Will Reform dominate the local and devolved elections?

This is the Guardian. I'm Pippa Carrera and I'm Kiran Stacey and you're listening to politics weekly for the Guardian. Hello, it's just me today as Kiran is taking a much-herend break before next week when we'll be laser-focused on the local and devolved elections and the fallout from them. So with that in mind, we thought that this week we'd bring back election analyst and friend at the podcast, Professor Rob Ford, to talk through what we might see from all those elections across the UK next Thursday. Hello, Rob. Hello. So, before we get into some of the details I want to talk about the broader picture and, first of all, the shift away from the two-party system that we've seen. How do you think that's likely to play out other local elections? Well, I mean, Pippa, I think it's probably the biggest story of the local elections in England because when you think about the political context we had when these seats were last contested, which in most cases is 2022, but for the county councils even goes back to 2021. Boris Johnson was still Prime Minister, COVID was still a recent memory, reform had virtually no candidates and was essentially a rounding error in the polls and the Greens were not standing in most of these seats either. So the environment we are in now is profoundly different to that. Both of the traditional parties of government have lost more than half of their support. We have a new party topping the poll week in week out of phenomenon we have never seen since the advent of scientific opinion polling in Britain in the 1940s. And we have in the last year the Greens emerging as a party who in some polling are almost equal to the Conservatives or Labor. So it's a completely different world that these places are being fought for compared to where these when these council seats and these councilors last face the voters a few years ago. So of course we have an electoral system in first pass the post in most areas. Do you think that will have much of an impact on both voting intention and then of course finally the results? Well, I mean it will definitely have an impact on both but figuring out what that impact is going to be in advance is pretty difficult because when you have five parties all showing substantial strength in the polls, all five of those parties have different demographic and geographical polls of strength. And in most cases, voters haven't had an opportunity to vote for any of the five parties. They haven't had a full menu in their ward ever before. So what you get in a situation like that is a really high uncertainty environment and awful lot of voters are going to be going to the polls in their ward not really sure which parties are even capable of winning locally. That's a situation in which first pass the post can become a real chaos multiplier, a kind of electoral pinball machine where you could have all sorts of different parties winning on very low shares of the vote. You could have all sorts of surprising and paradoxical outcomes. You could have wards where three quarters of the voters vote green, libde more labor and reform win. Or you could have wards where more than half of the voters vote reform or Tory and the libdems win and so on and so on. So major chaos. Isn't there a world though where voters sort of naturally gravitate to party themselves? They work out for themselves what the choice is. And we saw that obviously the Gordon and Denton by election, which became a reform versus green contest. And again in Carrofilly, which was a reform versus applied contest. Don't they sort of just work out themselves what the choice is? They do, Pipi, you're absolutely right. But the difference in a contest like this when you've got 5,000 wards up is that the job that the parties did in Carrofilly, the job that the parties did in Gordon and Denton was educating the voters about the stakes. I mean, believe me, I live just down the road from Gordon and Denton and older. My colleagues were getting a heck of a lot of green leaflets making sometimes somewhat implausible claims about just how powerfully strong the green vote was locally. And that paid off in these elections. The party simply don't have the resources to do that in every single ward. So in a lot of places, people are just going to go in in a bit of a sort of fog of uncertainty. But here's the paradox. If the result ends up being fragmented in a ward this time, that educates the voters about what the stakes are and whose viable next time. So if you have that ward I mentioned where three quarters of the vote goes to left parties and reform win, whoever emerges from that as the strongest left party has a really easy campaign to run next time. Because they just say we don't want to elect reform around here again and we're the obvious vehicle to prevent that. So we may end up with an election where we get lots of really fragmented results but where it's kind of like a passing phase in the electoral weather as we move from one sort of unified to party labor conservative system to what becomes more like an electoral system. More like an electoral kaleidoscope or patchwork quilt with lots of different to party systems in different parts of the country. Which brings me on to my next question and I know this is a difficult one. But is there any way that the local and devolved elections because of course happening at Scotland and Wales too will tell us anything about what we should expect at the next general election. Well, I mean there's one big reason, well there's probably two big reasons in fact why the answer to that is is no in the big picture sense. The first is simply there's