local elections

COUNCILS, COOPERATIVES AND COOPERATORS

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Colin Talbot

Here’s a good Quiz Night question: which independent political Party has the fourth largest representation in the House of Commons?

The answer will surprise many people – even amongst those who consider themselves politically knowledgeable. It’s the Cooperative Party. About ten percent of Labours 400+ MPs are also representatives of the Co-op Party. The highest number of Co-op MPs ever. And Andy Burnham is the first PM to represent both Parties*.

The proportion of Co-operative Party representatives amongst Labour councillors is even higher. The Party claims 1,200 councillors out of Labour’s current 4,500 – a quarter

A small historical detour is necessary to explain this situation. The Cooperative Party emerged from the Cooperative movement in much the same way as the Labour Party emerged mainly from the trade unions. Co-operatives as we know them today date back to Rochdale Pioneers who founded the prototype of today’s modern retail cooperatives in 1844.

By the early 20th century cooperatives were well established and, like their trade union counterparts, seeking parliamentary representation. The Co-op Party was founded in 1917, about a decade after Labour, which by then already had a foothold in Parliament.

In 1927 after some limited electoral success the Co-op Party concluded a historic, if somewhat asymmetrical, electoral pact with Labour. Where there were both Labour and Cooperative Party local parties they could field joint Labour and Coop candidates. Labour could also field just Labour candidates but, and this is the asymmetrical bit, the Co-op Party couldn’t put up Co-op only candidates. Or even “Co-operative and Labour” ones. Labour always took precedence.

This agreement, coming up for its centenary in 2027, still stands. The Cooperative Party is still registered with the Electoral Commission as a separate Party. But as if to cement the relationship with Labour, the former General Secretary of the Co-operative Party, Joe Fortune, has just moved over to become the new General Secretary of the Labour Party.

INVISIBLE COOPERATIVES?

If you feel embarrassed that you didn’t know the answer to the opening question, don’t be. To be completely honest I’ve only become recently fully aware of the size and roles of both the Co-operative Party and the wider movement it grew out of. Over the past few years I’ve both become intrigued and engaged with both, and with their almost total invisibility in public affairs and, it has to be added, academia.

Some simple facts. The latest report from Cooperatives UK, the umbrella or “apex” body for the coop movement in Britain, claims that about 5% of UK workers are employed in what they call the democratic economy. They claim the total income of cooperatives and mutuals was £241 billion in the past year.

There are some problematic issues with these numbers however. The biggest is that NHS Foundation Trusts, because of their quasi-democratic and semi-autonomous nature, are included in the democratic economy. Which is debatable.

Interestingly co-ops and mutuals exist in almost every sector of the economy, including ones largely funded by the state like education, social care and health. They are now extending into areas like community ownership of facilities like pubs, sports clubs, village halls, and most recently local green power schemes.

One Labour manifesto commitment which has passed largely under the radar is their pledge to double the size of the cooperative and mutual sector. Which has sparked debate, mostly confined to within the cooperative movement, as to what that means. What is going to be doubled? Where will the growth take place? How will it be supported?

All of the above existing local cooperatives are potential areas for growth. And they are areas that already involve, or are planned to be engaged with, various forms of local governance under Labour’s local reorganisation plans.

COOPERATORS ACROSS PARTY LINES?

The existence of the Cooperative Party, and its alliance with the Labour Party, means that promoting or sustaining cooperatives at the local level can be seen as a partisan issue.

It clearly isn’t. There are supporters of cooperatives in most political parties to varying degrees. Certainly in the Liberal Democrat’s and Greens. Some Conservatives have been in favour of promoting cooperatives, sometimes admittedly as an alternative to public provision.

The much more pluralistic nature of political representation in local government raises questions about more cooperation across Party lines. Councils like Birmingham City, where no party came close to the 51 seats needed for a majority. Reform UK has 23 seats, the Greens 19, Labour 17, the Conservatives 16, the Liberal Democrats 12, and a group of 7 independents. Without political cooperation the Council would be paralysed.

One example of a cross-party cooperative initiative is the Cooperative Councils Innovation Network (CCIN). Which although it was originally set up by the Cooperative Party is now an explicitly non-partisan and has the support of other political parties in some Councils. I will say more about CCIN in a future article.

