Locals and imperials

This week: the local elections are finally here, oh joy, oh rapture. Also: some notes on extremely big empires, and a map of an extremely populated region.

I love elections. I love them so much that I imagined one. We’re away this week, and I’ve made a big thing about being back in London by Thursday night so that I can vote. More than that: I was so worried by the fact that – at the time of the first election to be held under the Tories’ pointless new voter ID laws – my partner did not have a passport, that I harassed her until she got herself a postal vote. 

There are no elections in London this year. 

That doesn’t mean these elections are not important, of course. (Other places do, I’m told, exist.) I’m not buying the oft-heard claim that this will be the last electoral test the government will face before the next election – weak governments tend to cling on until the bitter end, which in this case means the winter of 2024-5, so we’ll likely get a whole different set of local elections (including, yes, London) this time next year. But this is still the first major vote since the beginning of Rishi Sunak’s premiership, or the beginning of Liz Truss’s, come to that – or, if you prefer, the first election in two prime ministers. All of which means it’s the first opportunity we have to see whether the Tories are actually as stuffed as the last few months of polls suggest.

And there are a couple of niggles that make me worry the results might not be quite as bad for the Tories as the polls suggest. One is that this particular set of councils – a mixture of Tory-learning districts, Labour leaning metropolitan boroughs and genuinely marginal unitaries – were last up for election in 2019. If you can remember that far back, you’ll recall that the early months of that year were the nadir of the Brexit crisis in parliament, when the lame-duck Theresa May administration couldn’t get its Brexit deal or really anything else through the Commons, and polling for both major parties was at rock bottom. 

All that meant a lot of votes for smaller parties like the LibDems and Greens, a lot of votes for independents, and a lot of publicity for new parties like the Brexit Party and Change UK, but not a lot of votes because they weren’t standing any candidates. (They were keeping their powder dry for the bizarrely quixotic European elections held three weeks later.) All in all it was a weird electoral cycle, which, according to the BBC’s calculations, suggested that both major parties were polling at about 28% of the vote if the vote had been nationwide. That is, er, roughly what the Tories are polling on now. That, plus the fact they can probably expect to win back some seats from the aforementioned independents, may make it a disappointing election for anyone hoping to see a rout. 

Then there are the aforementioned voter ID laws. The Tories claim that this is meant to stop voter fraud; but since that fraud is all but non-existent (except in postal votes, the law around which has not changed), and since there have been obvious efforts to make it easier for older people to vote than younger ones, then everyone and their dog can see this is a shameless, US-inspired attempt to suppress the vote of demographics which are less likely to vote Tory. Consensus seems to be it won’t work – there are signs that the message that you need to bring ID now is not getting through, and the voters least likely to carry ID are anyway older ones – but it might affect the results at the margin. More entertainingly, it’ll almost certainly mean clips of furious voters complaining that some jobsworth didn’t let them vote, and then being told the jobsworth in question was the actual Prime Minister. 

All of which means that, if I’m honest, I have no idea what to expect; but that’s okay, because neither does anybody else. The two things to watch seem to be: 

1. what happens in the unitary councils like Slough, Stoke and Swindon, as these are the sorts of marginals that win general elections; and

2. what happens in metropolitan boroughs like Dudley, Walsall and Bolton, as these will be the places to look for signs of Tory implosion in the Red Wall. 

As to the overall picture, Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, the experts rolled out every election at around this time, have suggested the Tories could lose over 1,000 seats, and Labour gain 700; meanwhile, Electoral Calculus have those numbers at a far more modest 250 and 400. Tory spokespeople are pushing the former set of figures, on the grounds that when they “only” lose 500 they can call it a win. How those attempting to set these expectations feel about the Sun’s sterling efforts to fabricate evidence of a Tory poll revival out of whole cloth is not exactly clear.

If pushed, my guess would be that the results for the government will be bad, but not that bad, then everyone will get distracted by the coronation, and the narrative (“Sunak might hang on”) will be unchanged. That may even be the correct reading of an election that shows Labour’s poll rating can’t be trusted. But I can’t help but think it’s just as likely it’ll offer false comfort to a Tory party that has convinced itself that setting the narrative is the same as winning.

Anyway, if you want a rather more involved read about how to interpret these figures, I can recommend this by Sam Freedman. Oh – and there’s no point staying up all night to watch the results, as most of the counting won’t happen until Friday. So that’s another reason I didn’t need to come back from my trip early. Bloody hell.

Local Elections 2023: The Preview

Some unusually vast empires

As the years have gone on, I’ve felt increasingly uncomfortable with the idea, oft heard in parts of the liberal left, that Britain is the absolute worst country. Don’t worry, I’m not about to start slapping union flags on stuff at random or anything; but the idea that one’s own country is the worst seems to me to stem from the same impulse as the idea that it’s the best. Either way, we are in some sense topping the league tables; either way, we are special.