still a long time to go. We're probably looking at three years until the next general election unless we get some sort of a surprise. If you look at the party environment three even three years ago, it's very very different to now. So there's plenty of time for everything to change. Also partly because of what we've been talking about fragmentation under first pass the post in the local elections different electoral systems as well in Wales and Scotland. You can't really read across a really big big picture story about how the election is going to go. That doesn't mean that these elections don't tell us anything though because what local elections enable parties to do is build organization demonstrate strength show local credibility. You've seen time and again with parties on the rise in particular that building strength at local government is a sort of paving stone to success for Westminster elections. So when we're watching reform and the Greens in particular like I wouldn't say oh they've won this council therefore they can win that Westminster seat. But it may be that them winning that council makes it much easier for them to make the case that they're credible in that Westminster seat next time. So it puts them in the running. It still matters. And of course it may yet have an impact on who ends up leading some of the parties or one in particular I'm thinking of given the potential fallout for Libra and Kia Starrmer. But let's start by looking at England now there are just over 5,000 council seats up for grabs next Thursday and elections in all 32 London borough councils 32 metropolitan boroughs 6 county councils and 6 directly elected mayors and over 1000 of the 2500 seats labor is defending Rob across England are in London. So lots of focus obviously on the capital. The big winners could of course be the Greens in reform and labor looks like it's on course to make major losses. So how much of a risk to labor given is traditionally done well in London because of progressive voters in their younger or more ethnically diverse that potentially is now at risk. How much of a risk is labor the shift from them to the Greens in London the good end of obviously losing strongholds in places like Hackney and Lewisha Miss a result. Well the Greens are a particular problem for labor in London because of the nature of the Green vote the Green vote even before Polanski became leader but even more so since he has become leader. The Greens have a very distinctive demographic profile it's younger voters it's social liberals it's ethn minority voters it's university graduates and those are essentially all the groups ironically enough that Labor decided they needed to downplay their appeal to in 2024. Because those voters are geographically inefficient as the electoral strategist would say in other words they cluster together in the same places which is no no no great shakes if you're trying to win a Westminster majority however you're an insurgent party trying to make big breakthroughs that's ideal. So the other side of the coin for this is it makes Labor uniquely vulnerable to a party that concentrates its supports in exactly those groups and if you run the demographic numbers from the census in places like Hackney, Lewisham, Islington, Camden and so on there's just masses and masses of those naturally green friendly voters in those places. So the potential is really there for some quite dramatic swings from Labor to the Greens and the other thing that makes London really high electoral drama in this particular year is that all of London seats come up at the same time. London elects essentially first three by the past the post in every single ward which means you can have if you have a big swing in the vote you can have an even bigger swing. in the seats and some of the council's we're seeing potentially at stake that a lot of the very sort of London specialist analysts think could be potentially up for grabs this time. They've been labour for decades and decades and decades so that's the other symbolic element in this. London labour will feel very bruised indeed if it loses places that it has not lost since the 1980s, the 1970s, sometimes the 1960s. Yeah and of course London is a tale of two cities in some ways in the inner London, the threat to labourers from the Greens, and outer London particularly around the east of the city, there's the risk of reform. Tautories as well as to labour and you could potentially have gains in seats in places like Buckingham and Dagonham which has been held by labour continuously since the 1960s. It could of course also pick up councils like Havering and even Bexley. How much of a danger do you think reform is to the Conservatives which still has some bull walks in London? Yes absolutely. It's hard to believe when we look at recent London elections that it's not that far ago in electoral history that London used to be a really hard-fought, evenly matched battleground between labour and the Tories. It's become very, very red but you've still got these outer burrows which are bull walks of a Conservative strength that low-coloured Westminster level. And there's a really interesting subplot in this I think, Pippa because the reforms appeal to Tory voters is uneven. There are some areas of the country, some groups in society where reform does very, very well. They do very well and they're going to do extremely well in Essex. They do very well along the East Coast, Lincolnshire places like this. But the kinds of voters that you get in the outer London burrows better off more professional, often working in the city centre, higher income. Those are groups that reform haven't always reached as