Local elections are held on the first Thursday of May each year in the United Kingdom, where voters decide the composition of local governments. This time, voters decided nearly 8,000 parliamentary seats in a total of 230 municipalities.
It was Rishi Sunak’s first serious challenge since taking over the keys to the prime minister’s Downing Street residence last year after Liz Truss’ begging premiership. At the same time, he cannot be overly satisfied with his party’s performance, because
The Conservative Party has lost its majority in important places.
It is no coincidence that no one in the Conservative Party was overjoyed when they saw the results, even though at the time of writing the winners had been declared in 136 of 230 municipalities. Despite the fact that only a few venues announced the winners in the morning, Sunak posed for the cameras and its worth his party’s performance. Sweetening the results a bit, he said his party is doing well in several cities, and also explained what he’d read of the results so far:
The message I’m hearing from people tonight is that they want us to focus on and deliver on their priorities.
Then he laid out what he thought were those priorities, which he announced on January 4: halving inflation, accelerating economic growth, lowering the national debt, reducing hospital waiting lists and, hopefully, a better life on the English Channel, they’d go. To Great Britain to stop immigration wanting to enter.
Heavy defeats on the right
The Tories have lost their majorities in local government in several cities it has led for decades: such as Plymouth and Stoke-on-Trent, but the fact that Midoy also went red is also a huge victory for Labour.
Even more embarrassing than this is that there were areas where prominent Tory ministers or politicians were running in parliamentary elections.
This happened, for example, in the district of the Minister responsible for energy, Grant Shapps, in Welwyn Hatfield, where the Labor Party won, but also a symbolic defeat in Windsor and Maidenhead, the district of former Prime Minister Theresa May, where the 22-year-old Liberal Democrat managed years after the defeat of the local leader of the Conservative Party.
After the Liberal Democrats gained a majority, party leader Ed Davey visited Windsor, where he was He said: The end has come for Rishi Sunak.
By the time our article was published, they had lost 469 seats in 136 municipalities, and it could easily be up to a thousand at the end of the day, when the last vote has been counted.
For the defeat, the Conservatives do not mainly blame Rishi Sunak, he took the party leadership in rather bad shape after the Johnson and Truss scandals, but at the same time, the Tories who spoke anonymously to the Tory Telegraph according to Sun can’t explain the massive losses through “last year’s chaos” as he says he started them in the first place when he was “stabbed in the back by the most successful Tory election winner in 50 years”, a reference to Boris Johnson.
Huge wins for the Liberal Democratic workers
As already mentioned, the Labor Party took power from the Conservatives in many important regions and cities, so it is not surprising that their leader, Keir Starmer, assessed the results in a rather positive mood.
The party boss, who has moved Labor in a somewhat centrist direction, has announced that Labor will take a majority in Westminster in parliamentary elections due in January 2025 at the latest, although according to most analysts this cannot be stated clearly yet. , and the Starmers still have a lot to do if they want to return beyond 2010 to handlebars.
In light of the current findings, according to most experts
Labor is likely to get a majority in Westminster, but it won’t get a majority on its own.
For example, as election expert John Curtis explained on BBC Radio 4, the Conservatives have already had a very bad night and the opposition parties have won many places, but they are sharing the “spoils”, so Labor must increase the number of its constituents if it is to The next Parliament will want to form a government on its own in elections. At the time of writing, Starmers had won 266 of the 469 seats lost by the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats had won 152 and the Greens, considered a dwarf party nationally, at 104.
In the current election, according to the BBC’s calculations, Labor won a total of 35 percent of the vote, while 26 percent of voters voted for the Conservatives – this, by the way, is Labor’s biggest advantage since 1997, when they won by 11 percentage points. more than the Tory Party.
On the other hand, Labor calculates that since the SNP is in crisis in Scotland with the departure of Nicola Sturgeon, it will be able to gain more seats in Scotland, which was considered Labor territory before domination. From the Scottish National Party – On two occasions so far the party has not gained a majority in Scotland.
(Cover photo: British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in London on May 4, 2023. Photo: Daniel Leal/AFP)
