The election results announced overnight clearly demonstrated that the Conservatives are in serious trouble.
There was one pre-election defeat in Blackpool South in the hands of the Labor Party, the seventh in this parliament.
In local elections, the Conservatives are losing seats in numbers that suggest this could be one of the party’s worst performances ever.
But the losses of Conservative council seats have not been beneficial to Labor overall – with Sir Keir Starmer’s party more or less static in terms of vote share compared with the results of last year’s May election.
Follow local elections live: results as they come in
Labor wins by-election: ‘People want change’
The picture of net seat gains and losses is intriguing.
Work leads the way but it is having to share the headlines with seat gains made at the Tories’ expense by the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and a host of local independents.
Rough comparisons of the change in vote share demonstrate that support for Reform is real and will hurt the Conservatives if it comes to fruition at the next general election.
Early results from Sunderland, where Reform fielded candidates in all 25 wards, demonstrate this. The decline in the conservative share was almost a mirror image of the rise in reform.
Conservatives should be grateful that Reform is only contesting around 300 of the more than 2,500 seats up for grabs.
Richard Tice, leader of the Reformation. Photo: PA
In Newcastle, it was a different story, where Reform put forward no candidates.
Here, Labor lost two seats, the Greens gained two and there was a rare Conservative gain. In terms of the change in vote share, it was the Greens who were making progress.
But strong evidence that Labor’s progress has been uneven has emerged in South Tyneside, where Labour’s 22-seat majority on the council was reduced to just two seats when 10 seats were lost to the Group of Independents and the Greens.
A long-running confrontation between the city administration and garbage workers is a combination that rarely works out in the ruling party’s favor.
Another example of this is Thurrock – where a previous Conservative administration presided over the circumstances that led to the council declaring its effective bankruptcy.
Given the opportunity to vent, voters wreaked havoc on the Conservatives, who lost all but one of the 13 seats they defended. Labor won eight seats and returned to power after an eleven-year absence.
Keep up with the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News
The first parliamentary by-election after the 2019 general election produced a surprise victory for the Conservatives in Hartlepool, a rare seat gain for the opposition party. This election took place on the same day as the 2021 council elections, which saw the Conservatives win the majority of seats on Hartlepool council.
This time the electoral pendulum swung in the opposite direction, with the Conservatives losing seats and Labor regaining control of the council in Hartlepool.
Read more: Boris Johnson walked away from the polling station
File photo: PA
Having easily retained control of Broxbourne, a council the Tories had held throughout their 51-year existence, the Tories lost control of North East Lincolnshire, where their 12-seat majority fell – after having lost six seats to Labor and two more for independents. .
The area, which includes the new Grimsby and Cleethorpes constituency where the Conservatives are estimated to defend a 23-point majority, it could well result in a close result.
Rushmoor in Hampshire provided the biggest shock, the Tory’s first Labor gain of the night.
This is the first time the Labor Party has won majority control since the council was created in the early 1970s.
Not even Tony Blair’s New Labor achieved this feat.
Mr Starmer will certainly use this result to assert that his party is a fighting force in areas of southern England.
In the West Midlands, Redditch was another straight swing from Conservative to Labour.
Labor was not far behind the Conservatives in power before the election, but boundary changes and a full council election provided the opportunity Labor needed. He won 10 seats and now has a majority of 15 seats.
But Labor knows that in some places Tory unhappiness does not translate directly into Labor gain.
In Peterborough, 13 Conservative losses were shared between independents and, to a lesser extent, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens.
He also knows that he still faces challenges in building a winning performance in the general elections.
In Harlow – the 33 seats were split into 17 for the Conservatives and 16 for Labor – with the Conservatives losing seats but retaining their majority on the council.
Understandably, Labor is using the Blackpool South result to talk about its prospects for the general election – but the local election story stated so far points to a more nuanced story.
This story originally appeared on News.sky.com read the full story
