It was election day in parts of England on Tuesday, with 23 councils holding local elections. There were also six mayoral elections and a parliamentary by-election in Runcorn and Helsby. The most obvious and unremarkable thing about all of these elections is that we didn't really learn anything new. Reform winning in Runcorn and Helsby by just six votes underlines the fact that every vote counts, but I don't think anyone was particularly surprised that Reform were triumphant. It was closer than I thought it would be. The party of government defending a seat - even a supposedly "safe" one ...
On Thursday the Liberal Democrats won a majority of seats on Shrewsbury Town Council for the first time. The council had been controlled by Labour since 2013. Shropshire Live quotes Alex Wagner, who won Quarry and Coton Hill ward for the Lib Dems:"This is a truly incredible result, more than we could have hoped for. We know that we now have a huge amount of work to do and a strong mandate to deliver change for residents. "We're going to prioritise protecting local services. Whether that's investing in keeping Shrewsbury tidy, making our parks the best in Britain, or stepping ...
Our Headline of the Day Award crosses the Atlantic and goes to The Smoking Gun. The judges (who have been reading Wikipedia) explain: The Smoking Gun is a website that posts legal documents, arrest records, and police mugshots on a daily basis. The intent is to bring to the public light information that is somewhat obscure or unreported by more mainstream media sources.
Reform - but how? Thursday 1st May 2025 may go down in our political history as a seismic moment. Nigel Farage's "Reform" (the possessive is accurate: It is not a party in the normal sense of "belonging to the membership," but owned, or maybe just part-owed, by him) have certainly broken the mould in the way that the Liberal- SDP alliance of the early 1980s hoped but failed to do. Whether they will really change our politics, or simply be a flash in the pan, remains to be seen, but it its victories are a massive achievement. The consensus seems ...
Sadly, Mike Ross did not quite make it in the election for Mayor of Hull and East Riding. But full credit to him for his response to the election results: I have had some time to sleep on the results and reflect on this set of elections. It is still early days, but there already looks like some points that stand out from what happened across the country on Thursday. Voters were rejecting the two main parties. The Conservatives and Labour both saw their support and numbers of councillors collapse. This was reflected on doorstep after doorstep, with residents saying ...
Anselm Anon looks at the social changes behind the collapse of Conservative support in local government, with assistance from Walmington-on-Sea and its Home Guard platoon. A recent theme on Liberal England has been to drawn attention to changes in the culture of local Conservative parties. This has happened over several decades, but the shift now seems definitive. The norm for Tory councillors and activists is no longer local worthies (or busybodies), for whom politics is an extension of their citizenship. Instead they are angry culture warriors, actually contemptuous of "mending the church roof" (as Kemi Badenoch would put it). I've ...
Welcome to my summary of the latest national voting intention polls for the next general election, along with the latest MRP projections and party leadership ratings. If you'd like to find out more about how polls work, how reliable they are and how to make sense of them, check out my book, Polling UnPacked: the History, Uses and Abuses of Political Opinion Polls, or sign up for my weekly email, The Week in Polls: General election voting intention polls PollsterConLabLDGrnRefLab leadFieldwork Survation 22% (nc) 26% (-1) 12% (-1) 7% (-1) 26% (+2) Tied (vs Ref) 30/4-2/5 UK Find Out Now ...
The first 100 days of the Trump Administration has been among the most consequential in American history. Consequential does not necessarily mean good. In this case, it means very, very bad. Let's start with the elusive issue of reputation. In the eyes of the rest of the world, America's reputation is probably the worst it has ever been. It took years of painstaking work to establish the trust and relationships that made America the leader of the Free World. It has had its problems, but generally speaking, post-war America is the closest the world has ever had to a "shining ...
[IMG: Picture of Sir Ed Davey the Lib Dem Leader] If you have any doubts that the two-party system which existed in the United Kingdom for most of the 20th century is dead, then just look North to Durham and look South to Kent. The Labour Party used to control Durham for 101 years with every single leader, of course, being a man. They lost that position in 2021 but was still the biggest party in a council which was led by a Liberal Democrat woman holding tight rein over a coalition of four different political groupings. However, on the ...
As usual, the Liberal Democrats are not getting the coverage we deserve for some pretty spectacular election results. The BBC spent most of its coverage talking up Reform, Lewis Goodall on the News Agents spent a disproportionate amount of time on Farage and not enough on Ed Davey. Everyone picked up Farage going on about what he wanted to do in the future, but paid little attention to the other stars of yesterday, us. I mean, we won more councillors than the Conservatives and Labour and beat the Tories into fourth place in terms of vote share. It is, frankly, ...
Many thanks to the residents who contacted us about a bad pothole in River Crescent - see photo. We therefore reported this to the roads maintenance partnership asking for repairs to be carried out and were thereafter promised that an Order had been raised to ensure this was repaired.
Losing one council might be viewed as careless, losing two as unfortunate, but to lose all of them at once and 68% of your county councillors is pretty disastrous by anybody's definition. The big question now is can Kemi Badenoch survive much longer as Conservative leader? Unsurpisingly, the Independent reports that senior Tories are already plotting ways to oust their leader after the party's disastrous local election results. The paper says that the prospect of the Tories having their fourth leader in less than four years appears to be on the cards, with the party losing hundreds of council seats ...