There has been very little attention paid to the role of the (currently) 1,200 Cooperative Party councillors. By the media or by academics. We know very little about whether they are cooperators in name only, or active promoters of cooperative principles and practice? Or how cooperators in other Parties, who certainly exist, put their values into practice?

*Gordon Brown MP is also a Cooperative Party member, but unlike Andy Burnham he was not a representative of the Party as an MP.

[This is the first in what I hope will be a series of articles about Councils and Cooperatives.]

Professor Talbot has extensive experience as both a practitioner and academic. He started work in 1969 and formally retired from the University of Manchester in 2017. He remains actively engaged with government, public service, and co-operative management issues. He is an Inlogov Associate at the University of Birmingham.

Learning from the 2026 elections

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Photo credit: https://www.southoxon.gov.uk/south-oxfordshire-district-council/local-democracy-and-elections/elections-and-voting/first-time-voters-guide/what-happens-at-an-election-count/

Jason Lowther

The Electoral Commission’s new report on the 2026 English local government and mayoral elections provides largely positive picture of local democracy. Turnout was the highest seen at comparable local elections for a decade, public confidence in the electoral process remained strong, and the overwhelming majority of voters reported satisfaction with both registration and voting. At the same time, the report highlights several challenges that local authorities, elected members and policymakers will need to address if they are to further strengthen local democracy.

Perhaps the most striking finding is the increase in voter turnout. Participation reached 41.2% in metropolitan, London borough, unitary and district council elections and 45.2% in county council elections. The latter represents the highest county council turnout for three decades outside elections held alongside a general election or referendum. These figures suggest that local government increasingly matters to citizens and that many voters remain willing to engage when they feel local issues have real consequences for their communities.

The report also points to generally high levels of public confidence in election administration. Around 94% of voters were satisfied with the voting process.  While 73% of eligible voters expressed confidence that the elections were well run, 9% were not satisfied – reasons for this include the perceived lack of useful information about candidates and/or parties, the voting system being seen as unfair, or the belief that the process of voting is not secure. Local authorities and electoral administrators should take credit for delivering elections effectively despite continuing operational pressures and resource constraints.

However, the report identifies several areas where citizen engagement could be improved. One concerns voter registration. Although most people were satisfied with the registration process, younger voters were less positive, and a significant proportion of dissatisfied respondents argued that registration should be automatic. The Electoral Commission reiterates its support for a consistent automated voter registration system and urges governments across the UK to coordinate reforms.

Accessibility is another continuing concern. Despite very significant efforts by returning officers to provide equipment and support in polling stations, disabled voters still face barriers to participation. Awareness of available assistance remains relatively low, even among people who could benefit from it. This finding highlights the importance of ongoing public communication and inclusive service design.

The report also raises important questions about information quality and democratic engagement. While awareness of the elections was high, many voters remained concerned about misinformation. More than half of respondents reported seeing misinformation during the campaign and around one in ten reported encountering deepfake material. Although the Commission’s pilot work found no evidence that political deepfakes were widespread, the findings underline growing risks associated with digital campaigning.

A major challenge concerns the experience of candidates. Abuse, intimidation and harassment, especially online, continue to affect many people standing for election. Candidates who were female, from an ethnic minority background, had a disability or were standing for Reform UK were more likely to experience abuse and intimidation.  The report warns that these experiences are influencing how some individuals campaign, for example avoiding canvassing alone, and one third of respondents considered not standing for election because of harassment, intimidation or concerns about future abuse.

The report also highlights a wider issue for local democracy: the availability of reliable information about candidates and parties. Although large majorities found it easy to obtain information about voter ID requirements and voting methods, fewer found it easy to access information about candidates. This suggests that there remains a gap between procedural information and substantive information about political choices.

Finally, the report notes the pressures facing electoral administrators. Recruitment challenges, supplier issues and uncertainty surrounding potential electoral reforms all created difficulties for those delivering the elections. While these problems were largely managed successfully, councils and government need to address the long-term capacity and resilience of local electoral services. Effective citizen engagement ultimately depends on electoral systems that remain adequately resourced and capable of adapting to future reforms.

Overall, the 2026 elections offer grounds for cautious optimism. Higher turnout, strong voter satisfaction and confidence in election administration suggest that local democracy remains resilient. Yet the report also shows that participation cannot be taken for granted. Improving accessibility, modernising voter registration, combating misinformation and protecting candidates from abuse will all be central to sustaining citizen engagement and local democracy.

