Alan's Green Thoughts

The Northern Irish local elections of 2023 continued and sharpened trends seen in the 2019 Northern Irish local elections, 2019 general election (allowing for pacts that took place), and the 2022 Northern Ireland Assembly election in many respects. Sinn Fein (SF) topped the poll for the first time in Northern Ireland's local elections, winning a total of 144 seats, an increase of 39 from 2019. Under Mary Lou McDonald's/Michelle O'Neill's leadership, Sinn Fein has flourished on both sides of the border, and nationalist votes have been coalescing primarily around them; furthermore, the nationalist-inclined population of Northern Ireland is increasing faster than that of the unionist-inclined population. Notable highlights for SF include taking overall control of Fermanagh & Omagh council and topping the poll in Derry & Strabane and Armagh City, Bainbridge & Craigavon for the very first time; normally due to STV with DEAs usually containing 5 or 6 seats apiece

The English local elections of 2023 (Northern Ireland's elections will finish next week and a separate blog post will be devoted to these) not only resulted in more than 1000 Conservative losses just as Rallings & Thrasher and Sir John Curtice predicted, they also resulted in sweeping Green and Liberal Democrat gains across the nation-sending a hard message to the Conservatives about the need to protect our environment and Labour for barely acting like an opposition at all. The Conservatives in total made a net loss of 1,061 seats, with the vast majority being in the shire districts where they once dominated-even councils such as Bracknell Forest and Surrey Heath, which they held in 1995 and 2019, fell, to Labour and the Liberal Democrats respectively in those two cases. Who they lost to varied widely by the nature of the authority-their losses to Labour came mainly in (ex) industrial "Red Wall" areas where they had made against-the-trend gains in 2019 or fared better