Local election campaigning enters final week as forecaster warns Labour could lose 1,850 English seats
Good morning. We are now into the final week of campaigning for the Scottish parliament, Welsh Senedd and English local elections. Keir Starmer had been planning a big speech today, but he, and other political leaders, are today focusing on their response to the Golders Green stabbing and the antisemitism threat facing Britain’s Jewish community – described as a “national security emergency” by Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s independent reviewer of terror legislation. Here is our overnight story. And here is our live blog by Taz Ali.
Taz will be covering most of the political reaction to that story, and so that won’t be something I will be covering here. (And because criminal proceedings are active, comments relating to the attack won’t be allowed below the line, I’m afraid.)
Instead, let’s start with the elections, and a member of the House of Lords called Robert Hayward. Hayward is a Conservative and former MP but at Westminster he is best known as an elections specialist who produces detailed forecasts ahead of elections. They are not always perfect – no forecast is – but they are well-informed, and politically neutral, and Hayward is one of the very few people doing forecasting of this kind whose views are taken seriously by the main political parties. He won’t necessarily tell you exactly what will happen; but he is worth reading if you want to know what the politicos expect to happen (which is useful intelligence because often election results are assessed by how they match up against expectations).
Last night Hayward revealed his forecast for the English local elections on ITV’s Peston.
And this is how Hayward explains it in his summary.
England all figures given are net losses and gains
Labour will lose 1850 seats
The losses will be nationwide
What impact on Sir Keir’s role? Given S Times comment re 1500 losses and ‘nervous breakdown’ this is bad news for Sir Keir and Labour.
Reform will be biggest gainer from both Labour and Conservatives, overwhelmingly outside London. They will gain 1550 seats
Will their national equivalent vote be lower than last year? I believe it will be
Conservatives will lose 600 seats many in councils deferred from last year. These seats were previously contested in the vaccine bounce year of 2021.
Do they gain any notable councils or stop Reform from taking control of target councils? Yes
Have they improved on the national equivalent vote last year? About static
Greens will gain 500 seats in London and middle class areas of other cities
Can they take any mayoralties or control any councils? Yes definitely mayoralty possibly a council or two
Lib Dems will gain 150 seats but will need to gain councils to be involved ‘in the conversation’.
Will national equivalent vote share reflect decline in poll position. Yes
Have they lost their position as part of the protest parties? Up to a point.
Independents will gain 250 seats
Many of these will be in east London, Birmingham and Lancs
Other forecasts are available too. I will post more on those soon.
Parliament is not sitting today, and there is not much in the diary. But we won’t be short of politics.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (between 10am and 3pm), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
Key events
Badenoch told BBC Radio London that the Conservatives were committed to keeping council tax “as low as possible”. She said, unlike Reform UK, the Tories were not promising to cut council tax. Reform did that, but could not deliver, she said.
In an interview on BBC Radio London, asked what would be a good result for the Conservatives in London, Kemi Badenoch said she wanted to win as many seats as possible. And she said she would like to win back councils the party had lost, citing Westminster as an example. But she refused to set a target for how many seats she expected to win.
Kemi Badenoch is doing a round of interviews on local radio this morning. She started on BBC Radio Leeds where, at one point, she said that people should vote for Conservative councillors because they were “not drama queens” and “not playing games”. At that point the presenter, Gayle Lofthouse, put it to her that that was exactly what she had been doing in Westminster this week, with the vote on the privileges committee inquiry. Lofthouse also said that BBC reporters were being told the voters in West Yorkshire weren’t interested in this.
In response, Badenoch said she had spent much of the past month focusing on energy policy and petrol prices. But she quickly reverted to defending the vote on Tuesday. She said:
It’s not a TV show, this is real life. Having a prime minister who appointed someone who is a national security risk affects your residents, your listeners.
It is a problem if we cannot defend our country because someone who had links to Russian companies that were closely linked to the Kremlin was appointed American ambassador.
Although Badenoch has repeatedly claimed that Peter Mandelson was a national security risk when he was ambassador, not a shred of evidence has emerged to show that he did anything while he was in that job to jeopardise national security. He was sacked because Keir Starmer concluded he had lied to No 10 about the depth of his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, and because the extent of that relationship made it impossible to defend Mandelson having an ongoing role in public life.
Robert Hayward’s forecasts for the English local elections (see 9.06am) are broadly in line with the equivalent figures produced by other experts.
