What did we learn from the 2024 local election results?

May 06, 2024

I’ll go through the results party by party.

Conservatives

The Tories got smashed all over England. They lost control of 10 of the 16 councils they’d controlled before, dropped over 470 council seats, and lost 11 out of the 12 mayoral elections.

The one mayoral election they did win was quite incredible. Ben Houchen retained his position as mayor of Tees Valley despite his involvement in the incredibly dodgy Teesworks scandal. It’s hard to know what people there were thinking.

The Tories also kept 17 of their Police Commissioner positions across England, losing 10 to Labour.

The Tory results were awful, but not quite as bad as the predicted slaughter, and not bad enough for Tory MPs to depose Rishi Sunak and replace him with an emergency replacement leader for the looming General Election, which is actually the best possible result for people who despise the Tory party.

They’ve taken an electoral kicking, yet they’re sticking with their ludicrously out of touch and widely disliked lame duck leader who doesn’t stand a chance of winning the next general election.

Labour

The Labour Party capitalised on the Tory collapse, winning 185 extra council seats across England, taking control of 8 more councils, holding all of their mayoral positions, winning the three new mayoralties (North East, East Midlands, York + N. Yorks), and flipping the West Midlands mayoralty from Tory to Labour.

Labour also took Blackpool South from the Tories in a parliamentary by-election increasing their share of the vote by 20% while the Tory vote collapsed by 32%.

It would be misleading to paint these results as a poor show for Labour, but there are warning signs.

Keir Starmer told people on the left to "leave if you don’t like it" and that’s exactly what a lot of people have done. For every vote the Labour Party has picked up from the Tory implosion, they seem to have lost almost as many to the Green Party, independents, and minor parties.

Then there’s the brutal reality that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are dead set on continuing Tory austerity ruination, meaning they’re implacably opposed to restoring local government funding.

Labour’s inexplicable austerity obsession renders the local election results fairly meaningless, because even though Labour have eight more councils under their control, all that really means is that the people imposing ruinous local cuts, overseeing declining services, and flogging off public assets to balance the books are changing the colour of their ties from blue to red.

Liberal Democrats

The Lib-Dems won 104 more council seats and won control of two more councils giving them 12 of the councils that were up for election, double the number held by the Tories!

The reason they managed to win 12 councils with 17% of the vote, while the Tories only won 6 with 25% of the vote is that the Lib-Dems concentrated their efforts on a small number of specific geographic areas, while getting trounced across much of England, and not even standing candidates in 32% of the council seats that were up for grabs.

The Lib-Dems improved their fortunes slightly, but they’re still absolutely miles away from the high water mark before Nick Clegg annihilated them in 2010 by signing up to the disastrous coalition deal to burn most of their pre-election promises, and unquestioningly prop up the austerity Tories for five ruinous years.

It’s hardly surprising that they’ve struggled to recover much of their lost ground given that their party leader Ed Davey was one of the worst Lib-Dem offenders during the austerity coalition years, however the sickening non-choice between pro-austerity Tories and pro-austerity Labour constructed by Keir Starmer seems to be working in their favour.

Greens

The Green Party gained 74 council seats and became the biggest party on Bristol Council, falling just one seat short of a majority. They’re also now the biggest party in Stroud and Hastings, and the second biggest in Norwich, Reigate and Barnstead, Solihull, South Tyneside, and others.

The Greens also won three seats on the London Assembly, meaning they’re the third party in the capital city after Labour and the Tories.

It’s still a case of slow progress and marginal gains, and the party still only managed to stand candidates in 62% of the council seats available, but they’re gradually improving their position at every set of local elections.

The Greens have been quite open about welcoming people who are disillusioned with Keir Starmer’s austerity economics, privatisation obsession, and complicity with Israeli genocide, and it’s a strategy that’s clearly working given that they’ve more than doubled their total number of council seats (to over 800) since Starmer turned the Labour Party back into a right-wing monstrosity.

Independent and local parties

It was another good set of local election results for Independents, Residents Associations, and small local parties, winning an extra 104 seats between them (the same gains as the Lib-Dems).

The localist People's Independent Party even won control of Castle Point council in Essex.

There was a big disappointment though, with the excellent independent candidate Jamie Driscoll coming second in the North East mayoral race to Starmer’s stool pigeon candidate Kim McGuinness. He did well to pick up over 120,000 votes, but it wasn’t quite enough in an area where people tend to vote Labour no matter who the party candidate is.

Minor left-wing parties

George Galloway’s Workers Party won four council seats (having contested only 33), including two in Rochdale where Galloway won his by-election victory earlier this year, and one in Manchester where they managed to unseat Labour’s deputy leader on Manchester Council.

The Women’s Equality Party won their first ever council seat in Basingstoke and Deane.

Minor right-wing parties

Despite wall-to-wall coverage from capitalist media and the BBC, the reincarnated corpse of the Brexit Party, now called Reform UK, won only two council seats, both on Havant Borough Council.

Their leader Richard Tice used the enormous platform the media keeps giving him to claim that Reform are now "the real opposition to Labour", which is a spectacularly delusional stance to take given that Labour aren’t even in power yet, and that Reform won only half as many new council seats as George Galloway’s tiny outfit, and literally scores fewer than the either the Greens, Independents, or Lib-Dems.

One of the most enjoyable moments came when the Britain First fascists won fewer votes than Count Binface to come second last in the London Mayoral election.

Perspective

Probably the most important thing to remember is that it’s not sensible to try and extrapolate broad general election predictions from local election results.

Local elections have much lower turnouts and much less publicity than general elections.

Those who do show up to vote in local elections (usually about 30% to 40% of the electorate) are generally more politically engaged than the 30% odd extra who vote on general election days, and there’s much less expenditure on political propaganda by the big parties during local elections too.

Then there’s the fact that Scotland didn’t vote at all last week, and Wales only had very low turnout votes for elected police commissioners, meaning any conclusions drawn from last week’s results are likely to be even more England-centric than usual.

Conclusions

It’s delightful to see the ongoing implosion of the Tory party, and that they’re still going to be lumbered with such a stone-cold loser of a leader going into the general election.

Overall it was a good result for Labour, but they bled almost as much support from the left as they gained from disillusioned Tories.

The Lib-Dems, Greens, and Independents all did relatively well, but starting from way behind the two main parties.

The extreme-right did terribly, but you’d have to be deeply naive to imagine that capitalist media and the BBC would ever decide to stop pouring such disproportionate attention on the likes of Laurence Fox and Reform.

The Tories used some disgraceful propaganda tactics in these elections (such as their attack on London, and their fake parking fines) which suggests they’re gearing up to fight an even more deceitful and dishonest general election campaign than 2019, and they’ve got £millions to splurge on social media dark ads, unlawful postering campaigns, search engine hacking, culture war bollocks, and outright lies.