What are Labour’s prospects in future elections ?
Although 2029 is a long way ahead, and Labour's leadership and cabinet will be focused on more immediate policy decisions, their
advance planners should already be thinking hard 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 next tranche of local elections are only a little under 3 months away,
so the first ‘day of reckoning’ at the ballot box is, relatively speaking, nigh.
Does this really matter, though, given their huge majority in parliament ?
The answer is that it does…the hard reality is that the brunt of any early disapproval of the new government 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 this year and will be worried about retaining their seats on May 1st. If, as seems quite possible, Labour suffer a whitewash in these polls, it will signal they are 'getting it wrong' as a party in the eyes of the electorate, and will have much more ground to recover later in the electoral cycle to stand any chance of being re-elected.
In one sense, this potential 'rout' of sitting councillors is a pity. 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 next May as a result of their leadership's ill-advised policy decisions, with the attendant loss of their collective expertise and enthusiasm to local government. Sadly, it’s virtually impossible to protect
local councillors from national government unpopularity, so there will be a toll to reckon with, unless the Westminster leadership show a lot more contrition for their 'sins' to date. Starmer's recent performances on the diplomatic front are unlikely to suffice, given his many 'faux pas' on the home front.
An additional factor to consider is that many local councils ‘went Labour’ during the Tory wipeouts of the last 2 years, and thus a significant number of currently Labour-controlled LAs may well be at risk of the party losing overall control. This will not please ‘grass roots’ supporters, who will
doubtless blame Starmer and Reeves for all their ills (including a continued lack of LA funding!). This unpopularity in the ranks could create even more divisions within the party, who won’t have forgotten having
their Winter Fuel restoration resolution at Conference first sidelined, and then studiously ignored, by the leadership.
Can we predict how bad things might get for Labour ?
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 latest (Feb 4th) actually puts 1 point behind Reform, with even the Tories now hot on their heels. Interestingly, though, the opinion polls also seem to indicate that the Tories appear to have gained relatively little from this downturn in Labour's fortunes so far.
This might at first sight be what one would expect at this stage of the cycle, given the Tories spell in ‘rehab’ is still in its early stages, with their new leader yet to make a real impression, and wisely avoiding making detailed promises on policy.
However, other, and arguably perhaps more reliable indicators, might suggest a different trend. Let's look at a more immediate register of how the electorate are feeling, i.e. local by-elections. How much we should read into Labour’s loss of popularity with regard to local election prospects?
Opinion polls are, at best, a blunt instrument when it comes
to predictions on voting outcomes ‘on the day’, and often get it wrong. Things have also become harder to predict in recent years, with our electorate becoming progressively more ‘volatile’ and unpredictable, with traditional voter ‘loyalty’
very much on the decrease.
We do, however, have a less well-used ‘barometer’ of voter sentiment available in the form of local by-election results. Since this represents real performance data, it is arguably a better indicator than opinion polls, whose representative small sampling technique really just gives a 'snapshot' of immediate sentiment, and can easily miss longer-term changes.
We can of course also use the constituency by-election method for predictions of General Election prospects, but the main problem there is that these 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 a general election.
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 resigns their position. 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. Some might argue that results reflect too much the immediate local issues to be representative, but voters do tend to admit when challenged that their feelings about the national government do 'colour their judgment' when voting locally, hence it's reasonable to assume some validity.
There are various online sources for these statistics. I’ve provided a link to one of the more reliable ones, which provides a regularly-updated summary. The table below this text shows the latest results summary.
The current stats are quite interesting, and confirm that the trend away from Labour is persisting at the local level. This is a direct consequence of the degree of unpopularity the current government has already brought upon itself by its treatment of pensioners, its cave-ins to the public sector unions with exorbitant wage settlements, and its apparent complete disdain for the business sector and the farming industry in favour of 'the workers'. (Labour have struggled to produce a useful definition of this term when challenged on its modern-day relevance - this may be because, like the 'working class' of yester-year, it is arguable as to whether it still actually exists as a homogeneous group in our diverse multi-ethnic society).
The most recent data confirm that none of the the post-budget update figures to date show any signs of improvement, and thus do not augur well for Labour.
Looking at the distribution of Labour's lost seats, the net loss of 24, with a net gain of 23 for the Conservatives, with the few remaining seats changing hands between the minor parties (see table below) speaks volumes. It's also noteworthy that the
Lib Dems, who profited handsomely from the Tories unpopularity in July, and
have been vying with the Tories (and Reform!) for the title of principal opposition party
ever since, have made no gains and have lost two council seats. One item of particular note,as mentioned previously, is that the Tory gains aren’t reflected in any of the current opinion poll predictions. This begs the question as to which technique is a better indicator of voting intentions.
But doesn’t this apparent loss of support just reflect the well-established ‘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 – it's still too early in the cycle for that to apply. Apart from anything else, we are by no means anywhere near mid-term yet, and a government as new as this one would normally be given the benefit of the doubt by its electorate for at least its first 6-9 months in office. Labour was, after all, given an unusually strong mandate (at least in terms of its majority, despite only polling 20% of the electorate), and as electors, those of us who didn't vote Tory will be naturally reluctant to admit they made the wrong choice this early on in the 5-year term. The fact that support for this particular government plummeted so dramatically in just their first 3 months, and has remained alarmingly low ever since, indicates that something really has gone wrong....and they have a mountain to climb before 2029.
Will
we get any corroboration of this trend from constituency by-elections ?
Probably not, at least for some time - this is a
relatively young parliament with a large number of 'virgin' labour MPs. Many of
the ‘old guard’ (both Labour and Tory) either stood down before the election or lost their seats on polling day, 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 to another party, rather than resigning 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 would in any case have a job achieving either!), but is desperate to overcome his reputation for weakness, and appear to be a strong one. His strategy is clearly to 'get the pain over with' in the early stages of his 'reign' and hope the electorate will have forgotten it all by 2029.
He may well find this approach comes back to bite him if he continues to ignore his electorate…his 'legions' of new back-benchers, many of whom will have already felt the 'chill wind of constituency disapproval' in their mailboxes as a reward for their loyalty over the more controversial issues, may soon start wondering whether he is becoming a liability rather than an asset. The most surprising thing in all this is perhaps the number of different groups he has managed to alienate by disadvantaging them in some way, and the speed with which he has rushed to do this. The old maxim "..fools rush in where angels fear to tread." certainly springs to mind here....
Starmer's real problem, though, is that as his electors, we have long memories......especially if we have been directly affected by his decisions. Quite a few of the 10 million pensioners he deprived summarily of their winter fuel allowance and who voted Labour in July certainly won't do it again...ever. And that certainly won't help his party's vote share next time round, or the next.....
Update 1.3.25: The trend continues with the Tories continuing to take the lion's share of the Labour losses. This correlates quite well with the increasing unpopularity of the leadership, and the party in general, as the effects of the swingeing budget measures announced in October and November really begin to bite, and the economy falters. The leadership's obdurate unwillingness to consider any form of mitigation to soften the blows won't have helped them, either. His recent 'junketings' on the diplomatic front are unlikely to redeem him in voters' eyes long-term, particularly if Trump turns nasty with Europe and Starmer is seen by him as complicit in its defiance against a future Trump-Putin 'carve up' of Ukraine and its resources.
The fact that Starmer has also already 'inspired' not one but two three of his brightest young female ministers to resign, may well have already 'started the rot' within the back-bench contingent. His hitherto loyal cabinet may also quite reasonably be wondering who's next for the chop......
On present performance, I give him another 6 months....
First published 6.11.24
Revised 7.2.25
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