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Thursday they were held elections to renew around a hundred city councils in England, the most populous of the United Kingdom nations. The counting in almost all the cities began on Friday evening and ended in the early hours of Saturday with a very clear result: the Conservative Party, which has controlled the national government for almost fifteen years, did very badly, losing approximately 450 seats of councilors compared to the previous elections (in total there were votes for around 2,600 seats).
Some experts they have already defined it one of the worst electoral defeats of the last 40 years for the party. The defeat took on huge dimensions also because in the previous local elections of these cities, held in 2021, the Conservatives had won by a landslide. In this round, however, Labor, the main opposition party, did very well, gaining 173 seats compared to the previous elections and obtaining the election of around a thousand councilors out of 2,600.
The result reflects what national polls have been indicating for months, that is, an increasingly reduced consensus for the Conservatives and a much higher consensus for the Labor Party, at levels not seen for fifteen years. Sunak has not yet officially commented on the results, while the secretary of the Labor party, Keir Starmer, said that “the message to Rishi Sunak is clear: it is time for change”. The elections held on Friday were the last before those to renew the British parliament, which Sunak’s government must organize by January 2025.
The result that political commentators are talking about most is that of Blackpool South, where a by-election was held for the parliamentary seat left vacant by the resignation of Conservative Scott Benton, who was involved in a judicial matter. Labor candidate Chris Webb obtained 58.9 percent of the vote, about forty percentage points more than Conservative candidate David Jones. Benton was elected in 2019 with 49.6 of the votes: in short, in the space of five years in the Blackpool South constituency the Conservatives lost two thirds of their votes.
More generally, Labor has done very well both in the northern areas of England, where in recent years their historic electorate had voted in favor of Brexit and then moved towards the Conservatives, and in some southern towns which have always voted to the right . However, it seems that they fared worse than expected in some areas where the Muslim community is larger: some analysts they are relating this result to the position taken by the party on the war in the Gaza Strip, which especially in the first weeks of the Israeli invasion was closer to Israel than in the recent past (in previous secretariats the Labor Party was repeatedly accused of harboring anti-Semitic positions). Support for Israel was one of several issues on which Starmer moved the party’s position more towards the centre.
The results of some large cities, including London, will be tallied and announced on Saturday: currently the Conservatives they elected a total of 479 municipal councillorsa number lower even than those obtained by the centrist Liberal Democratic Party, 505. Before these elections the Conservatives controlled 15 municipal councils out of the approximately 100 that went to vote: after these elections they retained control of just five (Labour instead they controlled 40 and reached 48).
The scale of the Conservatives’ defeat could further weaken Sunak’s position, already in great difficulty in recent months due to the increase in the cost of living and mortgages, economic stagnation and the public health crisis. During the election campaign, Sunak focused heavily on the effect of the approval of the law on the expulsion of asylum seekers in Rwanda: at the moment, however, it does not seem that the approval has counted for much.