Nigel Farage weakens Labour's grip in north as Tories lose control of flagship councils and Lib Dem vote collapses
“The other parties can no longer ignore
Ukip or its voting power, according to a Guardian editorial which says
that nothing comparable has happened…”
Local election results - live
Follow the 2014 local elections results live as more than 4,000
councillors are elected in England across metropolitan boroughs, unitary
authorities, non-metropolitan districts and in every seat in every
London borough. Figures are updated after overall council results are
announced
Welcome to our second local election results live blog. My colleague Claire Phipps has just finished the overnight results blog which you can read here.
We've
had more than a third of the results in so far, and it is already clear
that Ukip is doing very well. The Conservatives have lost control of
several councils as a result of the Ukip advance. And the Ukip surge has
also hit Labour, which has been picking up seats, but perhaps fewer
than expected, and which has lost control of Thurrock following Ukip
gains there. The Lib Dems are doing particularly badly.
Here are some of the results in detail. I've taken the information from the Press Association.
• Ukip have gained 11 seats in Basildon, Essex, meaning the Conservatives lost control of the council.
• Ukip gained five seats in Thurrock, Essex, meaning that Labour lost control of the council.
• The Conservatives lost control in Southend-on-Sea after a Ukip surge saw them gain five seats.
• The Tories lost control of Tamworth in Staffordshire, where no party now has overall control.
• The Lib Dems have lost control of Portsmouth.
• Ukip won four seats in Maidstone in Kent, costing the Conservatives control of the council.
• Labour has claimed it has seized control of "David Cameron's favourite council" - Tory-run Hammersmith and Fulham.
• The Conservatives lost four seats in Peterborough, which meant they lost overall control of the council.
• The Conservatives have lost control of Brentwood in Essex.
• The Conservatives have lost control of Castle Point, which covers Canvey Island in Essex, following Ukip gains.
• Mike Hancock, the MP elected as a Lib Dem who now sits as an independent, has lost his council seat in Portsmouth.
Updated
Council staff counting votes from the local elections in Croydon. Photograph: Rob Stothard/Getty Images
Before my colleague Claire Phipps handed over the live blog baton, she posted a final round up on her overnight results blog. Here it is.
It is already clear that Ukip have outperformed expectations.
Official
predictions from the political
parties tend to be fairly unhelpful, because they are mainly designed
to manage expectations. The Conservatives and the Lib Dems were saying
earlier this week that they expected to lose seats, and Labour claimed
they were only expecting to
gain around 150 seats. But polling experts do produce more objective
figures, based on how well the parties are doing in the
polls, and I'm aware of two different “forecasts”.
Rallings/Thrasher
Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher are
professors of politics at University of Plymouth who specialise in
studying local elections. In a briefing for the Political Studies
Association last month, they produced some figures for the number of
seats they expect the main parties to win in these local elections
based on how well they have been performing over the last three
months in local council byelections.
According to Rawlings and Thrasher,
those byelections suggest produce following national equivalent vote
(NEV). NEV is what the national vote share would be if the results in
places that did vote were replicated in wards all over the country.
Labour: 33%
Conservatives: 30%
Ukip: 16%
Lib Dems: 14%
According to Rallings and Thrasher, a
strict application of this NEV would see Labour gain 500 seats, the
Lib Dems lose 340, and the Conservatives lose 160. And Ukip would not
win a single seat. But they recognise that it is hard to assess Ukip,
because they are a relatively new party that has only started winning
council seats, and so they revised their figures to take into account
the likelihood they would win some seats. Here are the figures they
presented to the PSA.
Labour: +490 seats
Ukip: +80
Conservatives: -220
Lib Dems: -350
As I write, Ukip has already hit 80 seats - and around half the results are yet to come in.
Fisher
Steve Fisher is an associate politics
professor at Oxford. He has got his own forecasting model, based on
the link between performance in local elections and performance in
national opinion polls. He explains it here on his blog. And here are
his figures.
Labour: +130 (in a range between +30
and +220)
Conservatives: -130 (in a range between
-30 and -235)
Lib Dems: -400 (in a range between -230
and -570)
He does not have a figure for Ukip
because his model does not cover it yet.
Directly elected mayors have gone out of favour, but in Copeland they have voted for one.
Labour has held Carlisle city council (where only a third of wards were up for election).
Ukip have been celebrating in Portsmouth, where the Lib Dems have
lost control because of Ukip gains. Only a third of seats were up for
election.
Labour has taken control of Cambridge.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Conservative MP, has renewed his call for some kind of Conservative/Ukip pact in the light of these results.
