Labour stand to lose 1,600 seats at local elections in best case scenario as 3 in 4 Brits say things are getting worse

Labour could lose nearly 1,600 council seats at the local elections even on a good night, new research suggests.

In a best-case scenario, Labour could still lose 1,597 council seats across England and nearly 2,000 seats in the worst-case – in a set of local election results that could seal Keir Starmer’s fate as PM.

Labour currently has 2,196 councillors across the seats up for election, meaning a good result for the party would still leave the party’s number of locally elected representatives dwindling in the hundreds.

Labour is also on track to come third in both the Scottish and Welsh elections, the polling shows.

With less than a month until voters head to the polls, three in four Brits think things are getting worse under Labour.

And Sir Keir remains by far the least liked political leader among voters the research reveals, with a net approval score of -43. Kemi Badenoch is the most admired leader on -13.

This comes as Sir Keir is fighting for his political survival after it emerged Peter Mandelson had failed security vetting for the post of US Ambassador but was appointed regardless.

In a lukewarm show of support for the embattled Prime Minister, Scottish Secretary Douglas Alexander said yesterday he expected Sir Keir to lead Labour into the next general election, ‘but there are no certainties’ in politics.

Reform UK stand to gain from Labour’s deepening unpopularity, with Nigel Farage’s party predicted to gain between 1273 and 1603 seats, the research from polling firm More in Common suggests. The party currently has 78 local councillors across the seats to be contested next month.

And the research shows Labour potentially losing control of Sunderland City Council – which has been held by Labour since its formation.

Master of Laketown: All this talk of change must be suppressed. I can’t afford to let them rebel, band together and start making noises. The next thing you know, they’ll start asking questions, forming committees, launching inquiries.

Alfrid Lickspittle: Out with the old, in with the new.

Master of Laketown: What?

Alfrid Lickspittle: That’s what they’ve been saying, sire. There is even talk of an election.

Master of Laketown: An election? That’s absurd. I won’t stand for it.

The red flag with Farage and Lowe is they are from a faction that keeps spinning up new parties, new banners etc.

Farage’s Reform party won power in a part of Kent (the county southeast of London) and after a year half of them were complaining that it was too much like hard work. One councillor switched from Reform to UKIP, and four of their councillors have been suspended by Reform due to serious irregularities and misconduct.

And people in local government can easily bounce from one party to the next based on nothing more impressive than “this party has offered to pay more for my campaign than that party did.”

I had the joy, a few years back, of attending a local government hustings where there was a Green party guy who was more right wing than the UKIP guy, but he also had an entrepeneurship background. He had boundless enthusiasm, and loads of ideas on how to bring investment into the town.

By contrast the UKIP guy was some guy who’d been retired for twenty years and had narcolepsy; he slept through half the meeting and in the brief time he was awake and talkative all he could talk about was The Immigrants. Which would be fine if he wasn’t running to a constituency that’s 99.9999% white British, where there were about five non-white families in the entire town, there was no wave of immigration into the area, and what people really wanted to hear was an inward investment pitch.

Result - the green candidate got over 3,000 votes, the UKIP guy got under 400.

Thing to remember in the UK is, local government and national government are two completely different beasts. Over here, nobody cares about national issues in local elections unless they (a) want to send a strong message to the government of the day or (b) a national issue is of immense local significance.

The best local government I ever had working for me was comprised of

- one councillor who’s a far left Tankie, ex trade union, and whose son is in the Labour Party Corbynite wing
- three councillors who quit the Labour party and ran as a completely separate local party
- a Tory from a civil engineering background, massively anti-immigration and anti-benefits

All five of them got on very well, because they had different perspectives from different careers outside of party politics, and the party rosette was just a vehicle for in effect five different independent agendas. Also, they all lived in the area that they had to manage.

Those five people turned round what had previously been massively mis-run by careerist mainstream party jobsworths from the mainstream parties, and none of the mainstream parties have been able to pull power away from the independents.

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