Tonight’s battle grounds – the seats that are being defended
There is a whole series of different sets of elections taking place today and the chart focuses on English council seats which were last fought in 2013.
Mostly the seats being contested are in the old shire counties so this is not fertile territory for Labour in any circumstances period as can be seen. The Tories completely dominated last time these were fought.
2013 was the third year of the coalition waspretty bad year for the Lib Dems. It was also when UKIP reached it’s high point. It’s 20%+ vote share on that day 4 years ago, however only produced 145 seats.
What it does mean is that there are a lot of UKIP votes there to squeeze and given the way the national polls have been going then that is going to be the main driver of the likely Conservative success.
The other set of English elections are for the new elected Mayor position in the combined local authorities. Andy Burnham is the Labour contender in Greater Manchester while in Birmingham the Conservatives have got high hopes of taking victory which will be a huge blow to Labour.
There are also local elections in Scotland and Wales and here the seas were last contested in 2012 just after the famous “Omnishambles budget” and Labour’s speak in the last Parliament. This means that we can expect considerable losses for the red team.
The Scottish local elections use a complex form of PR where as in Wales it is standard first past the post.
This is the first time ever that the local elections have taken place in the middle of a general election campaign so it is likely that national issues will play a more important part than usual.