Local By-Election results as a Barometer of Things to Come

Making long term predictions about political outcomes is a risky process – in some ways it’s comparable to weather forecasting – the earth’s atmosphere is a chaotic system and trying to predict it behaviour locally more than 2 or 3 days ahead accurately still presents us with many uncertainties, despite all our advances in predictive technology. We’ve all seen recently how long a week is in politics nowadays, let alone a month, or indeed 3 years!

Although 2029 is thus a long way ahead, and Labour's leadership and cabinet will be focused on more immediate policy decisions, their advance planners will already be thinking hard, and indeed with some trepidation, about their electoral prospects…and not solely for the next general election.

After the hammering both major parties took in the May 2025 local elections, largely at the hands of Farage’s Reform, they will both be acutely aware that their next real ‘day of reckoning’ will be next May. The reason why Labour in particular should be concerned at this relatively early stage is that the next tranche of local elections are only a little under 5 months away, and if they don’t get their ‘house in order’ and offer some hope of stability to their electorates, there will be ‘hell to pay’ for all their local councillors who up for re-election.

And it will be Labour’s ‘turn’ this time round – the majority of seats to be contested in May will be labour held, including quite a few big Labour-held metropolitan councils. Last year's ‘punishment’ toll hit the Tories far harder than Labour, but this was likely due to the distribution of 'at risk' seats. May 2026 will see a much higher proportion of Labour-held seats up for re-election.....The predominance of red in the excellent Wikipedia article on the subject should convince the reader of labour’s vulnerability this time round, with a huge swathe of seats in London and the northern cities up for grabs.

Does all this really matter, though, given their huge majority in parliament ?

The answer is that it does…the hard reality is that due to the first past the first past the post system. Labour’s victory was a ‘hollow’ one in 2024, and the brunt of continued disapproval of the resulting chaotic national 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 next year and will already be very worried about retaining their seats in May 2026. If, as seems quite possible, Labour suffer a complete rout in the next set of local polls, it will signal they are continuing to 'get it wrong' as a party in the eyes of the electorate, and will have even more ground to recover later in the electoral cycle to stand any chance at all 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 again next May as a result of their national 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 the effects of national government unpopularity, so there will be a toll to reckon with, given that the Westminster leadership have shown little or no contrition for their 'sins' to date. Starmer's recent efforts, such as they are, on the diplomatic front are unlikely to make much impression, 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 if they lose councillors in significant numbers. 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 - witness the resulting refuse-ridden chaos in our 2nd city, Birmingham this summer!).

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 at the time (it took a near back-bench revolt to force them to partially reverse the move).

The unions are already starting to 'get tough', now that the axe has well and truly fallen on the super-inflationary pay rises that were characteristic of Labour's first couple of months. We may soon find our streets covered with refuse 'a la Birmingham' if Unite (who, you may remember, were the union so effectively snubbed at conference in October over their restore Winter Fuel motion) extend their strike to a country wide walkout. 'Our Angela' fell foul of Unite's wrath by not supporting the bin collector's cause and had her membership rescinded – and then was forced to resign as a result of her ‘housing issues’. How the mighty are fallen....and keep falling!

Is there any way of predicting how bad things might get for Labour, and how this might affect General Elections to come  ?

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 YouGov poll (Nov 13th) actually puts Labour a full 9 points behind Reform (18% vs 27%), with even the Tories hot on their heels also at 18%.  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, but there is some evidence that their opinion poll fortunes are slowly reviving, partly on the back of Reform’s unpalatability  and Labour incompetence.

However, other, and arguably perhaps more reliable indicators of public voting intentions, might suggest a different trend. Let's look at a more immediate register of how the electorate are feeling.

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 acknowledge that they often get it wrong. Things have also become harder to predict in recent years, with our electorate becoming progressively more ‘volatile’ and unfathomable, with traditional voter loyalty very much on the decrease.

To take the weather analogy a bit further, 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 using ‘representative populations’ of voters really just gives a 'snapshot' of immediate sentiment within a small selected group, and can easily miss longer-term changes as a result.

We could, of course, also use the constituency by-election method for predictions of General Election prospects, but the main problem there 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 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, and any mid-term poll will naturally tend to favour opposition parties. 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, and has done so almost continuously since shortly after the initial WFP announcement in July 2024. 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 highly diverse multi-ethnic society. Starmer’s latest effort at defining it is “…anyone earning less than £45k p.a…”, which excludes virtually all salaried professionals and many blue-collar workers of old).   

The most recent data confirm that none of the promised reforms Labour has introduced since taking office have resulted in any signs of improvement in their electoral prospects, and thus do not augur well for the party. 

Looking at the distribution of Labour's lost by-election seats, the net loss of 39 since May, with a net loss of 22 for the Conservatives, and a whopping 50 gains for Reform 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 only 18 gains, so may find it hard to retain their ‘bumper crop’ of 72 seats in the 2029 election.

But couldn’t this apparent loss of support for Labour 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, and a chance to keep its manifesto promises for a year or so after that. 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 that Labour have a 'popularity  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 who unlikely to resign their seats mid-parliament. 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 was clearly to 'get the pain over with' in the early stages of his 'reign' and hope the electorate would have forgotten it all by 2029. He also set much store by strenuous efforts on the diplomatic front, spearheading the 'coalition of the willing' and ingratiating himself with Trump at every opportunity (it has been said that he does this in order to spend as much time away from his unruly back-benchers as possible….I couldn’t possibly venture an opinion about that!).

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 to Starmer over the more controversial issues, will have already started to wonder 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 achieved 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, and ultimately the determinants of his fate, 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 are certainly unlikely to do it again...ever. And that certainly won't help his party's vote share next time round, or the next..... To coin a phrase "...a pensioner's goodwill is for life...not just for electoral Christmas..".

And what of Labour’s prospects ‘post-Starmer’ ?

Assuming a Momentum-sponsored leadership team replace this one next summer, the very policies which threaten to alienate the electorate (i.e. “Tax, Tax, Tax and spend, then Tax ‘em again”) are likely to  persist unabated, with a burgeoning public sector and no attempt to control the welfare budget. This could do untold harm to our economic prospects over Labour’s 3 remaining years. You have only to look at the Markets’ response to Reeves screeching u-turn on IT rate hikes this week on the long-term gilt rates to confirm that as a likely outcome.

At this stage, obviously, the outcome of the 2029 election (or 2027 if Farage’s prediction comes true!) is too far ahead to call. Confident predictions of a Reform landslide should probably be taken with a large pinch of salt. To achieve this, a truly massive shift of at least 350 seats would need to transfer from Labour and the Tories to Reform, with the other parties static. We are much more likely to see a hung parliament, or even a small Labour majority, particularly if Farage is unable to maintain discipline within the Reform candidate ranks and his burgeoning councillor population. One revolution we may well see as a result is the breaking of the 2-party system – this definitely is one the cards if both major parties fail to improve their prospects within the next year or so.

We need therefore to keep a close eye on our ‘barometer’ in the meantime, and of course the 2026 and subsequent local election results. The image below, which I will attempt to update periodically, shows the distribution of local council seats won in Local by-elections held between May 25 and May 26.