Voters in England go the polls on Thursday in a round of local elections that some analysts believe could signal the beginning of a new era of multi-party politics, threatening the long-established Labour and Conservative duopoly.
All eyes will be on Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, leading in the national polls and seeking to start building a local base from ground zero upon which to mount a serious assault on Westminster at the next general election, expected in 2029.
But while the rightwing populist party poses a serious threat — particularly to the Tories, the main party of the right — the local elections are likely also to result in big gains for the centrist Liberal Democrats across the prosperous south and the Greens, who pose a growing threat to Labour on the left.
Britain might have voted to leave the EU, but its politics look increasingly European. The big difference is that, unlike many European countries, its first-past-the-post voting model can throw up highly unpredictable results.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer proved as much last July when he secured a landslide general election victory with just 33.7 per cent of the vote, the lowest of any majority party on record. Vote distribution is key, but the result showed that British politics is entering an erratic period.
Local elections are often treated by the public as a chance to cast a protest vote, but Sir John Curtice, the veteran elections expert, told the Financial Times on Sunday: “The conditions are there for the biggest challenge to the political conventions of British politics since the 1920s.”
Thursday may give a foretaste of what is to come. A notable factor of the political debate ahead of the May 1 poll is speculation of what kind of pacts Labour or the Tories might need to strike with other parties to retain or return to power at the next election.
More than 1600 council seats are up for grabs, with about one-third of electors in England eligible to cast a ballot. Polls will be held for 23 councils and six mayors in England, along with a parliamentary by-election in the north-west seat of Runcorn and Helsby.
Reform, which is fielding more candidates than any other party, is the bookmakers’ favourite to win in Runcorn and is also topping opinion polls for the mayoralties in Greater Lincolnshire and Hull and East Yorkshire.
The populist party, whose support is strongest in the ancient Danelaw region of northern and eastern England where the Vikings once held sway, is also seeking to win scores of seats from the Tories.
For all his success on TikTok, Farage has told colleagues that Reform’s route to power at Westminster runs through town halls and local party organisations, generating the machinery to deliver results on the ground.
The build-up to the elections has seen Kemi Badenoch forced to discuss the possibility of the Conservatives forming local pacts with Reform in town halls, although she insists that she will not consider such a deal at Westminster.
Her party is defending seats on May 1 that were won during a high-water mark for Boris Johnson’s premiership in 2021, at a time when the country was emerging from the pandemic and the Tory government was enjoying a “vaccine bounce”.
Almost two-thirds of the seats up for grabs are being defended by the Conservatives, prompting concerns at Tory HQ of fresh discontent with Badenoch’s leadership brewing on Friday as results come in.
Lord Ben Houchen, Tory mayor of Teesside, is already talking about the possibility of the Conservatives forming an anti-Labour coalition with Reform in the event of a hung parliament at the next general election.
But Labour — which is struggling to defend Runcorn despite its 14,700 majority — also faces a threat from Farage, even if in the short term the idea of the right-wing vote splitting might sustain Starmer’s party in power.
It was no coincidence that Starmer became the first prime minister to host a Number 10 St George’s Day event to celebrate England’s patron saint and to try to wrest the English flag away from his rightwing political opponents.
“We cannot be under any illusions that there is a never-ending fight for our flag and what it represents,” he said, claiming some of his opponents wrapped themselves in the national flag while seeking to “sow divisions in our communities”.
Starmer is being dragged to the right to fend off Reform, including by changing his stance on the definition of a woman, cutting the overseas aid budget and slashing welfare spending.
But that trend towards “blue Labour” policies, driven by his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, has created space on the left, which the Greens could exploit. The pro-environmental party has hopes of winning a key mayoralty in the west of England.
The other party looking forward to Thursday is Sir Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats, which won 72 seats at the last election on a 12.2 per cent share of the vote, largely at the expense of the Tories in their southern heartlands.
Davey has been campaigning relentlessly in the same areas ahead of May 1 and party strategists believe the Lib Dems can knock down Conservative citadels and become the second-biggest party in local government, behind Labour, in terms of councils they control.
The Lib Dem leader, whose campaigning japery is intended to convey a sense of fun in depressed political times, is looking to make gains in areas including Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire and Devon.
The rise of the centrist party has raised questions for Labour about whether it could be forced to form a coalition with Davey’s party in a hung parliament. “I don’t think so,” Pat McFadden, Cabinet Office minister, told LBC on Sunday.
“We spent a long time in opposition with people suggesting to us that the answer to being not popular enough was to do some kind of deal with other parties,” McFadden said. But the fact the question is being repeatedly asked is, in itself, a sign of the shifting political landscape.
