The BBC has published its estimate of the national vote-shares for this year’s local elections. They show Labour out in front, on 31%, the Tories just behind on 29% – with Ukip in third place on 17% and the Lib Dems in fourth on 13%. Compared to the 2013 results*, this means Ukip is the only one of the four main parties to have lost votes in the last year.
Here’s the graph showing results over the last four years, 2010-14:
Here's the national vote share (est.) of the 4 main parties since 2010. Ukip DOWN on 2013. #VOTE2014 pic.twitter.com/5Kkh7jQAeV
— Stephen Tall (@stephentall) May 23, 2014
* Can I anticipate the inevitable queries… The national vote-shares take into account the fact that a different range of wards are up for election. So the fact that this year’s elections took place in the urban Metropolitan districts and last year’s in the more rural counties is already accounted for. For more on how they’re calculated, see Stephen Fisher’s post at the LSE’s British Politics and Policy blog (hat-tip Mark Pack).
* Stephen was Editor (and Co-Editor) of Liberal Democrat Voice from 2007 to 2015, and writes at The Collected Stephen Tall.
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43 Comments
No chart.
Also even if true no reason not to see as very bad LD result. In the run up to an election as a governing party the party needs to see a strong recovery.
“Can I anticipate the inevitable queries… The national vote-shares take into account the fact that a different range of wards are up for election. So the fact that this year’s elections took place in the urban Metropolitan districts and last year’s in the more rural counties is already accounted for. For more on how they’re calculated, see Stephen Fisher’s post at the LSE’s British Politics and Policy blog (hat-tip Mark Pack).”
But it’s not really clear from that how the estimates are done for UKIP. The tenor of the discussion suggests it would be by comparison with local elections contested by UKIP back in 2010, but they had a lot fewer candidates then, so the basis of the comparison must be rather tenuous.
I think it would be safer not to make any sweeping statements based on projections like these.
Is this due to what councils were up for election – swapping the voting habits of the counties for those of London?
Stephen – is your statement about PNS accounting for the Metropolitan/County split correct? I can’t reconcile it with the comment by John Curtice that is in the BBC report : Elections expert Professor John Curtice said UKIP’s lower vote share this year reflected its weak performance in London but remained “remarkably good”.
Wholesale destruction of Liberal Democrat groups in our great Metropolitan regions but we did well in Cheltenham (congratulations to those involved), so that’s a “mixed night”? “Yes, The Titanic sank but the orchestra kept taking requests, so it was a mixed night”.
Look blow UKIP, what we should be concentrating on is our damn awful polling figures. Whether UKIP, Labour or Uncle Tom Cobbly is up or down is not our concern, OUR CONCERN IS THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS AND WE MUST NOT DIVERT OUR ATTENTION AWAY FROM THAT, this is HQ spinning again. They should be overhauled once there has been a change of leader!
The vote is appalling and lets face that.
Mainly due to UKIP’s failure in London, which didn’t have elections last year. UKIP have placed the blame on the ‘educated’ people of London, but their perfomance in huge swathes of England should alarm all Liberals.
The graph suggests
(1) that most of the damage to the LibDem share was done in 2010/2011, by Labour taking LibDems
(2) that between 2013 and 2014, most of the damage done to the UKIP share was done by Lab and Con
So, this result shows what voters thought of LibDems since 2011. Nothing done after that has damaged the party’s standing very much, and nothing has improved it. No need for Clegg to go at all – indeed, his replacement would be an unknown quantity for the electorate, and electorates aren’t always keen on unknown quantities.
Oh, I see. Because the patient was shot in 2010, and has remained in critical condition ever since, means it would be a bad idea to remove the bullets lodged near his spine.
What?
I see Pangloss, Voltaire and Candide are having a field day again. Orange Bookers don’t really seem bothered at the Party losing support and Councillors again, even Lynne Featherstone could have problems in Haringey. Nick Clegg is the architect of the miserable results and has to go. We need more people on here to speak out against the party’s demise and take on the OBs.
@David-1
No. The patient survived the assassination attempt in 2010, so we can be confident he can recover. We just need to stop the people who have been continually making further attempts since then.