effectively. So it'll be a real test for the Conservatives whether or not they have a kind of resilient call vote that can resist the appeal of Nigel Farage, even that, you know, what is so far, his high watermark. So they'll be really, really eager to try and defend. Counters like Bexley, Bromley and so on. But also to hold on to Kensington and Chelsea to perhaps recover Westminster, those inner London counters, because that would show that they, you know, they perhaps have finally bottomed out. They've reached an irreducible core. Conversely, of course, Mr Farage really wants to knock them out. This would be a real demonstration of that if he can start to win in bits of London. Well, let me ask you about the narrative power of winning back a flagship council. One's with obviously is Labour at the moment and there's a very real chance that the Conservatives could win it back. This is a central London council that in 1990, when there was terrible Tory election results right across the country, Ken Baker, one of Margaret Thatcher's ministers, went to Onesworth, which the Tories did hold on to and said, "It's a victory. This is the beginning of the building blocks in which we can build back to electoral success." And it kind of turned the tide, even though the Tories had done pretty badly right across the rest of the country. Whether it was Onesworth or another sort of flagship borough somewhere, is there a way that Kierstorke can turn up if there's an unexpected victory and say, "This is the beginning of the fight back?" I think there would be examples. I mean, for example, Hackney, which is Zack Polanski's home borough and where it's widely rumoured he might run for Westminster if Diane Abbott retires from her seat, so potentially replacing one thorn in Starmas side with another one. If Labour were to hold on there in an area where much of the evidence so far suggests the Greens should do best, that would be a triumph against the odds and something that they could definitely wave around and say, "Well, we're past the worst of it." And that kind of symbolism is indeed really important because parties are organisations within a lives with emotional states. And to be able to emerge from what will definitely be a very bruising set of local contests with some big symbolic burrs and town halls still with Labour majorities intact. I mean, I think everyone around Stumber will be very much hoping that they can find a few that they can wave around like that. OK, well, let's turn to the north now where key battlegrounds are likely to be lower income, older, predominantly white towns and cities and Labour looks like it could lose heavily to reform. And some of Labour's big name councils are in the north and have been Labour for decades, places like Sunderland and Barnsley, which are currently pulling in favour of reform. I mean, reform could even pick up seats in Liverpool, which is pretty astonishing. You wouldn't normally expect them to win there. And meanwhile, at the other end of the political spectrum, the Greens have been pitching places like Newcastle where local Muslim voters have told us the Guardian that voting green would be the best way to beat reform and the far right. Do you think it's possible, Rob, that Labour won't even come in second place in some of these areas? I think it is possible, actually. And coming back to symbols and symbolism, that would be a very powerful negative symbol, I think, that might generate a lot of panic in Labour's circles. We saw this incidentally last year on the blue side of the corridor where there were shires that went from being Labour versus Conservative to being Lib Dem versus Reform overnight. So just a new two-party system of urging overnight. And I think particularly if you look at some of the councils around Tyneside, Sunderland is one example, north Tyneside is another. Some of them are all up because of boundary changes, so all the seats will change hands overnight. And in some of those areas, you've got some established green strength. They've done well in recent contests already. And you've got demographics that are very reform friendly. So all the pieces are in place for a potential overnight shift transmutation from Labour one party state to reform Green Marginal Council with Labour a distant third place. And that would be very painful, I think, for Labour. And we can hear your dog in the background there trying to join in the conversation, Rob. Oh, you'll enjoy the dog's name, I think, if he's called Harold Wilson. Harold Wilson, who of course, in 1968, oversaw Labour's worst ever elections, local elections, performance in London, and then of course went on to lose the next general election. But he was back in '74. There we go, bit of a bit of a electoral history for you there. But some of these losses that you're talking about across the North could be really worrying for cabinet ministers like Bridget Phillips and Evett Cooper, who have seats in some of these places in some of these reformed Labour battlegrounds, weren't they? Yes, absolutely. I mean, Bridget Phillips and I think was the first senior politician to go on air in the general election because Sunday noise declares very early. Evett Cooper, like Ed Milibam, may well, her continued political career to Nigel Farage's decision to stand Brexit party candidates in 2019, thus splitting the leave vote and preventing Boris Johnson from taking their seats. So these are people who are well aware of the potential for a very mobilised leave voting, older, socially conservative electorate to turn on them. It's nearly happened in the past. And if we see sweeping reform gains in places like Sunderland, like parts