Not quite an earthquake in the UK local elections

One of the things in the UK Local Elections that interests me the most is why on earth they don’t all take place at the same time, like constituencies in General Elections, or regions in the European Elections. It doesn’t necessarily create election fatigue, as each ward doesn’t have an election each time. However, it means that local parties are always in election mode and those who lead cannot dedicate their time to e.g. improving services. In the United States, it is well known that elected representatives have to constantly generate money for election campaigns, which means they always have to pander to donors. Constant elections aren’t always good. It would be much better if all council wards (across the country) had elections at the same time every few years. As noted in the book ‘Local Government In The United Kingdom (Wilson and Game), this would also allow the electorate to get everyone out at once, if they so wished.

Anyway, there were another set of elections recently. 161 of the councils were up for grabs. The Local Government Association has 351 English Councils as members, so it isn’t even half of the country. Nevertheless, there were opportunities for parties to make some major gains and get some valuable insight into how the country feel about them (would be even more valuable if the turnout was decent).

It is well-known that much of the population is unable to separate local and national politics, which means the current status of Labour and the Conservatives in the opinion polls was always expected to be an indicator of how they would perform in these elections. The same can be said for the Liberal Democrats. They would have expected losses beforehand. For them, it would be about minimising them.

UKIP Leader Nigel Farage wanted to cause an ‘earthquake’ (a message repeated in the European Election manifesto). It was a big opportunity for his party to get a foothold in some of the country’s important structures and organisations. The thing is, the word ‘earthquake’ in this context would suggest some dramatic or shocking. This put pressure on the party to perform. They only had two councillors in the councils involved this time. They needed to have much more than that. Their performance in 2013 was encouraging.

Results

The following are the results at the time of typing. It is important to note that they are incomplete, due to the deaths of candidates in two wards and the overrun of the count for the mayoral position in Tower Hamlets. However, most are available – as you can see.

There were other parties in these elections, but they had no seats or councillors, so I have excluded them from the table to make it easier to read.

The result for UKIP cannot be considered an ‘earthquake’. The had the second highest number of gains, they didn’t gain control of any councils and they benefited from a poor national opinion of the Conservatives (and, to some extent, Labour). As for the country as a whole, they don’t control any council. At best, they are the official opposition. In addition, if you only consider the councils involved in this election, they are the fourth placed party in terms of councillors. Despite all that, they did do significantly better than two of the other main parties. They were one of only two parties to make more than 20 gains.

Earlier, I talked about minimising losses. Whilst it must have been the case for the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, they have clearly failed. Their respective losses are massive. However, their losses do not mean they have slipped behind UKIP (for the above councils, or the country as a whole). The Liberal Democrats are the only party with a real chance of that happening and it would take more massive losses for that to happen. That change may happen eventually, but not right or next year.

Labour are the biggest beneficiaries – that is clear to see. In a terrific performance, they gained the most seats and were the only party to gain control of any of the councils up for grabs.

‘No Overall Control’ means that there isn’t a party in an authority with a majority of seats. The number of these went up. You could say that there is no particularly strong feeling for any party, but that is not necessarily true. It could be that a once dominant party lost that lead completely. When there are elections in these councils next time, there is the potential to make major gains.

Turnout

I will not list the turnout for each council. The table would be far too long. What I can tell you is that the percentage is normally quite low for local elections, even though councils are important to the daily lives of the electorate.

According to this article, turnout is roughly 36% (you can also find that figure in this article). This isn’t good. It’s much less than half of the possible voters. The following is some historic data from this page:

It’s fair to say that the results have been inconsistent. The only times when the turnout has been above 43% has been in general election years. European Election years don’t seem to matter as 2004 and 2004 were very low. The similarity in the percentages for non-GE years are interesting as it isn’t the same councils voting each time.

Finally…

Gaining seats is great. Gaining a lot of seats is even better. UKIP have certainly done that this time. The problem is that it doesn’t really mean anything if you don’t gain control of councils. If a party has a big lead in one council, the official opposition may be the second biggest party, but they are still unlikely to get their way. In these elections (or the country as a whole), UKIP has no control and hasn’t overtaken any of the three biggest parties. It will take multiple rounds of council elections before this happens.

As for an indicator of the possible outcome of the General Election next year, it means there is the potential for them to gain some MPs, but they won’t be the official opposition. There’s no cast iron guarantee that they’ll be third either. Seeing this as an indicator, he said the following about his party’s prospects for next year:

“UKIP fox is in the Westminster hen house”

So, what do you think?