Labour’s May 4th prospects are looking appalling in England, Wales and Scotland
And UKIP are in for a pounding as well
UKIP’s set to have more losses that its actually contesting
Today I have been in London for the annual local elections briefing organised by the Political Studies Association. The panelists were Professors Colin Rawlings and Michael Thrasher for England with Rodger Scully for Wales and Professor John Curtice for Scotland.
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Rawlings and Thrasher focused on their by-election prediction model which just covers England and suggested that there’s a possibility that Labour could end up as third party behind both CON and the LDs.
The slides above are from their presentation.
A massive problem for UKIP is that the seats up next week are those that were last fought four years ago which was when the party was at its absolute peak.
It was noted that many upper UKIP candidates elected in 2013 had switched parties or formed new groupings. The gains and losses calculation is based on what happened in the 2013 elections and does not take this into account. This is important because the number of UKIP losses predicted is higher than the number of seats that they are contesting.
For the model Ralling and Thrasher make their own calculations of the implications of boundary changes and that means that their change numbers will be different from those from the Press Association which will be issuing information on the night.
In Scotland the seats up are those last fought in 2012 and things have changed dramatically in the politics north of the border since then. The Tories are almost certainly look set to end up as a second party and we’re going to see spectacular losses for LAB like control of the city of Glasgow.
Wales is going to be equally appalling for Labour as we saw in yesterday’s YouGov poll.
What is important for the general election from the local council results is the narrative that will be created.