Terminal Decline

Local Elections Review: 2025

We have two election posts coming over the next few days. Today is my review of the results and analysis of the strategic challenges ahead for each party.

Then we’ll have a guest post from Oxford political science Professor Jane Green on Reform, and understanding their performance in context.

For those of you not so interested in the details of British politics we also have a couple of internationally focused posts coming over the next week!

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There’s a reason my preview post was subtitled “Tory cataclysm edition”. These results were bad for Labour, but they were existential for the Conservatives, who lost all 19 of their councils and finished in fourth place in the BBC’s projected national vote share, just four points ahead of the Greens.

Since this substack began I’ve argued that the Tories are at risk of terminal collapse, but yesterday was the first time I really believed it was going to happen. They’ve lost control of heartland counties like Kent and Lincolnshire before, during the Major years, but this time they were almost entirely obliterated, and by another right-wing party, not a coalition of angry Labour and Lib Dem voters.

Never in their history have the Tories faced a government as unpopular as this one and lost ground, let alone this much ground.

Reform, who significantly outperformed their national polling, have given themselves a real shot of becoming the main right-wing party, as National Rally and Brothers of Italy have done in their countries. Farage has done well before and then fallen back – UKIP got 22.5% of the projected vote share in the 2013 locals, the Brexit Party got 30.5% in the 2019 European elections. But this is different because Reform won a significant number of seats, two mayoralties and control of ten councils. That’s a base.

It’s also a challenge, given they now have to take real-world decisions, in very difficult circumstances for local government, and with no experience. Kent council, for instance, has a budget of £2.6 billion a year. That’s serious responsibility. Whether Farage and his lieutenants can turn what is still a ragbag party into one that can cope with such responsibility, or mount a challenge at a general election, remains questionable but it’s now theirs to throw away.

If Reform’s rise wasn’t bad enough for the Tories they also had to watch the Lib Dems continue their serene progress through the prosperous south, winning control of Shropshire, Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire. Back in May 2022 I wrote that the Conservatives’ attempts at post-Brexit realignment left them at serious risk of being pincered, as their newfound supporters would feel increasingly economically insecure, while younger professionals would see them as increasingly irrelevant and unpleasant. We’ve been watching that play out ever since and yesterday those pincers snapped shut.

Labour are in trouble too, if not quite so much. They’ll be most worried that Conservative 2024 voters seemed quite happy to vote tactically for Reform in Runcorn, Durham and Doncaster. Moreover, there’s no doubt their 2024 voter coalition is rupturing after a poor first year in government. Though, unlike the Tories, they do at least have a route to putting it back together.

In the next section I’ll take a quick look at how my predictions fared (and why). But the bulk of this post focuses on the strategic challenges facing all five of the main parties, in our increasingly fragmented political landscape, and what their options are. Along the way we’ll look at questions like whether a Tory/Reform pact is viable, whether Badenoch is toast, and what exactly Labour’s political strategy is at the moment.