Local elections: not worth a vigil
By Richard North - May 7, 2026
When it comes to the Iran situation, I cannot read it at all. Either president Trump is displaying Machiavellian cunning or monumental stupidity – or even both simultaneously. Thus, it’s just as well we have the local elections to distract us for a while.
Here, the situation is not easy to read either. According to the polls aggregate for April, the obvious winner is Reform UK, averaging 26.4 percent.
That puts the party way ahead of Labour, on 19.1 percent, and the Tories who are snapping at Labour’s heels with 18.6 percent. The Greens make 15.6 percent, the Lib-Dems 12.2 percent and the “Others” at 8.1 percent.
However, things are not always what they seem. With five national parties in the race and only 14.2 points separating the 1st and 5th-placed parties – the smallest recorded by the Electoral Reform Society since it started collecting data – I am no longer sure that a polling system is capable of making accurate predictions.
It was, after all, devised in the days when two parties dominated electoral politics and the “swingometer” was the most prominent predictive tool, charting movements between Labour and Conservatives. Now, with five national parties in the field – plus the Welsh and Scottish players – the statistical model cannot help but struggle.
Add the 300 independents standing for election (many of them Muslim) and factor in a variable (and usually low) turnout, and the possibility of some surprise (i.e., unpredicted) results cannot be ruled out.
Even the Electoral Reform Society laments that, with growing fragmentation, it becomes harder and harder to work out how polling will translate into seats in Westminster, at UK general elections.
This has led to the upsurge of MRP polls, with indifferent results at times, but the problem is magnified when there are 5,066 council seats up for grabs across 136 local authorities in England.
Given the spread of seats and the obvious difficulties in making specific area predictions, attention has tended to focus on the major local authorities such as Birmingham where all 101 seats in the Labour-held city are being contested.
One of the more recent polls, commissioned by ITV News Central and implemented by More in Common, suggests Labour could see its biggest ever loss, shedding 51 of its 65 seats.
The poll has Reform as the main beneficiary, taking 47 seats, while the independents, fighting on a Gaza ticket take the number two slot with 17 seats. The Greens pick up 12 seats, gaining ten, while the Tories also show a loss, ending up 16 seats down to be left with a mere six.
The fragility of this poll, however, is indicated by the estimated vote share. Reform gets 23 percent while Labour pulls down 18 percent of the vote – only three points behind. That, we are told, points the vagaries of the first-past-the-post voting system.
A few days ago, though, the local Birmingham paper was reporting on a YouGov survey which had Reform and Labour level-pegging at 21 percent. That the paper decided was a “chink of light” for Labour.
London is also a city to watch, where every seat in all 32 boroughs is up for election, with More in Common predicting that Labour will keep its lead in 21 of 32 boroughs, under pressure from the Greens which will hold second place in half of all Labour-held boroughs.
London has never been good for Reform, which will drag down its overall results. For those who are determined to use the elections as a jumbo-sized opinion poll, though, there are added complications.
As the Independent helpfully points out, most of the seats were last up for election in 2022, at a time when the then-Conservative government, led by the Oaf Johnson, was trailing Labour in the opinion polls and losing support in the wake of the Partygate scandal.
This, says the paper, was reflected in the results of the 2022 elections, which saw Labour, the Lib-Dems and Greens all make gains at the Tories’ expense. Now, an unpopular government approaching mid-term is expected to do badly. The important question, therefore, is how badly. If the Independent’s predicted “calamity” doesn’t materialise, then Labour can afford to shrug off even substantial losses as mid-term blues.
The paper, though, cites Stephen Fisher, a professor of political sociology at the University of Oxford. He was forecast that Labour will lose 1,900 councillors, dropping 74 percent of the seats it is defending.
This, he says, would mark the worst local election performance for any prime minister in history. But, in a clear sign of the rising discontent for Britain’s two largest parties, the Conservatives could also see a net loss of 1,010 councillors, Professor Fisher estimated.
Fisher thinks that Reform could gain 2,260 councillors, tripling its local representation in England. Meanwhile, the Greens could gain 450 and the Lib- Dems 200.Such a result would be a devastating blow, likely reopen the possibility of a leadership challenge. For all that, Lee Anderson predicts Reform will win over 1500 seats today – a relatively modest estimate.
Although I would avoid predictions, this leaves open the possibility that Reform will do well, but not that well, while Labour might not do quite as badly as expected. The Greens could be bogged down by their Walter Mitty leader and fail to live up to their recent promise..
One near-certainty is that the Conservatives will also do badly when, traditionally, they should be looking to regain some ground lost in the 2022 elections. The Nigerian import, for all her efforts, has yet to deliver any bankable results, and these elections may put a stamp on her failure.
Results will start trickling in from about 1am tomorrow, but nothing really happens until very much later in the day. Thus, this is not an event worth an overnight vigil.
