The 2023 Local Elections: Big Conservative Losses and Labour’s Hill to Climb
| Published date | 01 June 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/20419058231181277 |
| Author | Hannah Bunting,Michael Thrasher |
| Date | 01 June 2023 |
JUNE 2023•POLITICAL INSIGHT9
The 2023 Local Elections:
Big Conservative Losses
and Labour’s Hill to Climb
Hannah Bunting and Michael Thrasher analyse England’s local election
results and find that while the Conservatives face an uphill battle,
Labour still has lots of work to do to win the next general election.
The local elections held across
England in May 2023 represented
a bad night for the Conservatives.
After losing more than 1,000
seats – and control of numerous councils,
the Conservatives were overtaken by Labour
as the largest party of local government for
the rst time since 2002. Although Labour
made signicant gains, so too did the Liberal
Democrats and Greens. Labour’s diculty,
as the deadline approaches for the next
general election, is that its performance is
measured not by any immediate progress it is
making but rather the scale of the task ahead
of it. Projections using national vote share
estimates show that while the Conservatives
are expected to lose power in Westminster
after almost a decade and a half in oce,
there is a clear possibility that Labour remain
short of winning an overall majority.
Yarn to spin and footholds to gain
The English four-yearly local electoral cycle
peaked in 2023, leaving the Conservative
Party, which normally dominates this set of
elections, exposed to a serious erosion of its
local government base. This had happened in
2019 at the equivalent part of the cycle (1,300
seat losses then) and perhaps those running
the party campaign believed that things
could not get much worse. That might explain
why, after Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher
wrote in the
Local Government Chronicle
in
March that given a six-point swing we ‘could
see Conservative losses breaching 1,000’, the
Conservatives themselves seemed happy
to publicise this, albeit converting it from
conjecture to a hard forecast. Internally, the
party was clearly expecting a much better
outcome. As Alistair Campbell put it, ‘it
probably means they’re expecting to lose 500’
so they can then ‘tell everyone they did better
than expected’. The result was a loss of 1,061
seats and control of 50 councils.
Labour, understandably set its own bar
rather low and unsurprisingly became
annoyed when outside observers wanted to
compare these elections with those in 1995
when, at the equivalent point in the local
electoral cycle, Tony Blair’s New Labour routed
© Mark Kerrison / Alamy Stock Photo
Political Insight June 2023.indd 9Political Insight June 2023.indd 918/05/2023 14:5818/05/2023 14:58
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