What are Labour’s prospects in future elections ?

 

Although 2029 is a long way ahead, and the leadership and cabinet will be focused on immediate policy decisions, their advance planners should already be thinking about their electoral prospects…and not just for the next general election.

The reason why they should be concerned at this early stage is that the local elections are only a little over 6 months away, so the first ‘day of reckoning’ at the ballot box is, relatively speaking,  nigh.

Does this really matter, though ?

The answer is that it does…the brunt of any early disapproval by the electorate (and there’s plenty of that around just now!) will fall on local Labour councillors, many of whom come up for re-election next year and will be worried about retaining their seats on May 1^st.

In one sense, this is a pity, since Local politics is by its nature less overtly political than the national variety, and involves a lot more cross-party collaboration – it simply has to, in order to get things done at a local level. A lot of good, hardworking and experienced Labour councillors may well lose their seats, with the attendant loss of their combined expertise to local government. Sadly, it’s virtually impossible to protect local councillors from government unpopularity, so there will be a toll.

Since many councils ‘went Labour’ during the Tory wipeouts in the last 2 years, a significant number of LAs may well be at risk of Labour losing overall control. This will not please ‘grass roots’ supporters, who will doubtless blame Starmer and Reeves for all their ills, and this unpopularity could create even more divisions within the party, who won’t have forgotten having their Winter Fuel resolution at Conference sidelined, and then studiously ignored by the leadership.

Can we predict how bad this might get ?

Opinion polls are the most obvious and popular choice for assessing voting intentions for future general elections. The majority of these currently put Labour support significantly lower than it was immediately post-election, with losses of between 6 and 10 percentage points. The Tories appear to have gained little from this so far, as one might expect given their spell in ‘rehab’ is still in its early stages. How much we should read into Labour’s loss of popularity with regard to local election prospects, though ? Opinion polls are at best a blunt instrument when it comes to predictions on voting outcomes ‘on the day’, and our electorate is also becoming progressively more ‘volatile’ and unpredictable, with voter ‘loyalty’ very much on the decrease.

We do have a less well frequented ‘barometer’ of voter sentiment available in the form of by-election results. Since this represents actual ‘performance’ data, it is arguably a better indicator than opinion polls’ ‘representative sampling’ technique.

The problem with using this method for predictions of General Election prospects, though,  is that constituency by-elections are relatively few and far between. The sampling statistics they generate are therefore too sparse to be reliable, particularly a long way ahead of the event. Local council by-elections, on the other hand, are much more frequent, arising as they do whenever a councillor either moves house, suffers illness, or just simply gets fed up with the thankless task they’ve taken on and gives up their seat. This means we get a much better, and arguably more reliable, picture of how things are going from week to week, with respect to overall grass-roots voter sentiment across the country.

There are various online sources for these statistics. I’ve provided a link to one of the more reliable ones, which is provides a regularly-updated summary. The table below shows the latest results summary.

The current stats are quite interesting, and bear out the degree of unpopularity the current government has brought upon itself by its treatment of pensioners, its cave-ins to the public sector unions with exorbitant wage settlements, and its disdain of the business sector and the farming industry.   

The post-budget update figures are quite stark and the signs do not augur well for Labour. 

Their net loss of 18 seats, with 13 of them taken by the Conservatives, and the rest going to the minor parties (see table below) speaks volumes. The Lib Dems, who profited handsomely from the Tories unpopularity in July, and have been vying with the Tories for the title of principal opposition party ever since, have made no gains and have lost one. The Tory gains are also noteworthy in that they aren’t reflected in any of the opinion poll predictions which begs the question as to which is a better indicator of voting intentions.

But doesn’t this loss of support just reflect the ‘mid-term unpopularity effect’, whereby by-election results often result in a trouncing for the ruling party’s candidate on the back of government unpopularity ?

I suspect not – apart from anything else we are by no means at mid-term yet, and a government as new as this one would normally be given the benefit of the doubt by its electorate for its few months in office at least. Labour was given a strong mandate (at least in terms of its majority, despite only polling 20% of the electorate), and as electors, we’ll be naturally reluctant to admit we made the wrong choice too early on in the 5-year term. Will we get any corroboration from constituency by-elections ?

Probably not, at least for some time - this is a relatively ‘young’ parliament with a large number of new labour MPs. Many of the ‘old guard’ (both Labour and Tory) either stood down before the election or were defeated, so we would expect very few constituency by-elections at this stage of the game. Any further ‘defectors’ from Labour are likely to either go independent or switch allegiance, rather than resign their seats. Thus we will have to rely on the local results, and to an extent the opinion polls, to judge.

Starmer seems to set great store by dismissing any need to be seen as a ‘popular’ and charismatic leader. He may find this approach ‘comes back to bite him’ if he continues to ignore his electorate…..as may his 'legions' of back-benchers.

First published 6.11.24