Local Council By-Elections: 2024 in Aggregate

848,165 votes were cast over 384 local authority contests. 104 council seats changed hands, and all percentages are rounded to the nearest decimal place. For comparison you can view last year's results here.

* Reform's comparison results are based on recomputing their tallies in Others over the last quarter/year
** There were 40 by-elections in Scotland
*** There were 23 by-elections in Wales
**** There were 37 contests with Independent clashes
***** See the quarterly round ups for the results from smaller parties

Truly a year of two halves for Labour. It was making slow inroads into the demographics that normally turn out for council by-elections and were able to pile up a decent popular vote lead up until and immediately after the general election. But that counts for nothing when the electorate sharply turns on you. Which is exactly what happened after August. The Tory gains come entirely from the latter half of the year. Labour might consider a further erosion of its roots in local government a price worth paying for chucking millions of pensioners off winter fuel allowance, but the public appear to think differently.

Good news for Kemi Badenoch then. But likewise, Reform surged in the second half of the year. The year-end modest vote total underplays their momentum. I expect that this time next year Reform will have outpaced the Liberal Democrats and Greens to claim the third party status it currently enjoys in polling. Provided they're able to find enough candidates to stand in enough seats. Overall, the Lib Dems will be happy with their by-election performances. They're doing better than what the polls are suggesting and stand to do well out of Labour's woes and those Tory leaners who don't like the direction Badenoch is leading her party in. The same goes for the Greens, though the rise of Reform has depressed their vote share. But actual votes are more or less matching the polls and the upward slope in support and councillors continues. It would be nice if they were the repository of electoral discontent rather than Reform, but these are the politics we've got.

Just a couple of other notes. It seems by-election turnout is trending downwards. This is an impression rather than something backed by data, but it's worth keeping an eye on. And there's the performance of the Independents and Others too. The rise of Reform gives legends in their own council wards opportunities to become electorally successful, so I imagine their share will decline as more would-be Indies and small party people clamber aboard the bandwagon. And with more choice available through the main parties and the major minor parties, the appeals of Indies and Others could well decline. We'll see this time next year.

Labour's Defence of Billionaire Influence

What to do with a party that won't help itself? This is a question that will variously crop up in political comment over the next four-and-a-half years about Labour. The scenario unfolds thus. A problem presents itself to Keir Starmer. An obvious course of action could be taken that would mitigate problems for the party, might in some instances be popular, and could help increase the chances of re-election in 2028/29. And the leadership resolutely refuses to do anything about it.

Take the Elon Musk/Reform love-in for example. News, or to be more accurate, rumours started by senior Tories that Donald Trump's money man wanted to donate $100m to Nigel Farage's private company has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Farage met Musk at Mar-a-Lago last week, and what began as gossip is now being taken seriously as a real possibility. With a hefty wodge deposited in the Reform leader's bank account, minus whatever "top up fee" he'd cream off, it would give Reform the sorts of resources that, realistically, only the Labour Party has got: a decent-sized full-time staff that can be bussed around the country, a Contact-Creator-style platform for voter ID, the budget for targeted social media advertising and literature, and the expensive "campaign specialists" capable of creating and running such an infrastructure. Reform does have a ceiling, but a professionalised operation could cause the two main parties a headache. Particularly the floundering Tories.

This has provoked calls for an overhaul of campaign financing laws. Quite sensible to stymie the influence of overseas billionaires trying to buy the future direction of British politics, you might think. 10 Downing Street, however, disagrees. An unnamed source (Morgan McSweeney) ruled out new rules governing foreign donations. "We’ll beat Reform by defeating their arguments rather than changing the rules to stop them getting money from Elon Musk ... You don’t successfully take on populists by changing the rules in bid to thwart them." Beating the extreme right by chasing them on immigration, you mean? Or conceding popular issues ripe for exploitation by a party from whom principle is merely a word in the dictionary? But taken on its own terms, the argument makes no sense. Farage's "populism" is quite conventional. It's "us", the pure, hard-done-to, innocent (white) Britons versus the corrupt establishment. As Musk and Trump are, for the moment, closely intertwined and that the president elect is largely reviled by public opinion here, the possibility of Farage pulling off a little man act with the richest man on the planet in his corner is fanciful to say the least.

