It has been called “Super Thursday”– the biggest set of local and devolved elections that the country has seen since 1973.
Eight elections for Metro Mayors in England, elections for the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Senedd and the first by-election since the 2019 General Election.
As the results start to come through they will unleash a torrent of commentary about the future prospects of both Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer, about the likely outcome of the next General Election and whether the United Kingdom itself could now be at risk of break-up.
For the first time since Boris Johnson’s success in the General Election we will have a snapshot of public opinion based not on what people tell the pollsters about how they intend to vote but on real life data, a treasure trove drawn from actual election results across Great Britain. Confident predictions will be made about what it all means for the leadership of the two major parties and the likelihood of a further Conservative victory at the next General Election.
And yet…history tells us that the wiser course would be to greet these results with a high degree of caution about what they might tell us about the likely outcome of the General Election in May 2024 – or whenever the Prime Minister chooses to call it.
There are a couple of very obvious reasons for that. The first is the low turn-out that we can expect to see in this set of elections, which means that a simple read across to what we could expect in a General Election, where turnout is traditionally much higher, is simply not possible. The second is that a week is a long time in politics and three years an eternity. Voters will have plenty of time to change their minds.
Party activists with long memories are certainly well aware that today’s triumph can quickly morph into tomorrow’s tragedy. Ask, for example, Iain Duncan Smith who led the Conservative party to a gain of nearly 600 seats in the local elections of 2003, only to be deposed by his own party a few months later after languishing in the opinion polls. Or Ed Miliband, whose Labour party gained over 300 seats in 2014, only to crash to a defeat in the 2015 General Election that was worse than that suffered by Gordon Brown in 2010.
Liberal Democrats, in particular, have long ago learned to follow Rudyard Kipling’s advice (“if you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two imposters just the same”), not least in 2019. In May that year they won over 20% of the national vote (second only to the Brexit party) and sent 16 MEPs to Brussels, their best ever result. The Conservatives came in fifth, with a vote share of just 9%. As the Financial Times declared at the time: “The biggest story of the results was the dismal performance of the Conservatives, who recorded their worst ever performance in a national election since the party was founded in 1834”.
What a difference seven months can make. In the General Election of December that year the Conservatives gained 48 seats in the House of Commons and won over 43% of the vote, the highest percentage by any party since 1979. Meanwhile Jo Swinson, who had started the campaign saying that she could be the next Prime Minister, lost her own Parliamentary seat, saw the Liberal Democrat share of the vote slump to 11.5% and her party returning just 11 MPs, down one on their poor 2017 result.
Case closed.
I am not saying that the “Super Thursday” results will tell us nothing of interest. Of course, they will. Labour’s performance in the Hartlepool by-election and across the “red wall” constituencies will be particularly closely analysed. The outcome of closely fought Metro Mayor contests in the West Midlands and the West of England will provide some interesting pointers. Above all, the result in Scotland will dictate the likelihood of a second referendum on Scottish independence.
But will they tell us who will win the next General Election or what the outcome of that Scottish independence vote will be, if it happens? Absolutely not. It is still all to play for – which, for politics nerds and lobbyists alike, is what makes it all so endlessly fascinating.
Dave McCullough is Managing Director of Riverside Communications