British Local Elections, May 2024

[EastAnglianLefty]

Though they are clearly prioritising the coming GE over local elections, which clearly sets them apart from not just the LibDems and Greens but some of the bigger "minor" parties. Which doesn't mean such an approach *can't* be successful - the coming election may well be an interesting test of this.

I do understand why they may be going for that strategy (all of ukip's investment in locals just landed them with a small battalion of feuding local weirdos who almost all dropped out of the party), but it means they're heading into the general with very little idea where their target seats will be (if there are indeed any).

The difference now is that the local weirdos are being made parliamentary candidates then dropped a month later when their weird and/or extremely racist and/or misogynist comments come to light.

It's not the major benefit of running a doorstep-focused election campaign, but one benefit of it is that it keeps your activists off Twitter for a bit.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The Blackpool South declaration (presumably overnight) will be fairly important for narrative setting.

I would also think the Avon & Somerset PCC might be quite significant - Labour weren't too far off winning it in 2021 on second preferences and the areas with concomitant local elections are much better for Labour than the Tories.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Street slightly outperformed what you'd expect from a generic Tory in 2016 and 2021, but only slightly. The idea that he is an electoral juggernaught seems to owe more to London journalists having heard of him than it does to any detailed examination of the political attitudes of Black Country residents.

[EastAnglianLefty]

If we must have polling for these contests, can it perhaps be by firms that actually have reasonable (I'm not even demanding 'good') reputations?

I preferred the days when I could take British pollsters more seriously than Canadian pollsters.

[EastAnglianLefty]

What happens when you have single issue candidates (e.g. all about Gaza) who get elected to a local council and discover they will spend the next three years dealing with parking and dog runs?

Those councillors may have got elected on Gaza, but a lot of their campaign network will be made up of people who are interested in local government because it gives them influence over planning and licencing.

[EastAnglianLefty]

After the Tees Valley mayoral election  a Labour source went on twitter and said Labour don't expect to take the West Midlands cause of Gaza Defectors. But then another source did the same thing and said that source was bullocks and did not speak for the inside mood.

TL:DR: West Midlands doesn't count till tomorrow, and Labour are trying to gauge their support there based on other areas.

IMO, this is all for nothing cause Reform have a candidate here. If Reform do as well in the Black Country as they did in the NE then Labour can lose many more votes than thought. In fact, one of the public polls showed this.

This is completely backwards. There's no particular reason to believe that Reform will do well it the West Midlands mayoralty, but if they did then that would be extremely good news for Labour.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The funniest thing about Canvey Island parochialism is that the paranoia that underlies so much of it even has a rational justification: we have learned from the archives that until the completion of the Thames Barrier in 1982, the official plan for the nightmare combination of a Spring Tide and an extreme storm surge from the North Sea sufficiently bad to threaten central London was to inundate Canvey Island in order to save the City and Westminster.