of South and West Yorkshire, then that's good. It's going to have a lot of cabinet ministers in London who are worried about what's happening with the Greens in their patch and there'll be cabinet ministers representing Yorkshire in the North East, who'll be worrying about what's happening with reform in their patch. Yes, and of course, is this suggestion that if Labour loses more than 1500s of the 2500 seats, it's defending this time round, that that could be sort of the moment where a collective nervous breakdown is triggered in the cabinet with all the potential for some sort of a sort of revolt. But let's quickly zip through metropolitan areas and the Shires in London, because of course it's not just in London and the North, the elections are happening. Now, places like Birmingham, where Labour holds a slim majority, but has faced a very chaotic few years. Manchester, which Labour is confident of retaining, not least because only a third of seats are up for election, but the Greens, given what happened in Gorton and Denton, could be looking to follow up their success there, do you think that there's a potentially an end for Labour domination of big cities like these? And if so, what comes or who comes in its place? I think, yes, we will probably see results in both Birmingham and Manchester and some of the other big cities that are up next week that very much highlight the pattern that we've had for much of the past 10 years since Brexit of Labour really being very dominant in the biggest cities of England, that's potentially coming to an end. But what replaces it is likely to be very messy, I suspect. Birmingham is probably going to be the poster child for this. You go up to the MRP there recently, or usual caveats and health warnings about that kind of modelling apply with extra strength because modelling this kind of local election is tremendously difficult. That said, what it suggests is also what we've heard a lot and what we can see a lot in the polling, which is four or five parties all in contention reform, the Greens, the Liberal Democrats, Gaza independence, this is quite a large Muslim community there as well. Some conservatives too, and you could end up with the Birmingham City Council where scratching together any kind of majority to make decisions becomes actually exceptionally difficult. Manchester doesn't face that fate this year because it elects in thirds, but if you run, Manchester is like a big strip running north to south vertically, long in the thin, and up in the north reform will probably do very well. And in the south, some of the wards in the very south of Manchester City Council were in the Gorton and Denton constituency. We're likely to see the Greens do very well as well. So there's like a literal North South Pinson movement on the Labour Party. And the Council leader isn't up this year, but one of her wards is in Gorton and Denton. I would be very interested to see if the Greens win it. There's also a lot of workers' party candidates popping up here in Manchester too. So Manchester could also deliver a very messy outcome. Labour will still have a majority, but they'll be thinking, "How on earth are we going to govern this city two or three years down the line?" "If our majority goes and we're left with this patchwork quilt of different, often not very keen on each other parties in the town hall." Yeah. And the Shires, this is traditionally where the Tories have obviously felt on comfortable terrain. Do you think that's still the case or are the Lib Dems snapping at their heels still? Well, I mean, there's two stories preceding in parallel in the Shires. So reform are going to do well. SX is up. Chemies, home turf, Nigel's home turf. That's going to go very reform, I suspect. But you've also got places like Hampshire, East and West Sussex, where the Lib Dems, who are kind of the poor child of fragmented politics, really, we don't talk about them as much because the drama is all with the rapidly rising insurgents. The Lib Dems just sort of chug along at 10% in the polls, don't go up, don't go down. But they have, as a result of recent political history, a very distinctive geography of support. You take a big C-Shape arc all the way around London in South England, and the Lib Dems have gradually been painting every little patch of that arc yellow. They'll be trying to do that again this year. They could potentially again make hundreds of seat gangs. They again won't be the big headline story, but it's another brick in that blue, should be a yellow wall now. It was a blue wall once, and when they're thinking about defending and extending their largest Westminster representation in 100 years, every single one of those councils gain is going to help them on that from. Yeah. Now last year's local elections confirmed to us that reform can seriously damage the Conservatives. This time round, the contest across councils mainly held by Labour, so it's more about reforms threat to the Cure Starmas party. But what they will do is reveal whether reform will peak as an English nationalist party, or if indeed it can compete as a genuine nationwide UK-wide for us. I just quickly want to mention here an extraordinary story in the Guardian by Anna Isaac. We'll put the link in our programme notes for listeners. She will build on Wednesday that Nigel Farage was given five million pounds by the Crypto Billionaire, Christopher Harbourn, shortly pronouncing that he'd stand in the 2024 British General Election. And this wasn't declared, he's now been reported to the Standards Commissioner. We should of course say that Nigel Farage has said that this was a personal gift to him to cover his personal