What to look out for

Good morning. For an eccentric minority of us, local elections are about deciding who we think will best represent our interests locally. But for most people who vote in them, they are an opportunity to express a view about the government of the day in a safe, controlled environment.

Whatever happens in today’s elections is not a prediction or a guarantee about how the parties will fare in an election in four to five years’ time, but it is a health check, something for them to either feel joy or alarm about. Some thoughts on a couple of things to look out for as the results roll in over the next few days.

Great expectations

Don’t focus too much on the winners

When, as every poll, council by-election and conversation I have with voters nationally suggest, there are three to five parties of about equivalent strength jostling for power, the UK’s first-past-the-post system becomes essentially a coin toss.

Everyone expects that the Conservatives will do very badly, and they almost certainly will — yet given the coming together of multi-party politics and our electoral model, they really could do much better than expected when it comes to headline results.

Ditto, everyone expects Labour to do badly, and it probably will, but it could do much better than expected because, similarly, when everyone is polling in the low 20s, anything could happen.

Instead, watch for the health of the blocs

In both Keir Starmer’s election as Labour leader and in last year’s general election, it was striking to see the willingness of Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green voters (Labour and Liberal Democrat voters in particular) to treat the three parties as essentially fungible. As Paula Surridge’s excellent chart (also on Paula’s Bluesky here) shows, Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green voters in England all “liked” the three parties pretty much the same amounts.

That’s part of what lay behind some of the massive swings to the three parties and is why the Conservatives lost so badly.

So much of what Downing Street has done is based on the idea that the three-party left or progressive bloc will come together thanks to fear of Kemi Badenoch or Reform. Downing Street has done quite a lot to upset and to irritate voters in this bloc, but equally Badenoch and Nigel Farage have done quite a lot to frighten them. So let’s see how willing leftwing voters are to keep treating these three parties as fungible now that one of them is in government and two of them aren’t.

Now try this

I am currently reading and very much enjoying Joshua Cohen’s 2017 novel Moving Kings. Max Liu’s review is here to whet your appetite.

Top stories today

• Freebie jeebies | Rachel Reeves is under investigation by parliament’s standards watchdog for allegedly failing to properly register a gift, the latest in a series of embarrassing episodes for the UK chancellor.

• Tougher action needed on ‘finfluencers’ | The UK financial watchdog is calling on Big Tech groups to do more to stop the “whack-a-mole” problem of people switching between social media accounts to keep promoting unauthorised financial schemes or businesses.

• Bloc in the way | The EU is threatening to time-limit any agreement to remove red tape on UK food and drink exports across the Channel unless it gets long-term access to British fishing waters.

• Breaking bank promises | The UK is considering scaling back its nearly £2bn commitment to a World Bank fund for developing nations, according to people familiar with official plans, in a move that could see it slash aid alongside Donald Trump’s White House, Bloomberg’s Philip Aldrick reported.