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Far Right Makes Big Gains In English Local Elections [1]
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Date: 2025-05-03
There were local elections in England on Thursday, which resulted in a very large increase in support for the far right Reform party.
I haven’t seen it commented on so far so I thought I’d write a short diary just to explain what happened, and also to tease out some of the nuances that make the headline figures give a slightly misleading impression.
The UK has (of course — nothing is ever simple here) a very esoteric electoral system, especially when it comes to elections for local government. A century of tinkering has given us a patchwork system of different types of councils and other bodies in different areas.
Some areas have County Councils and District Councils as a “two tier” structure (for example Devon County Council sits above several local district councils like Torridge, South Hams, North Devon etc). Other areas have a “unitary” authority with only a single tier (most large cities, such as Plymouth have “City Councils” and some smaller counties, such as Cornwall, have a single council for everything).
Some local authorities have a directly elected executive Mayor. Others have a traditional structure with a council leader and cabinet doing the actual policy making, with a “Lord Mayor” as a cultural figurehead.
Adding to this confusion are “city region Mayors”. These are a consequence of the Blair government’s failed attempt to introduce English devolution. The original idea was that “regions” of England (the Southwest, the Northeast etc) would have their own “parliament” and devolved powers, that would equal the playing field somewhat with the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish devolution settlements. It turned out, English voters were having none of it, and a referendum in the North East (the region felt to have the highest level of “local identification” and support for its own assembly) resulted in a solid “NO”.
As a backup plan, the government started the process of introducing elected regional mayors that could do something like the same function but without the impression of “breaking England up into pieces”. We now have mayors for Greater London, The West of England, Greater Manchester, Merseyside, The West Midlands and several other parts of England (mostly conurbations). Eventually the plan is that everyone will have their own “mega mayor”. I personally think it’s a dreadful idea but my opinions aren’t relevant here.
The pattern of elections is also variable. Every year (pretty much) on the first Thursday in May there are some local elections somewhere. However, no local authority has elections every year. Some reelect all their members once every few years. Some elect 1/3rd of their members every year (sometimes on a 4 year cycle with a “year off”). This creates something like the situation with the US Senate race where different areas are up for election in different years.
So it is, that in 2025 the elections were mostly for English Counties, and some mayoral contests. This means that for the most part the seats up for grabs had previously been elected in 2021.
This means that two factors come together to mean that the Conservative Party had a very large number of seats to defend.
1) The English Counties are, historically, a Conservative stronghold. Due to the large cities (which tend to support Labour) being carved out into their own unitary authorities, what you are left with are rural areas and their towns and smaller cities. So to use Devon as an example. Devon County Council represents all of Devon other than Plymouth (250k working class industrial port) and Torbay (string of tacky tourist towns along some beautiful coastline). The city of Exeter (relatively small) is covered by the County Council. As in most countries, rural areas and country towns tend to the right. So in any given county council election, you’d expect to see Conservatives over-represented.
2) 2021 was the last year of Boris Johnson’s honeymoon after the big win of the 2019 general election (incidentally, an election that the Reform party’s predecessor essentially sat out and gave a free hand to the Tories). The Brexit deal had been “done” (and only recently implemented, so the negative financial effects weren’t yet entirely apparent). Covid was still stalking the land, Johnson had almost died from it, but the vaccination programme (which contrary to other aspects of the UK response, was something of a triumph) was bearing down on the pandemic and bringing it under control. The Tories were well ahead in the opinion polls as they went into the 2021 local elections. As a consequence, they did very well and captured many seats and councils that they didn’t usually hold.
So, looking at Thursdays results, it appears that the primary story is the almost total destruction of the Conservative Party by the Reform Party. The Conservative losses and Reform gains are almost one for one with the Tories losing 2/3rds of their seats and ending up controlling precisely no local authorities and only one mayoralty. Reform are the clear masters of English local government. Almost every council that actually has a party majority has a Reform party majority (vs none for the Tories, none for Labour and 3 for the LDs).