security costs. So we'll have to see how that plays out. But stepping back a bit, this isn't the only story about reform, the only scandal surrounding reform. Do you think, Rob, that this kind of personal scandal will affect their party's voters? I mean, have you seen so many before with Nigel Farage? And isn't clear if it really hits home with people? Well, I think people, what we have to remember with reforms votes, particularly now that they're polling in the mid-20s, you know, have recently been polling in the low 30s, that they're down a bit from that, is that the reform vote that's like the first 15%, the core reform vote is quite distinct from the voters that they've been gaining more recently. This isn't a homogenous block. So the kind of, you know, true core Nigel fanbase isn't really likely to be impacted by these kinds of stories. They're very anti-system, they're very anti-politics. They have exceptionally strong approvals for Farage. So these kinds of scandals don't really matter for them. But if reform aspires to a Westminster majority, they have to win over a very different segment, or very different segments of the electorate. Voters who are disaffected with Labour and the Tories, but aren't necessarily fully sold on the reform world view. And every story that tarnishes Farage makes him look potentially corrupt, or incompetent, or extreme, is another little black mark in those voters' pocketbooks. And this is really, really important because there's something really quite fascinating and delicate about the point that reformer at in the polls at the moment. They're sitting at about 25% in the polls, which is just about where first pass the post goes from being their enemy to being their friend, goes from being a sandbag that pulls down the number of seats they get for a given level of vote to a springboard where they start winning everywhere. And so that next 5, 6, 7% of the vote, not very sold on Farage, not very sold on reform, but deeply hacked off of the status quo, is actually really critical to them if they want to achieve the kind of breakthroughs they're talking about. So normally I would say these stories don't matter that much. They only matter at the margin. But in this situation they do matter because they matter at the margin, because the margin is so important. Fascinating. Okay, well let's pause here for a minute and when we come back, we'll look at the picture in Scotland and Wales. Welcome back. Now let's chat Rob about Scotland. And this time a year ago or certainly 18 months ago, it looked like Labour was on course to win power in Scotland for the first time in almost two decades. And a Sarwar was on his way to Butthouse. But now, fast forwards a year, 18 months. So in a situation where people are even speculating that the SMP could win a majority, do you think that's likely and is there a world where Labour, which has been battling reform for second place, doesn't even manage that? I think an SMP majority is quite possible in part because of some unusual vagaries of the electoral system they have in Scotland. And it's definitely possible that Labour could come third. They may have come below that, particularly on the list though. And that is a remarkable turnaround from two years ago when they were riding the wave of the Westminster success. It's been all down hill pretty much from the day the Westminster Government took office for Scottish Labour. In terms of the SMP's prospects, the reason the SMP can get a majority, despite the fact that currently they're polling about 10 points or more down on the last Scottish Parliament election in 2021, is that the Scottish Parliament has two sets of seats. First pass the post seats, standard, first pass the post constituency elections, and then there's list seats, top up seats, which try and like restore some proportionality to the system. But there aren't enough list seats to offset the first pass the post results. If one party is big enough and broad enough that it wins everywhere in the first pass the post seats, and the reason the SMP can get to a majority is because with Labour week in the central belt in particular in Scotland, the SMP can win, you know, more or less every single seat on relatively low vote shares. So they come out of the constituency chunk with like 90% of the seats. Even if they don't get any seats from the list or hardly any seats from the list, they're already like at majority status. So they could end up with the majority despite the overall vote that they get. You know, it's kind of an ironic echo of what Kirsta Amar achieved in July 2024. Labour got two thirds of the seat on one third of the vote. The SMP in what in theory is a more proportional system could manage as similarly disproportionate result or nearly as dismayors. They cannot be like 52% of the seats on the 31th, which is pretty extraordinary. Breaking the system and of course Scottish Labour would say that they are at their strongest in the central belt and that's where most of the supporters concentrated. So we'll have to see how it all plays out. But it definitely feels that what's happening in Scotland, and actually this is the case for the whole of the UK, but particularly in Scotland, is sort of like an anyone but election and the big chunks of voters will vote for anyone but Labour because of how they feel about what's going on at Westminster. There are big chunks of voters that will vote for anyone but the SMP because they don't like what's going on at Hollywood. And of course as everywhere, there will be voters that vote for anyone but reform because they don't like Nigel Farage. How does that even begin to play out? Well, I would even