Here are projections from Stephen Fisher, an Oxford politics professor who is part of the team led by John Curtice that produces general election exit polls for the BBC and others. He published this in a post on his Elections Etc blog last month.
And here are projections from Sam Freedman, the political commentator, in a post on his Comment is Freed Substack blog.
More Send inclusive schools ‘actively penalised in Ofsted grades’, union says
Lower grades in parts of a watchdog’s new report cards “actively penalise” schools more inclusive to pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (Send), a headteachers’ union has said. The Press Association reports:
Analysis by the NAHT headteachers’ union of Ofsted inspections under the report card system found one in five (20%) schools with above average numbers of pupils with Send were judged “needs attention” – the second lowest grade – in the report card’s attendance and behaviour area.
This is compared with one in 10 (9%) schools with below average numbers of pupils with Send, the NAHT said.
It comes after the Government unveiled sweeping reforms to the Send system intended to make the system and schools more inclusive.
NAHT general secretary Paul Whiteman said the findings should “ring serious alarm bells” for the government’s ambitions for more pupils with Send to learn in mainstream schools.
The Guardian’s data experts have also been looking at Labour’s prospects in the elections, and they say Labour’s vote-share could fall to historic lows across elections for councils in England and devolved parliaments in Wales and Scotland on 7 May, with big gains for Reform, the Greens and nationalist parties, according to recent polling. This is from Alex Clark and Ashley Kirk.
Robert Hayward has also given his predictions for the Scottish parliament and Welsh Senedd elections. He says:
Scotland– SNP to be just short of a majority
Wales– Plaid to be the largest party in terms of both votes and seats
But there is much more interest in what Hayward, and other psephologists, are forecasting for the English local elections because they are hard to poll. By contrast, there is a lot polling available for the Holyrood and Senedd elections. One source of seat projections based on this polling is Nowcast UK.
Local election campaigning enters final week as forecaster warns Labour could lose 1,850 English seats
Good morning. We are now into the final week of campaigning for the Scottish parliament, Welsh Senedd and English local elections. Keir Starmer had been planning a big speech today, but he, and other political leaders, are today focusing on their response to the Golders Green stabbing and the antisemitism threat facing Britain’s Jewish community – described as a “national security emergency” by Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s independent reviewer of terror legislation. Here is our overnight story. And here is our live blog by Taz Ali.
Taz will be covering most of the political reaction to that story, and so that won’t be something I will be covering here. (And because criminal proceedings are active, comments relating to the attack won’t be allowed below the line, I’m afraid.)
Instead, let’s start with the elections, and a member of the House of Lords called Robert Hayward. Hayward is a Conservative and former MP but at Westminster he is best known as an elections specialist who produces detailed forecasts ahead of elections. They are not always perfect – no forecast is – but they are well-informed, and politically neutral, and Hayward is one of the very few people doing forecasting of this kind whose views are taken seriously by the main political parties. He won’t necessarily tell you exactly what will happen; but he is worth reading if you want to know what the politicos expect to happen (which is useful intelligence because often election results are assessed by how they match up against expectations).
Last night Hayward revealed his forecast for the English local elections on ITV’s Peston.
And this is how Hayward explains it in his summary.
England all figures given are net losses and gains
Labour will lose 1850 seats
The losses will be nationwide
What impact on Sir Keir’s role? Given S Times comment re 1500 losses and ‘nervous breakdown’ this is bad news for Sir Keir and Labour.
Reform will be biggest gainer from both Labour and Conservatives, overwhelmingly outside London. They will gain 1550 seats
Will their national equivalent vote be lower than last year? I believe it will be
Conservatives will lose 600 seats many in councils deferred from last year. These seats were previously contested in the vaccine bounce year of 2021.
Do they gain any notable councils or stop Reform from taking control of target councils? Yes
Have they improved on the national equivalent vote last year? About static
Greens will gain 500 seats in London and middle class areas of other cities
Can they take any mayoralties or control any councils? Yes definitely mayoralty possibly a council or two
Lib Dems will gain 150 seats but will need to gain councils to be involved ‘in the conversation’.
Will national equivalent vote share reflect decline in poll position. Yes
Have they lost their position as part of the protest parties? Up to a point.
Independents will gain 250 seats
Many of these will be in east London, Birmingham and Lancs
Other forecasts are available too. I will post more on those soon.
Parliament is not sitting today, and there is not much in the diary. But we won’t be short of politics.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (between 10am and 3pm), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.