Labour's cowardice speaks of an abject failure of political nerve. Except it doesn't. There are very simple reasons why Labour doesn't want changes to campaign financing, and that's because they benefit from it. We're not talking about the clean and extensively scrutinised donations from trade unions, but the bungs party coffers enjoy from the millionaire and billionaire donors Labour has courted under Starmer's leadership. They want this to continue with a minimum of public oversight because it raises awkward questions. The relationship between private health's donations to Labour and Starmer's enthusiasm to create more profitable opportunities for them in the NHS is a case in point, but there are others. More widely, if we're going to be talking negatively about foreign billionaires and British politics, that flags up the decades of vetoes one Australian billionaire has had on this country's enfeebled democracy, and the kowtowing and complicity generations of Labour politicians have had in maintaining this affair.

Billionaire money is simply a facet of how things work. Labour have made it quite clear that their project is not to change things for the better, but perfect the way of the state as is. That means no action, and another step toward embedding the extreme right as an every day feature of how we do our politics.

Image Credit

Quarter Four By-Election Results 2024

This quarter 231,558 votes were cast in 124 local authority contests. All percentages are rounded to the nearest single decimal place. 51 council seats changed hands. For comparison you can view Quarter Three's results here. And yes, the table is rather ugly.

 

Party	Number of Candidates	Total Vote	%	+/- Q3	+/- Q4 23	Avge/ Contest	Seats
Con	118	57,449	24.8%	+4.6	+0.6	487	+20
Lab	111	54,567	23.6%	-14.5	-1.3	492	-21
Lib Dem	110	45,254	19.5%	+4.7	-4.9	411	+2
Ref*	63	19,686	8.5%	+6.0	+7.9	312	+7
Grn	95	20,133	8.7%	-4.4	-2.8	212	+2
SNP**	22	18,020	7.8%	+6.3	+6.4	819	-3
PC***	6	1,706	0.7%	+0.5	+0.5	284	0
Ind****	60	10,161	4.4%	-4.1	-3.6	169	-5
Oth*****	45	4,582	2.0%	+0.7	-2.7	102	-2

* Reform's comparison results are based on recomputing their tallies in Others over the last quarter/year
** There were 22 by-elections in Scotland
*** There were eight by-elections in Wales
**** There were nine Independent clashes
***** Others this quarter were Alba (239, 178, 118), British Unionist (241), Communist Party of Britain (23), Coventry Citizens Party (94), Heritage Party (61, 20, 11), Progressive Change (529), Propel (305), Scottish Family Party (83, 71, 53, 51, 25), Scottish Libertarian (15, 9), SDP (116, 33, 26, 12), Skegness Urba District Society (79), Socialist Party of Great Britain (22), Swanscombe & Greenhithe Residents' Association (395, 252), TUSC (327, 116, 76, 68, 56, 44, 35, 25, 18), UKIP (23, 11), Workers' Party (212, 143, 133, 80, 47, 40, 35, 32). The comparison figures from last year have been recomputed minus Reform's contribution.

The unprecedented becomes the precedented. No party has won such a huge parliamentary victory and seen their fortunes reverse as quickly. No party that has suffered an historic defeat has rebounded as rapidly. But these are what the numbers say. Political fortunes were going to turn against Labour at some point, and when they did the impact was always going to be disproprortionately felt at the level of council by-elections. Why? Because the age/turnout effect, i.e. the greater propensity to vote as one goes up the age range, is even more exacerbated for second order elections. And this is aggravated further by what looks like an across-the-board reduction in turnout since the general election. This matters because for the last 15 years the right have consolidated their support among older people, and when you consider how Labour expended its meagre political capital on a pointless attack on the elderly, you can see where their problems began. Caveats aside, it used to be the case that popular vote share tallies were simply effects of what was happening locally with some national overdetermination. Now, at least where the two main parties are concerned, the polls are resembling the by-elections.