The Liberal Democrats did very well in terms of seats, and their vote share remained healthy. However, mostly they won seats because of the split vote between Reform and Conservative candidates. This election was notable for the very low winning margins of successful candidates due to the vote being split across unusually large numbers of viable candidates. This is something of a mirror of Labour’s performance in the 2024 general election where they took hundreds of seats not because they were popular, but because their opposition was split between Conservative and Reform and they came through the middle on low numbers.
Psephologists in the UK have worked out a system for calculating what they call the “Predicted National Share” of the vote. This means they take the very specific results of a particular set of local elections, and calculate using standardised swings what this might suggest the overall vote shares might be in GB (they exclude Northern Ireland whose politics don’t really map from GB politics).
This gives a slightly more nuanced picture. Still great for Reform and dire for the Tories, but with some more context to what it means for other parties.
Reform 30% Labour 20% Liberal Democrats 17% Conservatives 15% Green 11%
This compares to the equivalent calculation after last years local elections of;
Reform 9% Labour 34% Liberal Democrats 17% Conservatives 25% Green 13%
So although the big losers on the night, on the ground, were the Conservatives, in terms of actual voting support loss, Labour lost the most at 14% drop compared with the Conservatives’ 10% (albeit from a much lower start — so proportionately a greater drop). Although on the night it looks like the Liberal Democrats had a fantastic night, in terms of vote share they were actually static. And 17% is their joint lowest vote share since 2018 (16%).
In terms of looking at what this means for the strength of the right, and especially the far-right, in the UK. It shows you that at 30% Reform as still very much a minority view (lower than far-right vote shares in many EU countries) and at 45% Reform + Conservative the UK is still on balance a slightly left-of-centre country. None of this means that Nigel Farage is going to be heading for Downing Street with his pro-Putin and anti-immigrant views.
The bind I think that mainstream politics is in, particularly in Europe, is that electorates have expectations of what government can achieve that don’t accord with the economic realities that exist in the world. All electorates want is a government that can cut their taxes, increase their pay, reduce immigration, improve healthcare, improve education, expand the armed forces, cut crime and pay off the national debt. Once in office, no party can actually achieve all of this. At best, with careful policies and deft management they might be able to make improvements in most areas.
So every party that comes into government gets tarnished with having "failed”, which makes alternatives more attractive as they haven’t “failed”. But of course they’ve “not failed” because they haven’t tried yet.
Historically, UK politics operated on a sort of “Buggins’ turn” system where one party would rule for a couple of terms, fail, then get booted out by the other party who would rule for a couple of terms, fail, then get booted out by the first party. That duopoly seems to be very much under threat. There is a risk that the pressure on the “failed” parties becomes so great that only the catharthis of the “alternative” getting and also failing comprehensively (as Reform surely would — their diagnosis in no more accurate than Trumpism and their solutions not much more sensible) can undo that.
The risk, as seen in Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Hungary and now the US is that that right wing “alternative”, once it gets its turn, has absolutely no interest in allowing itself to be booted out for failing.
On the other hand, this situation is not entirely unique. The far-right (when it was called UKIP) famously one a UK election for the European Parliament in 2014 in which its vote share was only just below what it got this year. That surge eventually subsided.
Like Mid-Term elections in the US, there is an element of the “protest vote” about local elections in the UK. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard sardonic remarks from pundits on election broadcasts saying “If these results were replicated in a General Election” but of course they never are.
The best case for Labour is that over time, the big bite that Reform has taken out of the Tories recedes leaving Reform and Tories more evenly split. That would allow another 2024 scenario where Labour win a majority on a small vote share, with the “right” split between their two opponents.
The worst case for Labour is that Reform maintain a 30% vote share and the other parties remain splintered into 20% or less fragments. That could result in a situation where Reform sweep a General Election the way Labour did, due to divided opposition.
One last factor to consider is that these elections do actually have consequences in their own right. Reform now directly control (in some cases with huge majorities) most of the big councils in England. They will, for the first time, have to actually devise and implement policies and deal with some of the problems that they “rage” about. It will interesting to see what this amounts to in practice and whether they end up “failing” as the other parties always do. Local authorities are very constrained in the UK. Their budgets have been so tightly squeezed, and the range of statutory duties (services they have to provide because of laws passed by parliament) so wide that they have almost no room for maneuver. That won’t necessarily spare the local politicians from the lash of angry tongues though.
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