How ‘local’ are the local elections?

Good morning. Voting is under way in parts of England. My best wishes to all our readers who are either standing in these elections, campaigning or putting a brave face on the results in the overnight shift. Some thoughts on how “local” these elections are or aren’t in today’s note.

It’s the cost of living, stupid

The real star of the local elections? This fry-up, courtesy of Valentina Romei.

Not, you understand, because politicians have been eating them on the campaign trail. But because of what it represents: prices of essential goods up and households feeling the pressure. (Though, frankly, I would gladly settle for being priced out of ever being able to see, let alone eat, baked beans again. Horrible things.)

This is, still, far and away the most important fact in British politics. It was eroding the government’s political position long before the invasion of Ukraine: it is the story of the slow decline in the Conservative position under Boris Johnson. And one consequence of Liz Truss’s premiership is that it not only hurt the Tory party directly but increased the share of the blame that voters put on it for the UK’s economic woes.

It is a big part of why so many people tell pollsters they want to rejoin the EU and a big part of whatever happens today in the local elections.

Local polls, national issues

Over at the Elections Etc blog, John Curtice and Stephen Fisher explain that what really matters as far as the fortunes of the political parties are concerned isn’t how many seats are won and lost today, but what it means for the “projected national vote”.

This is because not everywhere in England is voting. So in order to get a read on what these results are actually telling us about public opinion, Curtice and Fisher produce a projected national vote for the BBC, while Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher of Plymouth University produce an equivalent figure for the Sunday Times. As Fisher and Curtice explain, the two figures have never been that far from each other: but it is useful to have two simply because there are a lot of trade-offs and finely balanced judgments involved.

But wait a second, I hear you ask: aren’t these elections actually about local councils? Why do they tell us anything about national politics? Well, the answer is “because most people don’t vote on local issues in local elections”. Here’s Ipsos Mori:

Note that most of the things in this chart are nothing to do with local government, and the ones that are, are largely policy areas where local government is sharply constrained by national mandates.

Opinion polls are useful, but revealed preference is even more useful. Did every Labour council in, say, London, become considerably more competent overnight when the party went into opposition in 2010? And did every Conservative council in London become more incompetent? And yet more incompetent still after 2016? Of course not.

That’s not to say that local factors can’t aggravate national factors, or work against them. When the Liberal Democrats were losing councils at a clip during the coalition years, some high-performing local authorities were able to wow their residents enough to hold on or suffer only marginal losses, and that is true for all political parties. In very good years for the Conservatives and the Labour party, some local authorities end up swinging against the national tide because they are pretty rubbish at what they do.

But for the most part, most of today’s results will reflect satisfaction (or the lack thereof) with the parties nationally, rather than being about how these councils have performed locally. Much more about what it all means in tomorrow’s newsletter.

Now try this

I continue to rattle through Succession. So I was particularly excited to see that Isabel Berwick tackles the topic of succession planning in the new look Work and Careers email.

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