The untold story of the Green surge
We take a look at what happened to the Green vote on Thursday's election. And consider why the increasing influence of the Greens had been overlooked before last week?
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The untold story of the Green surge
The local elections have dominated national news for the past days since the 2 May election. We have all read about the Conservative meltdown. Labour made big gains. The LibDems did well.
These are the big money parties of English politics. They have the donors and membership base to enable them to put up candidates across most of the country.
At the start of the evening Labour had 955 councillors in the councils holding elections, the Conservatives 986 and the LibDems 417. By the end of it the LibDems had knocked the Conservatives into third place. These were the standings:
Labour 1,140 seats (+185)
LibDems 521 seats (+104)
Conservatives 513 seats (-473)
They are the parties expected to hoover up most of the votes in the General Election and for that reason much of the post-election analysis of council elections is devoted to the big three. Labour won control of eight new councils, the LibDems two and importantly, the LibDems successfully defended the councils they had control of before Thursday’s election.
There was much talk about the Brexit Party (sorry Reform UK as they like to be known these days) doing well in the Blackpool South by-election. Labour won the seat with just 10,285 votes in an election that saw a miserly turnout of just 32%.
It is also true that the Conservatives were pushed hard by Reform UK, polling 3,218 to Reform’s 3,101. This has been a significant narrative from Thursday’s elections and has been covered and analysed in all the broadsheet papers.
There are two facts to note here. First that the Conservatives would have lost by a big margin even if every Reform voter had voted Conservative instead.
Second that both Reform and the Conservatives polled just over 3,000 votes. There are 56,696 registered voters in Blackpool South. By any assessment, the votes polled by all of the parties (including Labour) are insignificant and it is dangerous to draw too many conclusions from such a small sample.
Forgive us then, if we find it hard to take seriously a claim that Reform UK are upsetting the balance of British politics on the basis of just three thousand votes being cast.
the evidence of 3,000 votes in an election where the vast majority of people did not vote is simply not credible evidence
Might Reform UK disturb the balance of British politics? They may indeed. But the evidence of three thousand votes in an election where the vast majority of people did not vote is simply not credible evidence.
That to some extent was backed up by the local election results. Again something that has not attracted the attention of political pundits is the embarrassing detail that while Reform won 2 seats in the council elections, George Galloway’s Worker’s Party of Great Britain actually won 4.
Twice as many.
Yet we are pretty sure that no-one will be forecasting serious disruption to the Labour vote at the General Election because of voters flocking to the Worker’s Party of Great Britain.
Other evidence may arrive in due course and when it does, we’ll examine it.
These results have made the headlines and dominated the post-election narrative. But what about the rest? Almost no comment has been made about the Independent candidates, who won 93 seats, nearly as many new seats as the LibDems. And the success of the Greens may have had an honorary mention, but perhaps not as much as the 74 new seats they won, merited.
For us then this was the big untold story of the night. And it served to highlight the fact that previous Green success has been under-reported too. As we shall see.