For Labour Leader Sir Keir Starmer, the results marked another step in the party’s comeback from the 2019 election.Reuters
Britain’s Conservative Party is piling up heavy losses in local elections across England and Wales, heaping more pressure on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s leadership.
Results from Thursday’s balloting in 107 councils began pouring in on Friday and counting will continue into the weekend. The tally so far couldn’t be much worse for the Conservatives.
The Tories and the Labour Party headed into the election each defending close to 1,000 seats, while the Liberal Democrats had around 400. As of Friday evening, the Conservatives had lost more than 300 seats while Labour had picked up 160 and the Liberal Democrats 68.
The Conservatives “are so far losing one in two of the seats they have been trying to defend,” said John Curtice, a professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde. “When all the results are in, the party is at risk of suffering the catastrophic 500 losses of council seats that some analysts had predicted.”
Dr. Curtice told the BBC that the results translated into a national vote share of 34 per cent for Labour and 25 per cent for the Conservatives – enough for Labour to win the general election expected later this year.
U.K.’s Rishi Sunak braces for string of local elections forecasted to go badly for Tories
The Conservatives got even more bad news from a by-election in Blackpool on Thursday. The Tories won the seat in the 2019 election but their candidate took just 17.5 per cent of the vote on Thursday, compared with 59 per cent for Labour. The upstart Reform UK party, which has campaigned heavily on limiting immigration, finished only slightly behind the Conservatives at 17 per cent.
The lone bright spot for Mr. Sunak was in the north of England, where the Conservative’s Ben Houchen won re-election as the regional mayor of Tees Valley, which encompasses five local councils. But Mr. Houchen’s share of the vote fell to 53 per cent from 73 per cent in 2021. “The government needs to do a lot better at delivering for people,” Mr. Houchen said after the results came in. “We need to give them the excuse to vote for us.”
Mr. Sunak tried to put a brave face on the results by hailing Mr. Houchen’s victory, but he acknowledged the party had not done well.
“It is disappointing to lose good hard-working Conservative councillors,” the Prime Minister said. “I’m focused completely on the job at hand. That’s delivering for people across the country.”
For Labour Leader Sir Keir Starmer, the results marked another step in the party’s comeback from the 2019 election, when it was trounced by the Conservatives under former leader Boris Johnson. Sir Keir took over as head of Labour in 2020 and has transformed the party by moving it away from some of its more radical policies.
The local election results “were a direct message to the Prime Minister, which is: Make way, let’s have a general election, let’s allow our country now to go forward,” Sir Keir said Friday.
There were some concerns for Labour. The party’s slow backing of a ceasefire in Israel, and Sir Keir’s perceived tepid support for Palestinians in Gaza, is believed to have cost it votes in some parts of the country. “We do recognize the strength of feeling that there is, and of course we will continue to work just as we do in every area across the country to earn votes back in future,” senior Labour MP Yvette Cooper said.
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The Conservatives face the prospect of being squeezed on the left by Labour and on the right by Reform, which is a co-creation of television commentator Nigel Farage, leader of the charge to take Britain out of the European Union. Reform’s showing in Blackpool was higher than analysts expected and while the party didn’t field a lot of candidates in the local election, it managed to beat the Tories in two-thirds of the council seats it contested in Sunderland.
There will now be questions about whether Tory MPs will move against Mr. Sunak and try to replace him as leader. Under party rules, 15 per cent of caucus members, or 52 Tory MPs, can call for a vote of non-confidence in his leadership. A handful of MPs have said they want Mr. Sunak dumped, but most analysts doubt that enough will threaten his position this close to a general election.
“It does seem rather suicidal,” said Sara Hobolt, a professor of political science at the London School of Economics. “If you are a Tory MP, you have to calculate going into a very divisive leadership election, just before a general election. Would that be better or worse? I think any neutral observer would say it’s probably not sensible.”
Richard Holden, the Conservative party chair, made it clear Friday that no insurrection had materialized despite the party’s poor showing. “The Prime Minister is going to go on and lead the Conservative party into the general election, there’s no doubt about that,” he told Times Radio.
Paul Waldie