When mayors hold the pencil: gerrymandering inside a territorial reform

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Miguel Ângelo Vilela Rodrigues (University of Minho), with Oliver Meza (CIDE) and Carmen Navarro (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

Gerrymandering is usually filed away as an American problem — a decennial ritual of oddly shaped congressional districts and litigation. But the practice does not require an American ballot. It requires only two things: a boundary that has to be redrawn, and a politician with an interest in where the line falls. Territorial reform supplies both, and it does so in countries that would never describe themselves as having a redistricting problem.

Portugal is a case in point. In our recent article in Local Government Studies, we look at the 2013 reform that amalgamated Portuguese sub-municipal units — the freguesias, roughly comparable to parishes — and ask a question that the amalgamation literature has largely left aside: not whether mergers deliver economies of scale or damage local democracy, but who decides which units merge with which, and what they get out of it.

A reform designed to be captured

The reform came out of the 2011 Memorandum of Understanding with the troika. Cutting the number of local entities was one of the commitments made, and central government initially tried to impose specific merger criteria from above. Local government rejected that outright. So the government softened its approach: it kept the targets — urban units to be reduced by 50–55 per cent, rural ones by 25–35 per cent — and handed the map itself to the mayors. Across 278 municipalities, the number of sub-municipal units fell from 4,269 to 3,092.

The design has an unusual feature. The units that had to merge were not the units that decided. Mayors drew the proposals; municipal assemblies approved them. And Portuguese municipal assemblies are hybrid bodies: alongside directly elected members, every sub-municipal president in the jurisdiction sits with a full vote. Sub-municipal presidents are also, in practice, part of a mayor’s electoral machinery — the people who campaign, mobilise and deliver a vote in their own patch.

That makes an amalgamation reform something more than an administrative exercise. Reducing the number of sub-municipal units aligned with the mayor’s party reduces the mayor’s support in the assembly that approves the budget and the investment plan, and thins out the voices in the field who will be needed at the next election. Conversely, a well-drawn map can pack opponents into a single unit or dilute them inside a larger friendly one. The pencil was handed to precisely the actors with most to gain from how it moved.

Vulnerability and feasibility

We modelled the mayor’s decision on two dimensions. The first is vulnerability: does the mayor have a majority of politically aligned sub-municipal units, or not? The second is feasibility: does the mayor command a majority of the elected seats in the municipal assembly, and so the ability to get a map approved without concessions?

Crossing them yields four situations. Where mayors are not vulnerable, redrawing is either irrelevant or indifferent — there is nothing to gain. Where they are vulnerable but lack an assembly majority, redrawing is crucial to survival but has to be negotiated, which means sharing the spoils. Where they are vulnerable and hold the assembly, redrawing is appealing: the incentive and the means coincide.

Using the 2009 sub-municipal election results projected onto the new 2013 map — the only information mayors actually had when drawing it — we then estimated multinomial logit models on all 278 affected municipalities.

The pattern is clear. Across the country, 51 per cent of municipalities ended up with more aligned sub-municipal units after a reform whose entire purpose was to reduce their number. In the appealing quadrant, the odds of an increase in aligned units rise more than nine-fold; in the crucial quadrant, where the map has to survive a coalition, they rise just over four-fold. The gap between the two is itself the finding: opposition parties will not sign off on a map that benefits the incumbent alone, so the gains get shared and diluted. Results hold when we substitute a vote-efficiency measure of the kind used in the US gerrymandering literature.

Why this should interest anyone outside Portugal

Two implications travel. The first is procedural. Structural reform is often delegated downwards on the sensible-sounding grounds that local actors know their own territory. They do — and they also know their own electoral arithmetic. Where the reform reshapes the boundaries that determine who sits in the body that scrutinises the reformer, delegation is not neutral. Anyone currently watching local government reorganisation in England, where boundaries, wards and the composition of new authorities are all in play, may find the logic familiar.

The second is about what happens next. Since 2013 there has been sustained pressure in Portugal to demerge some units, and the initiative for those petitions again rests with mayors. If the same rationality holds, demergers will be permitted where they are politically harmless and blocked where they are not — meaning the same territories get gerrymandered twice.

None of this requires bad faith or illegality. Every map was lawful and approved through proper procedure. That is rather the point: an effective opposition, not a rule about compactness, was the only thing that reliably constrained the outcome.