Feel much better now that the figures only had Ukip 4% higher than LibDem
I watched the parties say we get it carry on the same way as normal on BBC today once we know what happens in Scotland people will decide how the vote for the general election will go. Stand by your beds if the Scots go independent and the electorate think the major parties sell us down the garden path in settlement of borders and currency I suggest you all learn how to avoid eggs.
theakes 23rd May ’14 – 5:35pm
Look blow UKIP, what we should be concentrating on is our damn awful polling figures. Whether UKIP, Labour or Uncle Tom Cobbly is up or down is not our concern, OUR CONCERN IS THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS AND WE MUST NOT DIVERT OUR ATTENTION AWAY FROM THAT, this is HQ spinning again. They should be overhauled once there has been a change of leader!
The vote is appalling and lets face that.
To those who say Nick should go, name your candidate who can
1 Unify the party
2 Survive the Scottish referendum if it goes YES and the next GE
3 Avoids ageist attacks
Not easy is it!
No obvious high profile candidate. Maybe better to wait till afterwards and do the Tory knife in back option if it is a bad result.
Yes Tim Farron, popular with the rank and file of the Party and would appeal to more working class voters with his down to earth manner of speaking, would also happily take Charles Kennedy my hero who moved the Lib Dems to their highest ever number of MPs on guess what policies on the left of centre and all the things the Orange Booker brigade despise eg defending our public services such as the NHS, Police and Fire Service rather than cutting back and marketising them as the Orange Bookers are trying to force through.
And from now on I am going to campaign and campaign for a change of leader, to get the party back to where it belongs and ignore the head in the sand ostrich approach above.
why has the political right done so well? Is it purely about “immigration” though EU citizens coming here aren’t typically permanent immigrants are they?
@Peter Hayes
“To those who say Nick should go, name your candidate who can”
That does not really say much for the Liberal Democrat parliamentary party. If your own members are saying that there is nobody suitable for the role. How does that encourage voters to put their trust in voting Libdem
T
They haven’t the ‘hard right’ aka Ukip have.
Its also irrelevant if UKIP gets a higher share of the vote in the European elections on Sunday.
Matt,
It says more about the most high profile MPs are tainted by the coalition and the attacks on them.
What about a radical solution to LiDem woes – a merger with the Labour Party? I’m serious. Just as the Liberals joined with the SDP to create a new political force, so we could have a pact which gave the LibDems the status of the Co-operative. Outcome: no need to ever by trounced by Labour again.
Bill Chapman – merge with Labour … what’s that sound? It’s the snipping of party cards, up and down the land.
Oh – it was a joke! Oh, very good, you old rogue 🙂
I think he may have meant “sub”merge, with a silent “never to be seen again”.
Interesting graph.
FOUR YEARS POST- GE, David Cameron has lost 25 per cent of theTory vote, Miliband has held his lot level and Nick Clegg has lost just about half the Lib Dem vote. 🙁
” a radical solution to LiDem woes – a merger with the Labour Party? ”
Having lost many left wing members after the merger (ahem not really a meger, a coalition) with the Tory party, now lets lose all the right wing libertarian liberals by merging with Labour? I don’t think that would be a wise move.
@ Bill Chapman
“What about a radical solution to Lib Dem woes – a merger with the Labour Party? ”
You must be joking: our bank is solvent: why should we take on your billion s of toxic debt? If you merged with us all of those hundreds of thousands of your former supporters who have come back to us would desert us again. No way.
Labour had a fantastic local election victory: nearly three hundred seats gained , ( we only expected a hundred and fifty) ; we also gained most of the London Authorities including a Tory Flagship and three London council mayors as well. Our best result in London since 1968. We also made huge progress in our target areas.
Not that you would have known this from our Right Wing media which as always turned our great Labour victory into a defeat.
As for UKIP: they did not gain control of a single council, and gained only 157 seats as opposed to Labour’s 1,891. (even The Lib Dems took 404 seats). UKIP took barely a handful of seats in London, none in Manchester (vast multi-cultural connurbations, note) and their vote fell by an overall whopping six per cent. This was no earthquake: it didn’t even register on the Richter scale. The “Others” actually scored 111 seats. Was that an earthquake too? But the Right Wing Tory media is so fearful that the Right will lose at the next General Election that it has to promote and trump up Farage’s Thatcherite rump.
