The English local elections of 2023-Conservatives pay the penalty for failing to put a stop to sleaze and sewage in our rivers

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 than most, their losses to the Liberal Democrats came mainly in the shires south of the line spanning the Wash to the Bristol Channel (i.e. southern England and London) and the wealthier, better-educated parts of commuter towns and satellite villages (e.g. in North Hertfordshire and South Gloucestershire) and their losses to the Greens primarily came in rural districts where environmental, planning and/or transport concerns were a key issue, especially in districts on or not far from the coast. The Conservatives managed to lose as many as 50 councils, and in many councils they dropped from largest party status to third or even fourth in the poll, and were notably wiped out in Lewes where they had been the largest party in 2019, and also the affluent suburbs of Stockport. Amazingly, the Conservatives managed to gain two councils, both due to heavy losses by Independents and localist groups: Torbay in Devon and Wyre Forest in Worcestershire, where the Independent Community Health Concern group (a party based around Dr Richard Taylor's campaign of preserving services at Kidderminster Hospital) had wound up recently. This further affirms that the Conservatives will lose next year's general election, and royal events this year will make no significant difference to this.

Labour were on a roll, regaining many council areas which I previously believed that due to demographic change, permanent changes in working patterns, and a shift in the Labour vote towards the educated middle class away from the working class, they would never recover in a post-Brexit environment, including North East Derbyshire and Stoke-on-Trent which they both gained spectacularly. They also for the first time in 21 years are now the largest party in local government across England overall. Demographic change also accounted for their historic gain in Bracknell Forest, a prime commuter hotspot even with remote working and hybrid working becoming the norm in many professions, and their capture of Thanet which in the absence of affordable housing in such areas as Brighton & Hove and Bristol is becoming a new mildly bohemian haven, as is Leigh-on-Sea in Southend-on-Sea although Leigh-on-Sea (not to be confused with the Leigh in the metropolitan borough of Wigan) has always had a notable small "l" liberal bent. Their recovery of many "Red Wall" areas, as well as gaining control or largest party status in areas that contain key bellwether seats such as Derby, Milton Keynes and Southampton, is down to not only dissatisfaction with the Conservatives over the cost-of-living crisis and the legacy of the numerous scandals that occurred under Boris Johnson's tenure as Prime Minister, but also more moderate Labour voters dissuaded by Jeremy Corbyn returning to their natural fold, if such a thing exists in British politics anymore. One key exception to Labour's sweeping gains was Leicester, where due to a belief that the Hindu community's wishes were being neglected by the dominant Labour council (as also seen in Leicester East in the 2019 general elections where the Conservatives selected a Hindu candidate but Labour did not) the Conservatives gained as many as 17 seats from Labour and came a reasonably close second to Sir Peter Soulsby in the mayoral election that took place simultaneously.

The Liberal Democrats once again proved adept at sweeping the southern shires as happened in 2021 and 2022, routing the Conservatives across Oxfordshire (NB: the city of Oxford was not up for election this year as it elects by halves in even-numbered years) and Surrey in particular, and regaining their stride in Devon where with the Greens on the rise and Devon not having leaned Remain the way Oxfordshire and Surrey did a recovery was a much harder challenge. They overall gained 12 councils, including for the first time not only the aforementioned Surrey Heath but Stratford-on-Avon as well; surprisingly this did not include East Cambridgeshire where no change at all in seat terms occurred, even though overall it is undergoing the same pro-wealthy progressive intellectual demographic trends as South Cambridgeshire (if not to the same extent) where the Liberal Democrats have a secure majority, nor did it include Tewkesbury which is becoming fashionable with many affluent progressives priced out of the Cotswolds and Cheltenham although they did emerge as the largest party there and will undoubtedly obtain the council leadership. Bedford proved to be a notable exception where they lost largest party status and also the mayoralty (see below).

It was the Greens, however, who proved to be the stars of the show even though their overall gains, at 240, were just under 60% of the gains made by the Liberal Democrats (416). They most of all benefitted from voters' disgust at the Conservatives' disregard for environmentalism, not just in terms of MPs voting to allow raw sewage to be dumped in rivers but also due to environmental legislation being under threat from sweeping legislation that will scrap current EU-inherited laws unless they are specifically exempted by ministers. They gained overall control of their first ever council, Mid Suffolk, and became the largest party in Babergh (also in Suffolk), East Suffolk, Forest of Dean, Lewes, Folkestone & Hythe, Warwick, and even East Hertfordshire where I grew up; most of these councils contain Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, Sites of Special Scientific Interest, and/or are on the coast, and thus will bear the brunt of environmental catastrophes hardest in comparison to urban and suburban authorities. In many cases they unseated the leaders of Conservative groups. However, in metropolitan areas, the Greens either made limited progress (e.g. in Sheffield where they emerged with 14 seats, the same as last year) or suffered a sharp reversal of fortune, notably Brighton & Hove where they lost 13 seats, including those of their group leader and deputy leader, and only just avoided slipping to third place in seat terms.

Independents and localist groups had one of their worst elections in recent memory, with only the localist associations' hold of Ashfield, Epsom & Ewell, and Uttlesford being bright spots, and even then two of those groups lost seats. The City Independents, who had helped the Conservatives gain control of Stoke-on-Trent in 2015, almost completely collapsed with them being reduced to a solitary seat, and Independents were lucky to hold on to largest party/group status in East Devon. Only where they were the only significant opposition to the Conservatives did they manage to make gains e.g. in Boston, although Boston has previous history of electing localists such as when the Boston Bypass Independents held that council from 2007 to 2011. Only in Derby did Reform UK, which fielded small numbers of candidates and thus had few chances to start with, make any real impact and then this was mainly due to the personal votes of their councillors there; their efforts in Bolton came to nothing. The continuity Liberal Party only held the few seats they had in Liverpool and the Yorkshire Party only made gains in the East Riding of Yorkshire, although in the latter case this was due to many Yorkshire councils not being up for election this year. UKIP lost all their remaining councillors and most of their seats were not even being defended by UKIP, and nor for the most part did Reform UK step in to take their place. 

As for the 4 mayoral elections that took place simultaneously, the replacement of supplementary vote (a cross between the French two round system and AV) with first past the post produced, as feared, wins only by Conservative and Labour candidates; long-serving Bedford mayor Dave Hodgson lost by only 145 votes but would likely have been re-elected under SV, as would Andy Preston in Middlesbrough who narrowly lost to Labour. It also had a chilling effect on the Mansfield Independents, who, having only lost the mayoralty there by 2 votes in 2019, finished third this year. 

With so many councils being under no overall control and likely to remain so for the time being, British political parties will need to get used to cooperation and coalitions in local government, and it has been shown that they can work well in Britain after all, meaning that only those politicians unwilling to share power fairly or who want to hold seats without having to do any real work have anything to fear from the introduction of proportional representation at a local and parliamentary level in some form, even though when that happens it will be most likely AMS (as used in the London Assembly, the Scottish Parliament, and the Senedd) not full list-PR.