Miguel Ângelo Vilela Rodrigues is Associate Professor with Habilitation in the Department of Political Science, School of Economics and Management, University of Minho, and a researcher at CICP.

The full article — ‘Gerrymandering to survive: an explanation of the political conditions that shaped mayors’ decisions over an amalgamation process in Portugal’, by Miguel Rodrigues, Oliver Meza and Carmen Navarro — is published in Local Government Studies, 51(5), 993–1015. DOI: 10.1080/03003930.2024.2404104

When accountability fails to bite: governance, democracy and the 2026 Tower Hamlets elections

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Dr Gulay Icoz, Visiting Research Fellow, Middlesex University London

In theory, the 2026 Tower Hamlets local elections should have been a test of democratic accountability in action. The borough entered election year under active statutory intervention. A Best Value Inspection published in November 2024 had documented serious governance failings under Mayor Lutfur Rahman’s Aspire administration: weak internal controls, a culture of concentrated executive authority, poor transparency, and slow responses to statutory recommendations. A further written ministerial statement in January 2026 confirmed ongoing failures and deteriorating financial governance. In March 2026 — just two months before polling day — the Secretary of State escalated the intervention, granting ministerial envoys enhanced powers to step in directly if the council continued to breach its Best Value Duty.

Then voters went to the polls and Aspire won 33 of 45 council seats. Lutfur Rahman was re-elected as Executive Mayor for a third time. Labour was reduced to five seats — its lowest total in the borough’s history.

I stood as the Labour candidate for Bethnal Green West in those elections. What I observed — during the campaign and in the results — reveals a deeper tension between statutory accountability and community-level democratic legitimacy: one with implications that reach well beyond Tower Hamlets.

The structural picture

The results reveal a distortion that deserves wider attention. Aspire secured 73 per cent of council seats with just over 32 per cent of the vote. Labour and the Green Party each received just under 23 per cent of the vote, yet each won only 11 per cent of seats. In ward after ward, the combined Labour and Green vote exceeded Aspire’s total — yet the block voting system used in multi-member wards — where each voter casts as many votes as there are seats and the top candidates win — converted vote fragmentation into a decisive seat bonus for the incumbent. This is sometimes called plurality block voting, and it rewards coordinated slate-voting, which incumbent parties with strong voter loyalty are structurally better placed to exploit.

The ward-level picture sharpens this further. In Bethnal Green West, Labour entered polling day with an estimated core vote of around 540; Aspire’s coordinated bloc was already three times that size, with split votes running into the thousands. Green candidates who had run no sustained local campaign outpolled every Labour candidate standing — a pattern repeated across wards throughout the borough. The block voting system had no mechanism to reward breadth of engagement or effort: it simply rewarded the most organised and unified voting bloc.

It is worth distinguishing block voting in multi-member wards from single-member first-past-the-post. The coordination premium is structurally higher: a cohesive 32 per cent bloc can sweep three seats simultaneously in a way that would not occur in a series of individual contests. The question this blog is asking is not primarily about proportionality per se, but whether the electoral system can transmit accountability signals when a council is under active statutory intervention for documented governance failure.

This points to a question the electoral systems literature and the local democracy literature have rarely addressed together: when opposition parties are structurally disadvantaged by electoral mechanics, what additional tools does a democratic accountability framework need?

The accountability paradox

A long line of research — from Fiorina’s retrospective voting model through Powell and Whitten’s clarity-of-responsibility framework — establishes that electoral punishment for governance failure is neither automatic nor uniform. Recent scholarship sharpens this further: voters weigh integrity against perceived competence and community delivery (Breitenstein and Hernández, 2024); punishment weakens when opposition is fragmented and alternation unclear (Otjes and Stiers, 2022); and elections are in any case a blunt accountability instrument compared to courts, oversight bodies, and civic challenge (Papadopoulos, 2023). The established literature identifies three conditions that must be met for punishment to occur: voters must have clear information about failure; they must be able to attribute responsibility to the correct actor; and accountability must not be crowded out by competing loyalties or trade-offs. Tower Hamlets 2026 illustrates the failure of all three conditions simultaneously.

Yet the Tower Hamlets case also points to a fourth condition, largely absent from the existing retrospective voting literature: the accountability mechanism itself must be seen as legitimate by the communities it is meant to protect. This is the accountability paradox at the heart of the 2026 result — and it is a contribution that the standard retrospective voting framework is not equipped to capture.

