Theresa May had a bit of a cheek turning up in Wandsworth and claiming a victory where the Tories came within a whisker of losing their jewel in the crown council Another hundred votes in the right places would have put Labour in power after forty years in opposition. A close examination of the results show that n St Mary’s Park the bottom Tory was a mere 3 votes clear of Labour’s top candidate and the second just 16 head…
Are we past Peak Corbyn or was LE2018 just a bump in the road? You can tell a lot about how well a party has done by where a leader goes to celebrate their election victories. Theresa May (no doubt unwittingly) re-emphasised her caution-first nature by travelling all the way to Wandsworth: a council the Tories have held since 1978. She could have gone to Nuneaton, where the Tories stripped Labour of a sizable majority (unlike Wandsworth, where it was…
BBC News One of the things that generally happens on local election nights is that the media narrative is determined by what happens in the first few hours of results. So the big coverage was of Lab’s failure to take its key targets in London and of course the antisemitism element of the result from Barnet. But now that we’ve got just about all the results in we seen clearly that the big winners were the Lib Dems who have…
The BBC count at 0249 pic.twitter.com/akC9ahqCsp — Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) May 4, 2018 But there’s still a long way to go I’m off to bed! Mike Smithson Follow @MSmithsonPB Tweet
How will the big picture compare with the polls? Although large parts of the UK do not have elections today this, unless something exceptional happens, will be the last big electoral test before Britain is due to leave the EU on March 29th next year. Because of the nature of the seats that are being fought it is expected that Labour will do very well. A total of 42% of them are in London which is very good territory for…
TMay’s Tories doing better over Corbyn’s LAB than Cameron’s party was doing over EdM’s Given that context is everything I thought it might be useful to show the national polling gap between the main two parties this year compared with what it was in 2014 when most of the seats up on Thursday will last fought. Rather than show every single poll that was carried out in April 2014 and this month I have taken the average gap tha the…
John Curtice In an article in the Independent and a presentation at the annual Political Studies Association local election briefing John Curtice has cast doubts on the suggestions that Corbyn’s Labour is going to have an exceptional performance in this week’s locals. The big thing in his analysis is that there is a huge divide on Brexit between London, where 42% of the seats will be contested, and the councils in the rest of England where elections are being held….
So we are almost back where we were UPDATED The big story from the poll is that there has been a disproportionate drop in the LAB vote in inner London. Labour 59 (down 8 from Feb) Cons 22 (up 5) This puts into question whether the red team can take Wandsworth which is a key target and one which has remained in Tory hands for 40 years. It also, if the poll is right means that Westminster will remain Tory….