Changes in status – returnoftheliberal
The AGM season is over, we now know the control and leadership status of every council involved in the 2025 Local Elections. How did the Lib Dems do? The party can be rightly proud of itself, it won more seats than both the Conservatives or Labour for the first time since our merger in 1988 and we now lead/control more councils than the Conservatives nationally. The Lib Dems gained seats across the country, only suffering reverses Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, and significantly upgraded our status in places we weren’t expected to feature. As the years go by the Lib Dems’ micro-targeting data driven strategy, designed to play the First-Past-The-Post system we disapprove of, has been refined and finessed so we have far fewer wasted votes. We haven’t reached a goldilocks situation yet – as party President Mark Pack has pointed out our aspirations are not matched by our level of resource, so we’re still standing paper candidates and not campaigning in certain places where the electorate could be receptive.
We can be reasonably confident, however, that we’ll continue to make gains in the next few years as the delayed elections in places like Hampshire, Surrey and the Sussexes should bear fruit, and it will be relatively easy to up our numbers in Labour’s metropolitan areas coming from such a low base. I’m sure a lot of activists are primed for a bumper set of elections next year, but for now let’s reflect on where the Lib Dems have got to. The mainstream media is great at reporting on Local Elections as the results come in, but is far less keen to highlight the final reckoning – leadership of all the councils that go to No Overall Control. Council leadership is important – leaders of County or Unitary authorities have more power than backbench MPs and preside over budgets of up to £1 Billion.
The final scores on the doors
What we knew from the initial election results is that the Lib Dems upgraded their status in Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire, going from leadership to control, and they won Shropshire Council, thanks to major gains. The party fell marginally short of control in Gloucestershire and Wiltshire and that we could be cautiously optimistic of leadership there. Good results in Devon and Hertfordshire presented a good chance of leadership, with a longer shot in Cornwall, being just behind Reform there.
The fact that we now have leadership of all these councils is a testament to the negotiating skills of the local groups and that the upswing in Reform’s fortunes has had a unifying effect on all parties of the progressive left – it probably wasn’t too hard to do a deal with Labour and the Greens in Cornwall, for example.
Considering that we lost the leadership of Durham (a local group that can hold their head up high, avoiding the wipeout afflicting the other main parties and indies), the Lib Dems had a net gain of five councils in terms of leadership. In any other year the mainstream media would be toasting this, and making much of the fact that there’s more Liberal amber on the election map than red or blue, but current fixation on Reform means this will go unnoticed, except in the places where we won.
While Reform’s media strategy of getting on to TV constantly is clearly working, the Lib Dems are ploughing an entirely different furrow that is getting results too. People still read regional and local newspapers, or the online versions at least. Most of these are non-partisan and give a fair weight of coverage to minor parties, sometimes far more coverage to the Lib Dems and the Greens because our MPs are receptive to media requests. A few years ago someone complained to the Shropshire Star that Helen Morgan was pretty much monopolising coverage since her by election win – the Star pointed out that she was the only MP out of five in the county that ALWAYS responded to media requests.
Having 72 MPs has created an unprecedented trickle down effect – where we’ve won Westminster seats there’s now a halo effect with profile that new MP has, feeding into council results. It used to be the other way round, and only after years of scrapping our way to District Council success, if we were lucky. Pundits have speculated that despite the Lib Dems winning many of those 72 seats for the first time, sometimes in seats that were Tory for 100 years or more that they would dig in and be hard to shift. The next General Election is so far away that’s a highly speculative line to take, but early indications are that this is possible.
Aside from leadership/control wins, net gains in places such as Lancashire, Lincolnshire and Durham bely the Reform claim that we are ‘The Party of the South’ but there’s no getting away from the dazzling success in the South West. The Lib Dems now have leadership/control in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, North Somerset, Bath & North East Somerset, South Gloucestershire and Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch councils. Away from the metropolitan councils in the region we only need Herefordshire and Hampshire for a clean sweep. Perhaps we should change our stakeboard slogan from ‘winning here’ to ‘winning everywhere’ where the pastures are lush green and the cider is abundant. Of course the Liberals and Liberal/SDP alliance had a long history of success in the South West before now but this level of dominance is unprecedented and marks an astounding turnaround compared to the 2017 and 2019 General Elections where our leaders generally avoided the area because our canvassing return data was so poor.
Where does British politics go from here?
Journalists always put a major hype on election results and I’ve seen these local elections described as ‘the most consequential ever’. While that’s overstating it, one can’t deny that Reform has had more success than UKIP ever did, and has built up a councillor base in a far shorter timeframe. The success of Reform represents an existential threat to the Conservatives, who recovered well at council level after their heavy 1997 election loss. That won’t happen now because we have a much more crowded marketplace.
What results give the two main parties the most anxiety? I’d say the breakthroughs in Worcestershire and Warwickshire, two counties not known as heavy leave areas or the socio-demographics that informed their success in Lincolnshire and Lancashire. A lot of Reform’s wins have come despite minimal or no campaigning, that’s worrying and infuriating for parties that only win via months of hard slog, but it also means there’s a superficial attachment, people will ditch Reform as quickly as they rushed towards them if the political wind changes.
As the party of government, it’s up to Labour to make the weather. People are really hoping for them to be significantly different and better than the previous Tory administration. There’s a sense that they could do that by default via competence, stability – a general lack of unforced errors and chaos – but people clearly want more than that. There’s little point in Labour being in power if they’re going to implement benefits cuts to satisfy fiscal rules that no one cares about.
For the Conservatives there’s a more fundamental question – why would anyone vote for them when they have no significant tangible real world achievements to point to, especially post-2015, and they’re letting Reform effectively set the right wing agenda? The Conservative Party is the most successful political party in the industrial world of the last 200 years, it has a remarkable capacity for renewal and regeneration. I wouldn’t count it out as others have lately, however I think it’s fair to say it will take a while before it can challenge at a national level or even a local level again. Here in formerly True Blue Sevenoaks it’s noticeable how little they campaign, and following mass resignations on the District Council this month, they’re losing their appetite to govern too.
What of the Lib Dems? It was amusing to see Keir Starmer say the future of British politics was a fight between Labour and Reform – that’s two socially conservative parties offering different options in terms of tax and state involvement. Certainly the main local elections and council by elections since suggest there’s a progressive / reactionary dichotomy emerging that pits the Lib Dems against Reform pretty regularly from now on. While the rise of Reform is a scary prospect, for me in particular their Net Stupid agenda, which is backed by the right wing print media is something we have to be hyper vigilant about.
Such extremism can have a galvanising effect however, something I witnessed on the doorstep in 2022 canvassing for the London Mayor/GLA elections where a lot of people were really fired up to vote against Susan Hall. As always we have to work as hard as we can to offer a genuine Liberal alternative, something that many people are increasingly appreciative of.