For intervention to function as a democratic corrective, it must be perceived by the electorate — and particularly by the communities most affected by governance failure — as rational, impartial, and operating in their interests. Where that perception fails, intervention becomes politically legible as external imposition, and voting for the incumbent becomes an act of community solidarity rather than an endorsement of governance failure. This dynamic is not accidental: it is actively constructed through political framing, and incumbents with strong identity-based bonds with their electorate are structurally well-placed to construct it.

Recent research on statutory intervention in English local government proposes a five-stage model — crisis revelation, delegitimisation, imposed reforms, capacity building, and restoration — and argues that interventions must be carefully designed to appear rational rather than political if they are to maintain rather than undermine faith in local democracy (Lowther, Joyce and Whiteman, 2025). That model’s second stage — delegitimisation — describes central government’s work to undermine the legitimacy of the council being intervened in. What the Tower Hamlets 2026 election reveals is that delegitimisation can also operate in the opposite direction: the incumbent successfully turned the intervention itself into the object of delegitimisation in the eyes of the electorate, making the accountability mechanism the thing that lacked legitimacy rather than the council it was designed to hold to account.

Conversations on the doorstep revealed the depth of this reframing. Many Aspire supporters had not engaged with the contents of the Best Value report because they had already concluded the report itself was politically motivated — a tool of mainstream parties who disapproved of what Aspire represented rather than a genuine accountability mechanism. More striking still, when specific governance failures were raised — including nepotism and unqualified appointments — some voters had internalised a counter-narrative in which such practices represented community protection rather than misconduct.

It would be reductive to dismiss these perceptions as simply the product of misinformation. Communities with long experience of political marginalisation may have genuine historical grounds for scepticism toward central government intervention, and those experiences shape how accountability claims are received. What the Tower Hamlets case illustrates is the extent to which this pre-existing disposition was mobilised and amplified through deliberate political communication — producing not political apathy but the successful reconstruction of what accountability itself means.

This is not unique to Tower Hamlets. It is a dynamic that researchers of democratic resilience and local governance are increasingly attentive to, and it raises important questions about how accountability mechanisms are designed, communicated, and embedded — questions that are as much about institutional culture and civic trust as they are about statutory frameworks.

Tower Hamlets in context

Tower Hamlets did not stand alone in 2026. The elections produced historic Green gains across inner London — in Hackney, Waltham Forest, Lewisham and Southwark — and a significant realignment of the progressive vote away from Labour. What makes Tower Hamlets distinctive is that this regional realignment intersected with the specific dynamics of the Aspire incumbency, the governance intervention, and the structural incentives of block voting, producing an outcome more disproportionate than anywhere else in the capital.

Understanding whether Tower Hamlets represents an outlier or an advance indicator requires systematic comparison. Several English councils have been subject to statutory intervention in recent years — including Birmingham, Croydon, Slough, Sandwell, and Thurrock — yet the relationship between intervention, governance accountability, and subsequent electoral outcomes has received little comparative attention. Whether the accountability paradox identified here is specific to Tower Hamlets or reflects a broader pattern in how statutory intervention interacts with local political culture is a question that future comparative research must address.

The stakes

What the Tower Hamlets elections confirm, above all, is that democratic resilience is not reducible to electoral outcomes. The borough’s communities — residents navigating overcrowded housing, fractured services, and the cumulative pressures of one of England’s most deprived urban environments — continue to engage, organise, and hold their representatives to account through multiple channels. That engagement, not any single election result, is the foundation on which accountable local governance must ultimately be rebuilt.

What forms of accountability can work when statutory intervention loses legitimacy in the eyes of the very communities it is meant to protect?

Dr Gulay Icoz is a Visiting Research Fellow at Middlesex University London and stood as the Labour candidate for Bethnal Green West in the May 2026 local elections and Former Councillor in Hackney (2006–2014). She researches democratic resilience, local governance, and progressive voter realignment in inner London.

References

Academic sources

Breitenstein, S. and Hernández, E. (2024) ‘Too Crooked to be Good? Trade-offs in the Electoral Punishment of Malfeasance and Corruption’, European Political Science Review. doi:10.1017/S175577392400016X

Fiorina, M.P. (1981) Retrospective Voting in American National Elections. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Lowther, J., Joyce, P. and Whiteman, P. (2025) ‘Intervention 3.0: Designing a Responsive Model for Local Government Support in England’, INLOGOV Blog, 4 November 2025. Available at: https://inlogov.com/2025/11/04/intervention-3-0-designing-a-responsive-model-for-local-government-support-in-england/ [Also published as ‘How not to damage democracy’, Municipal Journal, 16 October 2025.]

