Labour loses 40% of council seats defended since UK general election

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Labour has lost more than 40 per cent of the council seats it has defended in by-elections since the general election, in a further sign that the party’s popularity has plunged since July 4.

The party’s vote share has fallen in 80 per cent of local authority by-elections, and in almost half, its vote share fell by at least 10 per cent, according to a new analysis of its performance in council ballots.

“You would expect a governing party to take a bit of a hit after a general election, but certainly not as immediate nor as drastic as this,” said political analyst David Cowling, the former political research editor at the BBC who conducted the analysis.

He analysed 101 council by-elections that Labour had contested across England, Wales and Scotland since July 4.

In total Labour has defended 58 council seats since the general election, of which it has held 34 but lost 24.

The party lost council seats to the Liberal Democrats, Green party, Reform UK and the Scottish Nationalists, but most of its defeats have involved ceding wards to the Conservatives, which have gained 14 council seats from Labour.

The decline comes after the party won 402 out of 650 parliamentary constituencies and secured a huge working majority of 163 this summer — although it only won 34 per cent of the popular vote.

The post-election tally suggests that opinion surveys documenting a slide in Labour’s favourability ratings are borne out on the ground in many parts of the country.

Cowling said the Tories’ success in winning back council wards from Labour after suffering its worst-ever defeat in July was particularly striking. “This is extraordinary to me — we’d expect Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Greens to be pecking at the corpse of the Conservative party and stripping it bare.”

Labour has also gained five additional council seats, including three in Scotland and one in Wales.

Overall in the 101 by-elections, Labour’s vote share increased in 20 seats, of which nine were in Scotland and two were in Wales, indicating Labour is faring worse in England than the other parts of the UK in which the party contests elections.

While Labour is credited with having built a highly efficient voter base before the general election, its support is shallow in many areas. The party secured one of the biggest majorities in British history with the lowest share of the vote for a winning party in modern times.

Tory polling analyst Lord Robert Hayward said it was “unprecedented that an incoming government has been subjected to the wrath of voters in so many councils over the last four months”.

Cowling has also analysed all the published opinion polls conducted since the general election, and found that voter support for Labour had fallen eight percentage points from an average of 38 per cent since July 4, to 30 per cent in October.

Meanwhile support for the Tories has risen from an average of 21 to 25 per cent during the same period, the analysis showed.

Hayward said it appeared to confirm the “collapse in support for Keir Starmer as a PM, as identified in the opinion polls”.

Starmer’s personal approval ratings have plunged faster than any British prime minister in the modern era, from +11 before the election to -38 this week, according to the research group More in Common.

On Tuesday More in Common released the results of a survey conducted on November 8-11, its first since Kemi Badenoch took over as Tory leader, which showed the Tories had taken a narrow lead of two percentage points over Labour, at 29 per cent versus 27 per cent.

A Labour spokesperson said: “This new Labour government inherited unprecedented challenges from the Conservatives, with crumbling public services and crippled public finances. We’ve already begun fixing the foundations and delivering change.”

Data visualisation by Jonathan Vincent