Peter Kellner's initial take on the results

Based on the overnight results, here is an extract from what Peter Kellner wrote about wat the elections say about support for the various political parties.


"Welcome to multiparty politics. The overnight results from English councils confirm the story told by recent polls: Reform UK is out in front, Labour is in deep trouble, the Conservatives may have begun to recover, the Greens have gained ground, and the Liberal Democrats are doing well where they have a chance of victory.


"This morning we can go further. The results so far add new information, and also provoke questions about how politics might evolve between now and the next general election.


1. Behind the impressive tally of Reform’s gains – likely to end up well over 1,000 – Nigel Farage should be privately worried. In last year’s local elections Reform won 41 per cent of all seats contested across England. On the basis of the overnight figures, this year’s tally is around 33 per cent. If there were no polls, and there had been no elections last year, this year’s figure would be astonishing. But we do have the record of recent polls and elections, and it seems clear that Reform has peaked.


Under first-past-the-post, this matters. Our voting system helped Reform last year, when it won a much higher proportion of seats than votes. Its support is now at the point where that bonus has started to shrink. If more voters desert the party, it could suffer badly – falling short in many council and parliamentary seats that it would have won last year.


2. In contrast to Reform, Labour has cause for relief, despite losing half the seats it was defending yesterday. It’s bad – and in normal times it would be catastrophic – but it’s not as bad as its record in local council by-elections over the past 12 months, where it hast lost three-quarters of the seats it was defending. The overnight average conceals wide variations. Labour has lost all the seats it was defending in Wigan and Hartlepool, and all but one in Tameside, Dudley and Redditch. In other parts of England, where Reform is weaker, Labour’s support has held up better.


However, even on the most optimistic interpretation of Labour’s performance, the overnight figures contain a stark warning. John Curtice told BBC viewers in the early hours that while Labour has lost many SEATS to Reform, it has lost VOTES more to the Greens. The next election could produce a mirror-image of what happened in 2024. Keir Starmer’s landslide was largely the result of the way the right-of-centre vote divided in seat after seat between Conservative and Reform, and let Labour in through the middle. Next time, it could be a Labour-Green division that swells the parliamentary contingents of the right.


3. There is another way in which the Greens are mirroring Reform. Their national support is in the same ballpark as Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. Yet while Labour and the Liberal Democrats won similar numbers of seats yesterday (253, 250 and 241 respectively overnight), the Greens won only 51. Like Reform two years ago, their support is spread too evenly to win anything like as many seats as their overall vote share would seem to warrant. Reform won only five seats at the general election, despite winning half a million more votes than the Lib Dems, which won 72.


4. The Conservatives have clearly done better – or, more accurately, less badly – than last year."

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