Otjes, S. and Stiers, D. (2022) ‘Accountability and alternation: How wholesale and partial alternation condition retrospective voting’, Party Politics, 28(3), pp. 457–467.

Papadopoulos, Y. (2023) Understanding Accountability in Democratic Governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Elements in Public Policy).

Powell, G.B. and Whitten, G.D. (1993) ‘A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting: Taking Account of the Political Context’, American Journal of Political Science, 37(2), pp. 391–414.

Government documents

Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (2024) Best Value Inspection Report: London Borough of Tower Hamlets. London: MHCLG. November 2024.

Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (2026) Written Ministerial Statement: Tower Hamlets Best Value Intervention. London: MHCLG. January 2026.

Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (2026) Enhanced Intervention Powers: Tower Hamlets. Ministerial Announcement. March 2026.

Supporting councillors to thrive: the 21st Century Councillor Revisited

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Catherine Needham

In our research on the 21st Century Councillor, we’ve found that elected members are facing a barrage of challenges:

  • Perma-austerity has deepened with sustained underfunding of public services  
  • Complexity of place has intensified, through combined authorities and integrated care systems, alongside local government reorganisation.   
  • Communities are in distress, moving from the pandemic straight into the cost-of-living crisis   
  • Incivility in public life has grown with rising issues of abuse and harassment for councillors in particular 
  • The rising profile of equality, diversity and inclusion has drawn attention to how public services systematically fail some workers and citizens  
  • Remote and hybrid working can enhance individual flexibility but can make it more difficult for councillors to build the relationships they need to function effectively. 

From interviews with councillors, we heard about the strategies they use to cope with these challenges and to support their communities to thrive. They are keeping the system human on behalf of communities. They are zooming in and out, from the micro issues facing residents to the big strategic issues of place. They act as a lightning rod, absorbing hostility whilst keeping themselves grounded and safe. You can read more about the research findings here.

If you’re a councillor – or you work in a role supporting councillors – come and join us in Andover on 4 November to hear more about this research and chat to peers about how best to manage these challenges. You’ll also hear from the Local Government Chronicle about their new campaign to support councillors.

Click here to register: 21st Century Councillors Tickets, Tue, Nov 4, 2025 at 10:00 AM | Eventbrite

Disappearing Reform UK Councillors, Lord Mark Pack’s Poll Base, and me, etc.

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Chris Game

Literally minutes before I was going to email this already over-lengthy blog, I had my attention drawn to Birmingham’s rather paltry 5.4 score and 4th-from-bottom ranking on the HAYPP vape retailers’ ‘smell score’ scale – pretty well what it sounds like: UK cities ranked on perceived cleanliness. It seemed so obviously distorted by the lengthy bin collection strike and consequently not a lot better than Leeds’ 4.2, rather than up with at least, say, Newcastle (7.4) or even Liverpool (8.2). But, apart from those few lines, I let it pass.

So, on to my initial topic, which, as it happens, kicks off with some equally basic stats. Someone asked me recently – albeit after I’d slightly steered the conversation – if I knew whether (m)any of the several hundred new Reform UK councillors elected in the recent local elections (that I’d written about in a recent INLOGOV blog) had already left the party.  

I had to waffle a bit – after all, the 677 ‘new’ ones had taken Nigel Farage’s party’s national total to just over 850, and some/many undoubtedly shocked themselves. But I did happen to know that the number of recent resignations/suspensions/expulsions was already into double figures. To which I was able gratuitously to add that the party had also ‘lost’, at least for the time being, two of its six MPs.

Which might seem to suggest either that I have a particular academic interest in Farage’s indisputably fascinating party or that I’m some kind of political nerd – to neither of which I’ll readily admit.

No, the explanation for my having acquired this arcane knowledge is that for at least 30 years now I’ve known/known of (nowadays Baron) Mark Pack, his captivation with all things electoral, and his enthusiasm for sharing that captivation – dating back to when he was at the University of Exeter, just up the A38 from the University of Plymouth, original home of ‘(Colin) Rallings & (Michael) Thrasher’ (definitely local government statistical junkies), and now itself home of their internationally renowned Local Government Chronicle Elections Centre, and its/their matchless annual Local Election Handbooks.