Leaving aside the large SNP vote as an artefact of a greater number of Scottish by-elections than normal, the story of the quarter is the continued rise of Reform. The period underplays their potential strength because they have not stood in anywhere near as many seats as the other parties, and it's this spread of candidates that, at least for the Greens, in making them look better right now. Here the vote average is a good indicator of strength and this quarter we see that Reform is now fourth place in England and Wales, but did out-perform the Liberal Democrats in December. Unfortunately, thanks to the favourable media environment and Reform's slight age/turnout advantage over the other parties bar the Tories, if Nigel Farage can find enough candidates this rise is going to continue.

Image Credit

Local Council By-Elections December 2024

This month saw 26,636 votes cast in 18 local authority contests. All percentages are rounded to the nearest single decimal place. Seven council seats changed hands. For comparison with November's results, see here.

Party	Number of Candidates	Total Vote	%	+/- Nov	+/- Dec 23	Avge/ Contest	+/- Seats
Conservative	15	5,894	22.1%	-0.5	-12.3	393	+3
Labour	15	6,502	24.4%	-0.3	+8.7	433	-4
Lib Dem	14	4,445	16.7%	-1.7	-24.2	318	0
Reform*	11	4,192	15.7%	+5.6	+15.5	381	+2
Green	11	1,883	7.1%	+0.6	+0.6	171	0
SNP**	2	1,712	6.4%	-6.2	+6.4	856	0
PC***	1	88	0.3%	+0.3	+0.3	88	0
Ind****	14	1,489	5.6%	+2.2	+4.3	106	-1
Other*****	2	421	1.6%	-0.2	+1.6	211	0

* Reform's comparison results are based on recomputing their tallies from last year's Others
** There were two by-elections in Scotland
*** There was one by-election in Wales
**** There were four Independent clashes
***** Others this month consisted of Propel (305) and the SDP (116). The comparison figures from last year have been recomputed minus Reform's contribution.

The golden age of dozens and dozens of by-elections per month are now over, but that makes no difference to Labour's woes. Losing more than half of the seats being defended is not a good look, especially when the reactionary pairing of the Tories and Reform are helping themselves. Very few thought Labour's performance at the ballot box would nosedive so quickly after July, but that was before Winter Fuel, freebiegate, and all the rest. And it's the troops in local government who are ponying up the political price in the first instance. You don't need to wear tin foil hats to see the cancellation of some council elections this May because of the local governmentt reorganisation as a touch suss.

The Tories probably can't believe their luck as they come out on top yet again. But the results are a warning for them too. Despite getting more seats, they dropped greater vote share and the beneficiaries of that were Reform. Indeed, the votes per candidate average sis a creditable performance for the challenger party and how they are closing in on the Conservatives, which might be bad news in a general election scenario. A widespread Reform challenge five years from now makes it harder for the Tories to recover lost seats, unless some sort of deal is cut. On the wider ramifications and what kind of threat Farage presents Labour is something I'll look at in the quarterly round up.

January wil be an anomaly as there are more than a handful of by-elections scheduled. I cannot see the results being much different to those closing off 2024.

5 December
Cardiff, Splott, Lab hold
Fylde, Kilgrimol, Con gain from Ind
Glasgow, Partick East/Kelvindale, Lab gain from SNP
South Oxfordshire, Cholsey, LDem hold
Stirling, Stirling East, SNP gain from Lab
Wokingham, Shinfield, Con gain from Lab

12 December
Barnsley, Dodworth, LDem hold
Chelmsford, South Hanningfield, Stock and Margaretting, Con hold
Essex, Stock, Con hold
Runnymede, Ottershaw, Ind hold
St Helens, Blackbrook, Ref gain from Lab
Wakefield, Featherstone, Lab hold

19 December
City of London, Bassishaw, Ind hold
City of London, Billingsgate, Ind hold
City of London, Broad Street, Ind hold
Dudley, Brockmoor & Pensnett, Con gain from Lab
Greenwich, West Thamesmead, Lab hold
Swale, Milton Regis, Ref gain from Lab

Image Credit