Tag Archives: local elections 2017

Welcome to our Election Night open thread. We’ll be looking at the results as they come in from all over the country. The most exciting thing we are likely to find out tonight is whether we have managed to make up ground in Cardiff. Most results come in tomorrow.

Where are the key battlegrounds?

Let’s have a look at the elections being contested. Every council seat in Wales and Scotland is up for grabs, as is every County Council seat in England. For us key battlegrounds include Cardiff, Edinburgh and Cornwall. We have new mayoral contests in Greater Manchester (where Jane Brophy is our candidate), Cambridgeshire and Peterborough (Rod Cantrill), Tyne Tees (Chris Foote-Wood), West Midlands (Beverley Nielsen), Liverpool (Carl Cashman) and Western Counties (Stephen Williams). These elections all took place on different nights the last time. The last Scottish and Welsh elections were in 2012 and they were grim for us. We lost more than half our councillors in Scotland and pretty much half our councillors in Wales. The county elections in 2013 were pretty grim too, with 124 losses. There will be a few Welsh results in tonight but other than that (fingers crossed for our Welsh colleagues) but the main action happens tomorrow. So, what is Twitter telling us about the elections so far, in this early part of the night.

Professors Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher have predicted that the Liberal Democrats could gain 100 seats in the County Council election, twice as many as the Tories are predicted to gain. They also say that Labour will lose 50 seats and UKIP 100.

From the Sunday Times (£):

Thrasher and Rallings predict that Ukip’s vote will collapse from 22% to 10% — and that the Tory vote will rise five points to 31%.

Rallings said: “The Tories will benefit from Ukip’s decline, but could themselves lose seats to the Lib Dems.

“The Lib Dems will be looking to take seats from both Tories and Labour as they claw their way back from the humiliation of the 2015 general election. In local elections they benefit from an ability to mobilise support on the ground.”

The last time those seats were fought, we lost 124, so even that sort of spectacular rise wouldn’t take us back to where we are in 2009.