When voters in England and Wales go to the polls on Thursday to elect mayors and local council members, the result will inevitably be seen as a barometer of Britain’s upcoming general election. Given the poor public mood and the Conservative Party’s terrible popularity ratings in the polls, storm clouds are already gathering.
The big question is not whether the governing Conservatives will lose seats (that’s a foregone conclusion among pollsters) but whether the losses will exceed or fall short of expectations after 18 months in which the Conservatives have consistently trailed the opposition. Labor Party by huge margins.
“If a party has been 20 points behind the opposition for 18 months, how much worse can it get?” said Tony Travers, professor of politics at the London School of Economics. “The losses would have to be very, very bad for the Conservatives to see them as a negative outcome, and they are unlikely to be good enough for Labor to see them as a success.”
The magic number, Professor Travers said, is 500 council seats.
If the Conservatives, defending 985 seats in England, can keep their losses below 500 seats, he said, party loyalists will likely accept it as a painful but bearable setback. If Labor, which defends 965 seats, and other parties win more than 500 Conservative seats, that could trigger a new spasm of panic in the ranks of the ruling party, even putting Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s job at risk.
Professor Travers admitted that the 500-seat benchmark was arbitrary, a presumption by academics rather than a concrete measure of either party’s standing with the electorate. But in a local election, especially one so close to a general election, intangible factors like momentum and mood matter.
By most accounts, the public mood remains dour and its anti-incumbent fervor fierce. The Conservatives are struggling with the same problems that have plagued them for more than a year: a falling cost of living, a stagnant economy, rising mortgage rates and a crisis in the National Health Service.
With some exceptions, the Conservatives, who have held power at the national level for 14 years, have been eliminated from parliamentary seats in recent special elections held to fill vacancies. In a general election, which Sunak could call within weeks but which he is more likely to call in the autumn, polls predict a Labor Party landslide that could rival that of Tony Blair’s Labor Party in 1997.
In the last local elections, held a year ago, the Conservatives lost more than 1,000 seats, a series of defeats across the country that dramatized the party’s problems and raised questions about Sunak, who had stabilized the British economy after the turbulent 44 days. mandate of her predecessor, Liz Truss.
Since then, little has gone well for him. While inflation has eased, the British economy remains stagnant and thousands of Britons are being hit by higher mortgage rates. Fear of imminent electoral defeat has split the party into warring camps, with ambitious potential leaders vying to replace Sunak if he is forced to resign.
“They’re fighting like rats in a bag,” said Timothy Bale, a politics professor at Queen Mary University of London. “They are pursuing a culture war policy that has little appeal to an increasingly tolerant electorate.”
However, in such a febrile political atmosphere, two issues have come to the fore in recent weeks: immigration and the war between Israel and Hamas, which analysts say could play modestly to the conservatives’ advantage.
Sunak recently pushed through a divisive law that would put asylum seekers on one-way flights to Rwanda in Central Africa. While legal and logistical challenges suggest it is unlikely large numbers of people will ever be sent there, the policy is popular among the Conservative Party base.
On Wednesday, the British government said it had sent a rejected asylum seeker on a commercial flight to Rwanda. But that man left under a separate voluntary program, not under the forced removals plan, and the government paid him 3,000 pounds, about $3,750, for him to leave.
No asylum seekers have yet been forcibly removed, despite Britain having already paid hundreds of millions of pounds to Rwanda. That figure undercuts Sunak’s claim that the policy will be a cost-effective deterrent to the tens of thousands of asylum seekers who cross the English Channel each year in small boats.
Still, Wednesday’s announcement was the first sign of movement on irregular immigration, which analysts said could reassure disenchanted Conservative voters. It could also help the party fend off a challenge from Reform UK, an anti-immigration party affiliated with populist Nigel Farage.
Israel poses a challenge to Labor due to discontent among local Labor politicians over the time it took for party leader Keir Starmer to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Starmer, who has worked to eradicate a legacy of anti-Semitism in the party’s ranks, has struck a delicate balance between the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks and Israel’s military response.
But his measured approach has frustrated people on the party’s left, and particularly Muslims. Some Labor council members have quit the party and are running as independents. That could hurt him in areas with large Muslim populations that are traditionally Labor strongholds.
Robert Ford, professor of political science at the University of Manchester, said: “If Muslims want to register a protest vote on Israel-Gaza, it is a risk-free protest vote.”
Of course, there are limits to the extent to which a local election can be a harbinger of a general election. Voter turnout is approximately half that of a general election. While national issues are important, local elections can be influenced by parochial concerns such as rubbish collection and the approval of planning permits.
The narrative of this election is also likely to be driven by the results of three mayoral contests: in Tees Valley, where a Conservative, Ben Houchen, is fighting for his political survival; in the West Midlands, where another Conservative, Andy Street, is in a tight race; and in London, where Labor mayor Sadiq Khan is ahead in the polls but has generated little enthusiasm among voters.
Professor Ford noted that both Houchen and Street were more popular than the Conservative Party as a whole. If that personal popularity allows them to overcome deep disenchantment with their party and win re-election, it would be a victory, as well as a talking point, for conservatives.
“It would allow them to say, ‘Even though we’re in a hole nationally and our prime minister is unpopular, where we have popular politicians, we can still win elections,'” Professor Ford said.
It would be little consolation for Sunak. But it could also spare him a leadership challenge, which could result in worse-than-expected losses.