Naturally, R&T’s interests and path-breaking publications focus primarily on local government elections. Those of (nowadays) Lord Pack of Crouch Hill (but Mark hereafter) include the Liberal Democrat Party, of which he’s currently an extremely active President; the House of Lords, and, as ever, political opinion polls, about all of which he writes invariably fascinating weekly newsletters; in addition to reporting on almost anything electoral. This and more he shares on his exceedingly lively website, the recommendation of which (to any readers unfamiliar with it) is the main purpose of this blog.

And so, belatedly, back to those disappearing Reform UK councillors. It’s the sort of phenomenon that Mark Pack revels in – the numbers, the reasons/circumstances, it’s all perfect material for a near-daily political diarist.  He naturally keeps a running list of councillors “shed by Reform UK” since the May elections, the most recent updating of which at the time of typing this paragraph being, I think, on July 7th, when the departee figure had reached a quite striking 11.

They comprised five straight resignations as councillors, two expulsions by Reform, three suspensions by the party, one of whom subsequently quit, and one who’d decided they’d prefer to be an Independent.  

As for the (female) Reform UK councillor charged with assault and criminal damage, for instance – well, it was covered, naturally, in Mark Pack’s diary on June 30th, and she’ll shortly be “appearing before magistrates”.  And, as the Crown Prosecution Service publicly emphasised, it’s “extremely important that there be no reporting or sharing of information online which could in any way prejudice ongoing proceedings.”    

Which brings us to the two of the all-time total of just six Reform MPs who already are no longer. First was Great Yarmouth MP Rupert Lowe, who back in March was suspended and reported to the police over alleged threats of physical violence towards the party’s Chairman, Zia Yusuf. And second, more recently, was James McMurdock, who “surrendered the party whip” a few weeks ago over, as The Guardian delicately put it, “questions of loans totaling tens of thousands of pounds.” 

The key, albeit belated, point of this blog, however, is the multifaceted contribution to our political world of Mark Park himself, rather than ‘here-today-gone-tomorrow’ MPs. Yes, he’s a copious diarist, but so much more. In particular, there’s his arguably greatest single contribution to our academic political world: the phenomenon that is what I still think of as his ‘PollBase’, but which comparatively recently has acquired the handle PollBasePro.

If you’re writing anything at all concerning our political world in the 90-plus years since 1938/39 – yes, before the start of World War II – and you need to know or even get a sense of the state of UK public opinion on a virtually month-by-month, and latterly week-by-week, basis, just Google either title, and it’s there, instantly accessible and downloadable. Yes, completely free – all Mark asks is that you point out any mistakes (!) and have the decency to acknowledge the source.

It’s a fabulous resource, easily worth – pretty obviously – a blog on its own, but all it’s going to get on this occasion is this abbreviated reference, kind of explaining why I’ve structured this blog in the way I have. That reference comes from p.2 of the dozens of pages, when the only pollster was Gallup and the only poll publisher the News Chronicle (1930-60, when it was “absorbed into the Daily Mail”).

From the start, in 1938, the sole question asked consistently was “Conservatives Good or Bad”, and, probably not surprisingly, throughout most of World War II, the Conservatives were overwhelmingly (75-90%) ‘Good’. Only from 1943 were questions asked about the other parties, and from the start Labour, polling consistently in the 40s, had a double-figure lead over the Conservatives, suggesting that voters were already clearly differentiating between the conduct of the war and the conduct of peace.

This came to a head in January 1946, when Labour, with 52.5%, outpolled the Conservatives by a massive 20.5%, a lead they’d never previously even approached and would do so just once again in the coming decades. Oh yes, and I was born at the very end of December 1945 – and, if only we’d known, my committed Tory-voting parents would have been deeply unhappy, and I’d have gurgled contentedly. Sorry about the length, but I had to squeeze that last bit in.

Chris Game is an INLOGOV Associate, and Visiting Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan.  He is joint-author (with Professor David Wilson) of the successive editions of Local Government in the United Kingdom, and a regular columnist for The Birmingham Post.

Picture credit: https://www.facebook.com/nigelfarageofficial/posts/today-i-announced-29-local-councillors-have-joined-reform-uk-from-across-the-cou/1184319953049781/