The real Earthquake was the size of the Coalition’s losses, which ,of course , the Right Wing Media won’t go anywhere near. Between them the Coalition lost 485 seats. The Lib-Dems alone lost 284 seats. Why did that happen if the economy is doing so well and coalition with the Tories is so good for you?
We in the Labour Party finally got our party back. The Lib Dems can get their party back too. But to do that they have get out of their fatal coalition. Now that would be a real earthquake!
Lib Dem party have to think on their stand on EU and consider common wealth countries. Common wealth countries voters are crucial.
Mack – I tend to agree with you but the Orange Bookers have to be expunged as they are taking the party too far to the right and their libertarian right wing nasty views go down very badly with people like me who joined the party in London to arrest inner city decay and live on a council estate. Here in Greenwich Labour won a huge victory again as expected and also wiped out, although rather sadly in my book, some good and hard working Councillors in Lewisham. I actually think although it’s a long shot and a long way off there may be room for some kind of partnership with the Greens who did really well in London and when it comes to the environment eg fracking I find myself fully opposed to it and in agreement with them. On fracking Tim Farron who should be our new leader, thinks the same.
lol, i love the pungent imagery such colourful wordplay engenders;
“expunging the nasty orange bookers!”
Wonderful off you go to trivialising the left of centre liberals on here and protecting your self interests.
aren’t you likewise protecting your self interest?
is yours a more moral position, from which you are a safe to utter against others?
Lets look at the state of the party – Rushmoor Council Covers Aldershot and Farnborough in North East Hampshire. Aldershot was a second teir target seat in 2010. At the general election the Lib Dems polled 34.4% – 12.3% behind the Tories.
On Thursday 13 seats were up for election in Rushmoor – the Lib Dems contested just 4 seats. they came last in 3 of those (5th, 4th and third) and overall polled 4.5% of the votes cast in Rushmoor.
What’s your point. All you seem to do is trivialise anyone you disagree with by belittling them with silly jibes and inane banter.
If Farage were not such a showman, would we even have seen this Ukip bubble?
I have never in my lifetime seen so much media attention for a party that until this week-end had very little to show for its 21 year history. Much is made by its supporters about the results of this week- end’s elections causing momentum. Equally likely, it may have peaked. The number of seats won was hardly stratospheric given the number of seats up for election, and they still don’t control any council.
I’m just fed up with this overblown party. The Green party ran a council and had an MP and did not merit a fraction of the attention given to them. Indeed the possibility that Ukip might get an MP at the GE gets more attention. The way that Ukip has been puffed up is reminiscent of the panic and media attention given to the BNP before the last election.
After this week- end, please can we have a rest from Farage and the inside of pubs?
@david
Nobody needs to be expunged, defenestrated, expelled or otherwise removed from the party. The top leadership needs to pull its best people out of Whitehall, once the final Queen’s Speech for this government is completed, and get to work building a radical new campaign that will give us something positive to fight for again, alongside defending our compromises in coalition.
The leadership question is largely irrelevant to these calculations, because whoever leads this party will be leading it into an incredibly difficult election at which we will lose votes. But this election will be difficult for everyone. Labour is retreating to its 35%, hoping to stagger across the line with a ten seat majority. The Tories are hoping for something similar, while praying their europhobe fringe MPs don’t grow a spine and jump ship to UKIP. And UKIP, they’re a wildcard, turning two-way or three-way marginals into four-way splits where tiny swings between the four will deliver almost random results.
There’s everything to fight for here, let’s not waste it by tearing ourselves apart with these sort of arguments.
The Party is imploding under Nick Clegg’s leadership, isn’t it obvious or will you wait until we’re down to single figures before doing anything about it.
I think that the reported drop in the UKIP “national vote” may be wrong – though it may have been overestimated last year.
Of course they take into account the different types of Councils etc BUT their system may not have got the size of the differences right. They may also not have taken account of the geographical variations in the UKIP vote within a particular type of Council, particularly the shire areas and post-shire unitaries.
