What would Reform’s Tsunami mean for a general election

The recent local elections were the first test of public opinion since the May 2004 General election. Opinion polls had been consistently placing Reform ahead of all other parties in recent weeks but it was unknown how this might translate into seats in a real election. The marmite nature of support for Reform means that tactical voting by their opponents is more than likely.

We now know that Reform can perform even better than recent polls have predicted. The veteran analysts of local elections, Thresher and Rawlings, calculate that Reform gained 32% of the local election votes. This is distinctly better for Reform than the latest poll of polls  which gives them 26% of the national vote.

This May’s local elections were only held in England, and thus missed the greater antipathy to Reform typical of Scotland, but also the strong support for Reform in Wales. Only a selection of local areas had elections, since Labour suspended elections in a range of areas which are about to be substantially changed. It may not be coincidental that most of the local authorities where elections were not held were Labour controlled, thus shielding them from Reform’s surge.

These local elections were thus not representative of a national poll. In any case local elections can often provide a poor guide to the outcome of the following general election. Voter turnout is also usually much lower than at general elections. Even so, these were real votes in a large number of areas widely spread across England. The dramatic surge in support for Reform also reflected what national polls have been saying.

If there was tactical voting by supporters of left-wing and liberal  parties, it did little to dampen Reform’s success. It is more likely that tactical voting reduced Reform’s margin of victory in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election, where there was a clear incentive for LibDem and Green voters to lend their support to Labour to keep Reform out.  Next year’s local election in a wider set of areas will provide a better guide to Reform’s national standing. Many of these local authorities will be in constituencies where Reform are currently second to Labour and without some dramatic upturn in Labour’s popularity, a further rout looks likely.

The next general election is four years away and much will happen before then. Some will argue that there is limited mileage in calculating what the recent local results would mean for the next general election. This is not quite right however, since the impact of the local results on the outlook of sitting MPs is quite likely to mean that these results are highly influential. Not to put too fine a point on it, many Tory and Labour MPs will be panicking about their future prospects. Policies will be sharpened up to head off Reform and at least one leader may fall.

We have thus used our BfB election spreadsheet to calculate how Parliament would look of there were a uniform swing across all constituencies. We start with the actual general election results for 2024 and apply the subsequent national swing to all constituencies. The results shown in the table below are truly dramatic. Reform is projected to rise from five to 348 seats and Labour to fall from 411 to 91. The Tories would lose nearly three-quarters of the rump which emerged from the 2024 meltdown. In third place, with only 35 MPs the Tories would cease to be a national force. Reform would have an overall majority and would form the next government. With five years to dig in at Whitehall, Reform could have some confidence that they had permanently replaced the Tories as the right of centre force in British Politics.

If something like this were to happen, then historians would record the 2025 local elections as being the first break-through. We could also argue that the Brexit vote in 2016 and the general election of 2019 were clear signs that a revolution was underway. The small size of the Tory rump surviving in 2029 would also not be the end of Tory woes.  Only 16 of the current Tory MPs would survive the deluge. Although the Tories would be predicted to win 35 seats, a majority of these would be new victories mainly from Labour. These would be won because the assumptions here are that Labour’s vote would decline much more sharply than the Tories. Even with a declining vote the Tories could thus win back some of the seats lost in 2024.

Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick and Mel Stride would all go. Rishi Sunak, Chris Philp and Oliver Dowden would survive but the Party would be shattered and hardly recognisable from today. Of course, all of this depends on the recent, local election results providing a guide to future vote swings. Perhaps this will not happen. Perhaps the local election results should be seen as a protest vote with the expectation that voters will return to their familiar homes come a general election.  Even for someone not given to dramatic scenarios this seems hugeley complacent. There are clearly electoral revolutions going on, in the USA, Germany and elsewhere, and there is enough evidence of a similar trend in the UK. The two main parties have allowed the UK to change too far in unpopular directions. They have no effective policies to reverse the stagnation in living standards. If they are surprised at the size of the electoral tsunami then this surprise is very much part of the problem.

Dr Graham Gudgin CBE is co-editor of BriefingsforBritain with Professor Robert Tombs and Research Associate at the Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge.