nowhere.

He has never taken any of these opportunities. He clearly does not have the confidence to try and convince the public of an argument. It’s not even clear if he thinks politicians have a place doing so. He is redundant. Obsolete. He secured power at a crucial moment in our national history and he squandered it. Pissed it away. It was a precious thing and a profound responsibility and he simply wasn’t up to it.

I would be much more concerned if I was Conservative than if I was Labour

Labour is having a nervous breakdown. This looks unseemly but at least it’s rational. It is a reasonable way to behave given the situation they are in. The Conservatives are equally screwed but they are calm and that is so much worse.

We read repeatedly that Kemi Badenoch is safe in her position because Tory members like her. This is in part a result of the extremely generous coverage she receives from the right-wing press, which acts as if her ability to speak in complete sentences exhibits some sort of intellectual triumph.

The Conservatives are getting hammered out there. Absolutely hammered. Badenoch has no plan to save them. In fact, the discussion around the party’s problems is so deranged that it makes the ‘Labour should break left or right’ conversation look Nobel-prize worthy.

The Tories have lost Postcard England to the Lib Dems. All those places you go to on long weekends - benign, self-satisfied areas with good tea rooms that you can’t quite work out if you want to live in or set fire to. The Lib Dems own them now. And this isn’t even really mentioned. It’s as if it isn’t happening, as if only the right-wing Reform threat is of any consequence. Half of Badenoch’s voters are Cameronite Remainers, somehow clinging on for dear life to a party which couldn’t give a damn about them. She seems as uninterested in them as she is in the voters she has already lost.

What the hell is happening with moderate Conservative MPs? Will they ever speak up? Will they ever rise from their slumber and take back their party, or will they sit there, parroting the same old tawdry crestfallen nonsense about the ECHR and leave-to-remain?

This is supposed to be the most mercenary, win-at-all-costs party in the Western world. It’s supposed to do whatever it takes, knife whoever it must, kill whomever it desires, if it will secure victory. Instead, it resembles a happy, doddery old man in a nursing home, oblivious to his surroundings, vaguely amused by what’s on the telly but struggling to follow along, going pleasantly and without much fuss into that good night.

By the bowels of Christ, we need electoral reform

No-one reading this will be the least bit surprised by what I am saying, but these results present an immediate pressing need for electoral reform and for that reform to take place immediately. There is now no single argument against this measure, regardless of your political views or your ideological tendency. To stand against it is to stand against all sense of logic, all commitment to reason, against mathematics itself.

Look at the result in the Exeter St Loyes ward, to take one example of many. Conservatives came in third with 25.3% of the vote, Reform came in second with 25.5% and the Liberal Democrats won with 25.6% of the vote. As political scientist Rob Ford said: “Pure chaos. [First-past-the-post] fruit machine.” These kinds of results are utterly arbitrary. They remove any sense of meaning from the vote. They remove - and this should send a shiver down our democratic spines - any sense of will.

Unless we urgently change our approach, we are going to go into the 2029 election with these sorts of results all over the country. Victory on the basis of knife-edge contests decided by perhaps a few hundred people. The disenfranchisement of the vast majority of voters, with victors representing a seat on pitiful levels of public support. Thirty per cent? Twenty-five per cent? Or perhaps even less. As party support shatters, winners will pass the post with homeopathic mandates. That is a democratic abomination and a crime against maths.

It is simply not possible to support this while still maintaining any pretence of respect for the voters. Any incoming Labour leader - and I presume there will be a new one incoming - should finally accept what most other countries recognised long ago. We need electoral reform and we need it in time for the next election.

No odds and sods this week, sorry and no podcast. But I suspect there’ll be another newsletter in the next few days when the results become a bit clearer.