Graham Stringer, the Labour MP for Blackley and Broughton,
has been speaking to broadcasters. He criticised the Labour campaign,
saying that although the party was campaigning on the cost of living, Ed Miliband did not even know his own cost of living. That was "unforgivably unprofessional", he said.
Lynne Featherstone, the Lib Dem international development minister, has said that Ukip are doing well because they "sound like human beings".
The
reason have had such amazing success, such a rapid rise ... I think
they've also managed to sound like human beings, and I think that's
Nigel Farage's big win. All of us have gotten to the point where we are
so guarded, we are so on message, that we seem to have lost some of our
humanity.
Farage thinks the secret of his success is simple. ‘It’s about language,
isn’t it? I’m fairly direct and I think that makes a big difference.’
Here's more on the Cambridge, where Labour took control of a council
that was previously under no overall control. It's from the Press
Association.
Ten of the seats on offer went to Labour, while the Lib Dems won four and an independent one.
The new council line-up has Labour on 25, the Lib Dems on 14, independents on two and Conservatives on one.
Labour doing less well than two years ago, says John Curtice
On the Today programme John Curtice, the psephologist, delivered his preliminary verdict on the results. Here are the key points. • Curtice said that Labour were doing worse than they were two years ago.
When
it comes to local elections, we have quite high expectations of what
oppositions should achieve because we basically say, if a party looks as
though it is potentially regarded as an alternative government, it
should be doing very well in local elections, even better than you would
expect to do in a general election in 12 months' time. The truth is, by
that test at least, Labour have not done well enough.
Most of the
seats that were being up for grabs yesterday were last fought over on
the same day as the 2010 general election. And if you compare Labour's
performance vote for vote with 2010, the advance is just 3% point - 3%
on what was the day in which Labour recorded its second worst result.
And if you actually compare these results with the position two years
ago, which we can also compare most of these places with, Labour's vote
is clearly well down, something like nine points.
So the truth is,
modest progress, Labour not even doing as well as they were able to do
earlier in this parliament, and thereby again reinforcing the doubts
that have always been there that at the end of the day it is not
entirely clear that the British electorate regard Labour as a clear
alternative.
• He said Ukip were doing much better than expected.
Certainly
what these local elections demonstrate is that anybody who thought that
the Ukip bubble was going to be easily deflated should now be disabused
of that notion. They have managed to maintain most of the support they
have had over the last 12 months and repeated it at these local
elections. To that extent at least they have done remarkably well.
We have already found Ukip gaining over 80 seats. That was as much as anybody expected them to make [see 6.01am],
even if they did well, and we've only had a third or so of the results
actually in yet. So we are probably going to see far more Ukip councils
by the time all the ballots are counted this afternoon than we've ever
previously seen.
• He said on average Ukip were getting just under 25% of the vote. In London they were only getting around 7% of the vote, he said. But outside London they were getting more than 25%.
Here's Greg Hands, the Conservative deputy chief whip and MP for Chelsea and Fulham, on the Hammersmith and Fulham result.
The Tories used to run the council, but 11 of their wards went to
Labour, leaving the council with 26 Labour seats and 20 Conservative.
My colleague Rob Booth has sent me this from Croydon.
UKIP's vote is showing strongly even if they've not won seats yet
in Croydon. They just came second to the Conservatives in the safe ward
of Kenley, an affluent leafy suburb and their candidate came third
behind the two Labour winners in Fieldway ward.
John Curtice's comments on the BBC earlier (see 6.39am) suggest he thinks Labour is on course for a projected national share (PNS) of 30%.
PNS
is a figure that psephologists produce that tries to show what the
national result would have been if the votes in local elections had been
replicated in an election covering every ward in the country. It
adjusts the actual results to take into account the fact that annual
local elections feature a disproportionate number of elections in either
Tory or Labour areas.
In 2010 Labour's PNS in the local elections was 27%. In 2012 it was 38%.
There is some good news for the Lib Dems.
Here's Steve Crowther, the Ukip chairman, on the results.
They are saying [Ukip is just a protest vote] but there is an air of desperation about it to be
perfectly honest because this has now been going on for sometime and
it's a consistent thing.
Ukip have been building for 20 years consistently and we have now
reached a point where we have broken into the old party system. It is
now four party politics and this is not a flash in the pan.
The other parties are looking a little bit panic stricken.
He said he was particularly pleased the party had won 10 seats in Rotherham.
The Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg has been renewing his call for some kind of Conservative/Ukip pact. Grant Shapps, the party chairman, has ruled that out.
We’re not going to have a pact or joint candidates, or whatever. It
can’t happen on a technical basis because we do not allow joint
candidates to stand ... It’s not going to happen because we’re the
Conservative party; we are the best chance to offer an in/out
referendum, the only chance.
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