The ruling Conservative Party suffered heavy losses in local elections held across the United Kingdom yesterday. Though results continue to roll in, the Tories have already lost more than 250 seats, while the Labour Party won control of local councils it has not governed for decades and flipped a seat in Parliament in a special by-election. (AP)
The usual caveats apply to these results: They are local elections, which are usually driven more by local concerns than national ones. Still, this is also the last nationwide ballot in the U.K. before the country’s next general election, which must be called by the end of the year. The expectation has been that the Tory Party is headed for a historic defeat in that contest, and the results from yesterday will only further cement that view.
Perhaps most telling is the by-election result for the parliamentary seat of Blackpool South in the northwest of England, which the Tories flipped in 2019 as part of the advances they made in Brexit-supporting areas of the country that historically voted Labour. Yesterday, Labour won the seat back with a 26-point swing. That suggests a massive turnaround in sentiment that, if repeated in the general election, would give the Labour Party an overwhelming majority in parliament.
So how did the Tories get here? First, 14 years in power is usually more than enough time for disenchantment among voters to set in. If the Conservative Party’s run lasted this long, it was mainly because of Brexit. The divisive debates about whether to leave the EU and how to pursue Brexit after the referendum was over reconfigured the U.K.’s political landscape, allowing the Tories to poach districts in Labour bastions, like Blackpool South and across northeast England, in 2019.
Now, however, Brexit is not as salient an issue anymore, and the Blackpool South by-election result suggests that the reconfigured electoral landscape of 2019 was temporary. What is more salient now is the country’s economy, which continues to suffer from slow growth because of the impact of Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic and nearly 15 years of austerity measures under the Conservative Party. On the local level, austerity-driven budget cuts have also led to a crisis of local governance affecting much of the country.
Those issues alone would likely turn voters against the party in power, but chaos under the successive Tory governments of Boris Johnon and, briefly, Liz Truss also compounded the party’s problems. Now, under PM Rishi Sunak, the bitterly divided Tories have shifted further toward the far right and away from the “compassionate conservatism” that won them swing voters under former PM David Cameron in the 2010s. At the same time, Labour leader Keir Starmer has shifted his own party away from the leftward tack of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, and back toward the center.
The combination of all of these factors is setting Labour up for an overwhelming victory in the upcoming general election. The only question now is when Sunak will set the date for his own political demise.