add a fourth anyone but which is that there's a very strong anti-Touric tradition in Scottish political cultures. So there's quite a lot of voters who would vote anyone but conservative and that's one of the things that reform have potentially benefited from. There's always been big chunk of voters in Scotland who are quite socially conservative, quite right-wing in many respects but were not in the Tauricollum because the Conservatives regarded as you know damaged goods. Reform seems to be really soaking those kinds of voters up. So you're right. I mean when you look at the polling trends, the only party that's unambiguously doing better is reform and they are of course the quintessential anyone but party. But if they do do well or in places for example in the constituencies on the Scottish border where they're in contention, the obvious campaign to run is then anyone but reform. You need to vote for us in order to stop reform. It's not clear how that's going to pan out. What is likely though is that reform will emerge as the strongest right-wing force in Scotland. Not necessarily the strongest unionist force. It depends how labor go. But the strongest right-wing force in the Scottish Parliament which given how Nigel Farage's UKIP used to run in Scotland. They were really underperformed relative to their English performances in Scotland. Scottish voters didn't seem interested in UKIP. That's a pretty remarkable development in itself. Reform seem to have found a way to unlock their natural electorate in Scotland in a way that Farage's previous outfit never did. OK, well let's turn to wheels now where it looks like, at least a sort of surface level, that there's a battle between plides and reform. But of course it changes the way that voters in wheels will elect the Senate this time, which has required parties to campaign very differently compared to previously, and the extent to how well they adapt to that will affect how they perform. Can you see Welsh Labour losing power in the Senate for the first time in its electoral history? I mean there being credible symbolism in that, wouldn't there? Yeah, I mean the Welsh election is remarkable because we're not just talking about labour losing the Senate. We're not just talking about labour losing the first nationwide domestic election in Wales for a century. We're talking about labour coming third. We're talking about labour, you know, being a minor plier in Welsh politics, which they have dominated since the introduction of the universal franchise. So that is in an election that features many extraordinary developments and a lot of symbolism. That is possibly one of the most extraordinary and the most symbolic. You know, this is the land of a Nair and Bevan and Neil Kinneck. Michael Futzeet was there and it won't be read in all likelihood, all the polling is telling us it won't be read. And possibly the only thing that's saving labour as a force in the Senate at all is the new electoral system they're using, which means although Labour might poll at 15, 12, 10%, there are still return members, albeit a pitiful shadow of what they were in previous Senate elections. So yeah, it's going to be an absolutely extraordinary result. The other big story there is going to be who's going to top the poll, is it going to be applied to the first time ever or will reform top the poll there, which we'd add to Faraj's case that he's running now a Britain-wide party. That's a symbolism story more than anything partly because of the new electoral system because given the proportional allocation of seats, even if applied comes, you know, somewhat behind reform in their title seats, they'll have a lot more friends in the Senate. They'll be able to form a government. Reform will probably make a lot of noise about that, but they can't do much because they won't have any friends and allies to form a government with. And it applies of course, come top and DSNP win in Scotland, Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland. You had this for the first time this real shift in the constitutional picture where you've viewed the foreign nations in the UK run by nationalist parties and a fourth reform doing very well in England. A remarkable irony in some respects that the devolution reforms, the devolved institutions that Labour brought in in their last government, in part, out of a desire to strengthen the bonds of the Union. Now every single one of those devolved institutions could be run by parties or at least in part by parties whose desire ultimately is to leave the UK and go their own way. What that will mean for politics in the long run could be hard to say, but yeah, imagine a few years from now because of the way that the timings of these elections work. If reform were to win a Westminster majority in 2029, you'd have an English nationalist reform majority at Westminster needing to work with Welsh nationalist government in Cardiff, a Scottish nationalist government in Edinburgh and an Irish nationalist government. That will be an interesting situation to watch unfold I suspect. Interesting and extremely challenging. Well, lots for us all to look out for. Rob Ford and your door carol Wilson, thanks very much for joining me. My pleasure. That's all from us. Thanks for listening and if you haven't already, please like and follow politics weekly UK to make sure you keep getting our episodes in your feet and keep your emails coming. If there's anything you want to know more about from this week's episode, please email us on [email protected]. This episode was produced by Frankie Toby, music by Axel Cucutie and the executive producer is Mazz Ebtarge. Goodbye. This is The Guardian.