Reflections on the 2024 Local Elections
Reform as an apathy machine and the future of the British party system.
The last local elections to coincide with the current parliamentary term were recently conducted. Despite all the hype (for want of a better word) from all quarters, the results of the right-of-centre parties are worth examining. To put it bluntly and briefly, for any readers who might be justifiably uninterested in political commentary, they show any potential replacement for the Conservative Party in the political duopoly has not yet arisen.
Some crude quantitative measurements of the Conservatives’ growing troubles in local elections over the past fourteen years are enough to illustrate their wider woes as a party. The first protracted net loss of councillors, from 2012 to 2014 against a relatively popular Labour Party and insurgent UKIP, totalled 976. Thenceforth followed several years of stronger gains and only shallow losses, amidst general election victory in 2015, predicted victory in 20171 and the collapse of UKIP, totalling a net gain of 1021 councillors. Excluding the net loss in 2010 to be generous and including the net gain of 86 in 2011, Conservative governments so far had accumulated a modest gain of 131 councillors.2
The chaotic half-decade which led us to the present situation began in 2019, which saw a net loss of 1,330 Conservative councillors in its local elections. Boris Johnson’s net gain of 235 in 2021, at the tail-end of his widespread popularity, was more than offset by the net loss of 485 councillors the next year. With Liz Truss in power too briefly for the party to contest any local elections, Rishi Sunak’s first in 2023 brought a net loss of 1,063. Do note that local election cycles dictate the majority of seats in that election were last contested during the thumping the Conservatives received in 2019. Last week, Sunak’s party experienced a further net loss of 474 councillors. This brings overall Conservative performance over their time in office to a net loss of 2,986 councillors, in the process giving Labour a clear plurality of councillors in the country.3
Of course, the latest local elections have brought further portents of doom for the governing party. The Conservatives came third in total councillors elected and councils controlled, behind Labour and the Liberal Democrats, for the first time since 1996. All but one of the combined authority mayors, which Conservative governments have consistently proliferated as a devolution mechanism, have now elected Labour representatives.4 In terms of police and crime commissioners, the only thing which saved the Conservatives going from a near-monopoly to a near-washout in one fell swoop was their choice to change the voting system from supplementary vote to first-past-the-post.
If the Conservatives are crumbling, perhaps terminally, then what about Reform? As the insurgent right-of-centre party, nearing the Conservatives’ level of support in national polling, have they taken some of the spoils in these elections? Well, from all the hype and claims of extraordinary results they keep promoting, Reform gained a grand total of… two councillors. Specifically, two weak third-place results in three-member wards in a couple of housing estates in Havant, where Labour happened to put up two candidates instead of three. The vote percentages of said Labour candidates strongly indicate they would have won the third, either with or without Reform’s presence. Elsewhere, Reform just split a vote that would otherwise mostly go to the Conservatives and were tracking behind UKIP’s past (weakened) performance in the North East, where the latter was still a competitive opposition to Labour in some wards several years ago.
This begs another question: what is the point of Reform if they cannot really replace the Conservatives at either the local level or (if predictions are correct) in Parliament? At this point, it can only be to build a machine which hoovers up apathetic voters in the hope that the Conservatives completely cease to exist, whereupon they might be able to win a few things by shifting who gets to control the shattered and inertia-ridden right of the near-future (if not the present already). One immediate problem is that apathetic voters are less likely to vote, which is why Reform has potentially scooped up millions to a negligible effect. However, just the basics of Reform’s organisation are an open can of worms that can tell us why they might be incapable of producing large-scale victories. The party, partly due to its infancy but also its leadership, is the most directorial of the major political forces in Britain. This might have worked well when, as the Brexit Party, all it needed to manage was several dozen MEP candidates and the odd parliamentary by-election. Attempting to manage hundreds of parliamentary candidates in this way, let alone several thousand council candidates if they ever wish to supplant the Conservatives in local government, will be practically impossible. We know this because the Conservatives have steadily centralised certain processes over the last twenty years, as they have become incrementally more obsessive about the political characteristics and thus dogmatic loyalty of their candidates. This has ultimately contributed to their dire situation today by undermining their natural political constituency and bedrock of local associations in favour of whatever CCHQ in London wants to signal to fashionable opinion-makers who will never vote for them.
Returning to Reform, their party infrastructure appears underdeveloped centrally (despite their leadership style) and practically non-existent locally. This exacerbates all their organisational issues, not least the inherent tension between their directorial leadership and populist identity. Populism prioritises quantity over quality and quite drastic variances in opinion over any semblance of productive conformity or organisation. Any serious political party needs some idea of quantity to cover the mass of local government positions in existence, but populism does not accord to that balance. Moreover, in the general absence of local infrastructure Reform cannot ever hope to make their hopeless national populism responsive to local concerns, which would be essential for the sorts of upsets they are desperately seeking. Theoretically, a confederation of localist entities might enjoy a fair amount of success against a weakened Conservative Party, creating a few dozen Castle Points across England amidst a general climate of problems in local government finances and services. Even the Green Party has built a noteworthy local election operation in recent years, arguably because they are permanently constrained in potential parliamentary success by Labour, but it is doubtful Reform will ever be willing to drag themselves away from pursuing flashy faux-victories.
If the local elections give an indication that Reform is unable to win big, it might show they do not deserve to win either. This again starts with the party being an apathy machine, which only demands that the party is not the Conservatives, in other words a simple matter of branding. Next, populism is only a superficial ideology with completely nonsensical logic behind it. Nonetheless, Reform wishes to replace the Conservative Party and take their place in the duopoly. They attempt this by cobbling together tired quasi-Thatcherism and sloganeering, in essence aping destructive pre-existing Conservative factions as an external iteration thereof. Reform’s grasp for distinctiveness is promising to abolish FPTP and the House of Lords, which is the easiest way to produce dysfunctional centre-left coalitions forever. Therefore, it should not be taken seriously.
As far as one can discern from history, the Westminster system will only allow a change in the duopoly if an insurgent party has something substantive to give to political life in Britain. Often, this has occurred in response to an episode of high political crises. A similar contribution has to be made ideologically, even today, so the party has some staying power and an independent identity. Toryism, Whiggism, conservatism, liberalism and Fabianism all did this. Reform satisfies none of these ‘tests’; the word ‘reform’ itself is a completely relative concept. The party is only experiencing these phantasms of success because the Conservatives are currently just as vacuous in terms of intellectual and practical ability.
Thus, Reform is predicated on a massive gamble that the Conservatives will disintegrate before an effective version of the latter emerges, one which can work to fix the nation’s problems once more and evolve conservatism positively into a renewed political force. In some ways, it is fortunate these local elections demonstrate Reform may be far less able to unsettle the status quo for the worse than prior hype has suggested. For now, the future remains uncertain beyond a Starmer ascendancy, although Labour is not in the rudest health itself. More importantly, though, no matter the stagnation conveyed by these election results, the future of politics is yet open for those willing to build something genuinely constructive.
Which never materialised, but the local elections took place a month prior, before public opinion turned against Theresa May.
Including the net loss of 121 in 2010, the net gain is even less impressive.
Which extends to negative 3,107 if 2010 is included.
However, if the spread of combined county authorities continue under Labour, then somewhere like Lincolnshire might force this number upwards out of residual loyalty in certain rural counties to the Conservatives (and/or lack of choice beyond them).