The UKIP successes last year were quite concentrated in an unusual way. Around half their elected County Councillors were along an arc of the English coast from Portland Bill in Dorset to the Humber (plus Filey in North Yorks). Another chunk were in areas (often inland of their coastal seats) with large amounts of gangmaster type employment on farms and in the food processing industry. Only a few of these kind of areas were polling this year – the shire districts polling by thirds tend to be more urban and few coastal ones. Where they did poll, UKIP seem to have done well (eg Great Yarmouth and Southend).
So basically I don’t think we know the truth.
Tony
@ Jayne
I’m just fed up with this overblown party.
Well devise some policies which will attract UKIP voters then! No-one forces them to vote for us you know, why is your supposedly left of centre party so failing to connect to the poorest and most deprived in our society???
You are a middle class party. You have utterly failed the white working class (although not as much as Labour).
>why is your supposedly left of centre party so failing to
>connect to the poorest and most deprived in our society???
Firstly, it’s not a supposedly left of centre party, it’s a centre party. Secondly, the poorest and most deprived usually have lower standards of education which means they’re more likely to be duped into voting for “characters” who profit from their vote whilst doing nothing for them, rather than serious politicians that could of helped them address the causes of their social problems.
It’s true Lib Dems have been really bad at connecting to the voters they help the most. The voters who now don’t pay tax because of the Lib Dems may not thank the party for it, but the facts are the facts. As much as I detest Cleggs leadership, he’s done a great deal of real things to lift people out of poverty. Typifying legislation such as raising the tax threshold as having “utterly failed the white working class” is disingenuous, the Lib Dems have done more for that demographic than any party for a long time, despite difficult economic conditions.
What has Farage done for anyone other than himself?
@ Chris B
Firstly, it’s not a supposedly left of centre party, it’s a centre party.
The Party in Parliament or the Party in the country, the activists? As far as I can see, as a non Lib Dem, the party membership is that of a left of centre party. And reading this website has done nothing to disabuse me of this notion, the opposite in fact.
“Secondly, the poorest and most deprived usually have lower standards of education which means they’re more likely to be duped into voting for “characters” who profit from their vote whilst doing nothing for them, rather than serious politicians that could of (sic) helped them address the causes of their social problems.”
Wow. No wonder they don’t want to vote for you if that is what you think. It never ceases to amaze me that the establishment parties think that the way to won people’s votes is to call them racist and thick and ill educated.
Which is what your lackey newspapers and TV stations have been doing for the past two or three weeks.
The voters who now don’t pay tax because of the Lib Dems may not thank the party for it, but the facts are the facts.
The “facts” which matter to them are that they have become “strangers in their own land” without so much as a by their leave. And certainly without their ever having voted for it. and now they ARE voting against it they are patronised and insulted.
You speak for yourself not for them. They realise that even if you don’t.
It was a left of centre party in parliament but is now dominated by Orange Bookers, think Ukip your party even on NHS privatisation, dismantling the welfare state. The activists and councillors are probably still left of centre but are being let down by the leadership and most of our voters have left for labour. Incidentally I am not sure how your policies benefit the white working class as you call it and why make a race issue out of it when the working class are not just white. I thought your party were supposed to represent working class people from all ethnic groups it’s called diversity still now I know that the Isolationists are even more narrow and insular than I suspected no wonder they didn’t pick up any council seats in London.
Mack (Not a Lib Dem)
We in the Labour Party finally got our party back. The Lib Dems can get their party back too. But to do that they have get out of their fatal coalition. Now that would be a real earthquake!
You did? I don’t see any big change in the Labour Party recently. I don’t see it offering anything in the way of radical proposals which would reverse the effects of 35 years of Thatcherite economics as pushed by all recent governments. I don’t see it offering anything that would reverse the decline in democracy and people’s feelings that politics is all wrong but lack of a clue what to do about it and so easy prey for the far-right. In fact I don’t see Labour offering anything much at all except supposing the pendulum will swing back its way next time, and those pesky LibDems will be eliminated and the good ol’ two party system restored, so that means they won’t have to do any thinking any more ever, just rely on the pendulum.
Looks like Nige is going to do a deal with Beppe Grillo…
Fantastic! 🙂