Britain’s ‘Conservative’ Party gets a well-deserved drubbing, losing council seats in a periodic reminder that voters do actually notice when you take right-wing votes but deliver left wing policies, like open borders and high taxes.
Mayoralties, councillors, police commissioners, and a by-election across England and Wales were decides at the ballot box on Thursday, with thousands of seats contested. The election was anticipated as one that would give a clear indication of national feeling, just months before the whole country votes to select its Members of Parliament, deciding the next government.
While results will continue to roll in through today and into the weekend — the key mayoral challenges aren’t expected to declare until Saturday afternoon, as councils undermine constitutional norms by switching from fast overnight counts to weekend days — it is already clear the UK’s governing Conservatives have performed extremely poorly. The party was seeking to defend nearly 1,000 seats, and of those 200 declared so far it has already lost around half.
Left-wing Labour, on the ascent since it shook off the hard-left era of erstwhile leader Jeremy Corbyn and capitalising well on a failure to govern effectively by the Conservatives, had already picked up nearly three times as many council seats as the Tories.
The Daily Telegraph, the British newspaper closest to the Conservative Party and government, cites Councillor Andrew Jefferies who had led Thurrock Council, which has now switched to Labour control, who explained why voters simply weren’t turning out for them. He said: “The Conservative Party, the Government, need to give people a reason to vote Conservative. At the moment people feel disheartened and disappointed.”
And little wonder: the Conservative Party has been in power nationally for 14 years now, and can boast record-high immigration, unmatched at any time in British history, a porous border, and soaring taxation, and all that before the enormous power the cultural left has continued to accrue in that time, all but unopposed. This track record has evidently proven hard to sell on the doorstep, leaving the party essentially facing total annihilation.
Not only does Thursday’s election underline the total lack of interest of people across the country in voting Conservative, but today’s wipeout of local Councillors leaves the party with less local infrastructure to actually fight the national election later this year, as it is these local elected officials who typically do the heavy lifting come election time.
The slaughter to come was perhaps best underlined by the results of the Blackpool South by-election, replacing a member of parliament in an early vote as the Tory Party incumbent had been forced to stand down over corruption allegations. Labour took the seat last night with a considerable 26 per cent swing, one of the largest since the Second World War.
While the seat had traditionally been Labour supporting, it had switched to the Conservatives in 2019 as part of the much-discussed ‘Red Wall’ of working class areas. Whatever progress had been made there appears to have been squandered. What is most remarkable, perhaps, is that the Conservatives only came second place by the skin of their teeth, edging ahead of insurgent right-wing party Reform UK by just 117 votes of over 18,000 cast.
While Reform have yet to pick up any seats, they nevertheless hailed the result, saying the damage they’d done to the Tories “sent a clear message to Westminster”.
Party leader Richard Tice said of the result: “What’s rapidly becoming clear is… as more people hear of Reform, we’re becoming the real opposition to the Labour Party in the North, in the Midlands and in Wales. We’re on the way up, and it’s quite clear the Tories are on the way down”.
That is not to say all is roses for Labour, however. While indications point to a massive victory later this year, results today also confirm earlier-noted trends, such as Muslim voters abandoning the party in ever greater numbers. Further, analysis by The Guardian notes, the party is also doing worse than hoped in “some highly educated and liberal areas”.
This story is developing.
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