Five things we learned from the UK local elections

Last Thursday, elections were held throughout most of England to elect county councils.  These particular councils were last fought in 2009, when Conservative popularity was at its peak.  This meant that the Tories had a very high starting point, controlling 28 of the 34 councils being contested in England.  Despite them losing the popular vote (at least according to BBC figures), they were still able to control a majority of the councils up for election.  The UK Independence Party (UKIP), though, has reached record support, taking nearly a quarter of the vote and over a hundred council seats.

So what have we learned from these council elections?

1. The disconnects between the top and bottom of the Conservative party are strong.

How the results are interpreted depends on who from the Conservative party you ask.  If you talk to some of the top Tory MPs, such as Chairman Grant Schapps, Home Secretary Theresa May and Foreign Secretary William Hague, they will say that they are doing an excellent job in running the country and that their main problem is that they're not communicating it to the public.  If you talk to Councilors, though, especially those who were defeated last week, they will say that they don't feel like the party is listening to the people.  This difference of opinion in itself is a sign that there is a strong split in the Tory party on what needs to be done in order to prevent being humiliated at the 2015 election, and I'd be more inclined to believe that councilors who just got off the campaign trail are more likely to have a sense of what the British public thinks than high-level cabinet members.

2. Coalition is hurting the Conservatives as much as it's hurting the Lib Dems.

It's well-known that the Liberal Democrats being in government has really hurt them politically, due mainly to the tuition fee increase and increasingly due to the government's austerity program. However, this coalition doesn't seem to be helping the Conservatives either, because many of their core voters have been abandoning the party to UKIP.  Many people who say they are former Tory voters have had comments published on the BBC's Live Coverage page saying that they are voting UKIP because they are better addressing immigration and the EU.  The problem here is that the Conservatives can't really do much on Europe because they're in coalition with the Lib Dems, who are the most pro-Europe of the four main parties.  As we're seeing with both of the coalition parties, you are still associated with government policy even when it differs from party policy.

3. First Past the Post is about defeating your main opponent.

It is estimated that the Liberal Democrats lost around half of the vote that they had in 2009, however in terms of seats, they only lost a quarter of the council seats that they were defending.  The Conservatives, on the other hand, were able to lose a similar fraction of councilors while losing a smaller share of the votes.  This is one of the quirks about the First Past the Post, where a party can lose a large number of votes without losing a large number of seats.  The reason for this is because a large number of Lib Dem council seats were under more threat from the Tories than from Labour, and because the two parties are down about the same amount, the swing between them is around nil.  No swing means no seat change.  (That said, if Labour was chasing the seat, they will almost certainly have gotten it.)

4. Votes are not enough to get seats.

UKIP has earned around one out of every four votes cast in 2013, but despite this, they won fewer than 10% of all council seats and didn't gain control of a single council.  If there were to be a general election right now, UKIP would face a similar fate, with the current seat model failing to give them a single seat.  In order to do well in First Past the Post, you need to be able to concentrate your vote in a few key places or a few key demographics, but the thing that's preventing UKIP from gaining seats is exactly what Leader Nigel Farage is trying to get across in the media: that his party's support is very broad.  It will probably take as little as Farage himself standing as a candidate for MP that will be enough for him to become one, but he will need to really dig into the disenchanted Tory voter if he wants to gain seats.

5. Labour's votes aren't exactly stacking up either.

According to BBC estimates, Labour received fewer than 30% of the votes cast in these elections, and failed to take back a number of councils that they lost in 2009.  This is a pattern that has developed over the last couple of by-elections, including Eastleigh and South Shields, where Labour's vote has been essentially flat since 2010, where the opinion polls have them up by 8%.  Now it is common to see the two major parties do a lot better at general elections than at local elections, due largely to the direct choice between two potential prime ministers, but the difference is usually nowhere near that large, and it could make the difference between Labour forming a majority government or simply being the largest party in a hung parliament by the time 2015 gets here.

So what does this mean for 2015?

Now if we use the opinion polls to come up with a seat estimate, we would see a Labour majority government, earning 37% of the vote and a majority of 82 seats in the House of Commons.  37% might seem a little low for winning a majority, but that's around where Tony Blair finished in 2005 with his third general election victory.  On top of that, looking back at the historical projections from the past year, the Conservative seat projection has remained within a tight range since UKIP started gaining ground a year ago.  So there's not much evidence that UKIP alone will cost the Tories many seats, but there are still two more years to go before the next general election, and that is more than a lifetime in politics.