The United Kingdom held a variety of elections on Thursday, with enough diversity to give every major party both good news and bad news, depending on where you look and who you ask. Instead of running through the various results, which largely played out as expected, let’s look at where each major party succeeded and failed.
Labour: The opposition Labour Party went into Thursday’s elections fearing disaster, but mostly avoided it outside of Scotland. Sadiq Khan took the London mayor’s office back for Labour, defeating Conservative opponent Zac Goldsmith, by a 57-43 margin in the second round of the instant runoff. Khan’s victory made him not only the city’s first Muslim mayor but also the first-ever Muslim mayor of a major Western capital. (It also earned him an appreciative tweet from William Shatner.) Labour also maintained its hold on the Welsh Assembly, and more importantly, it lost only 18 English council seats despite earlier fears it could lose up to 100 seats. (Labour held 1,342 seats before the election.)
Scotland, though, gave Labour its worst showing in more than 100 years. Not since 1910 has Labour fallen to third place in a Scottish election. The continued salience of Scottish independence continues to hurt Labour, as nationalists voted for the Scottish National Party and unionists voted Conservative. Overall, these results are not likely to result in a challenge to Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn’s position, but they will also not quiet his critics who believe he cannot lead the party to a general election victory.
Conservatives: Thursday was mostly a good night for the ruling Conservative Party, which needed it after a disastrous budget roll-out, a near civil war over the upcoming referendum on whether to remain in the European Union, and some unpleasant revelations for Prime Minister David Cameron from the Panama Papers leak. In the Scottish Parliament, the Tories passed Labour to take second place and become the official opposition party, their best showing in Scottish elections since the body was created in 1999. Meanwhile, the Conservatives lost 48 of their 890 local English council seats up for election, which was actually a decent showing since the governing party traditionally does poorly in council elections. However, they lost seats in the Welsh Assembly and lost the London mayor’s race, the most prominent office in England outside of Parliament. Overall, though, the Conservatives will happily take the results of last Thursday night.
Liberal Democrats: Having been all but left for dead after winning just eight seats in last year’s general election, the Liberal Democrats had a good night in Scotland and England. The Lib Dems continue to hold five seats in the Scottish Parliament, and they gained 45 English council seats at the expense of both Labour and the Conservatives, increasing their total to 378. Wales was less positive for the party as it lost four of its five seats in the Welsh Assembly.
UKIP (UK Independence Party): The openly xenophobic UKIP gained 25 local council seats (after starting with just 33), doing particularly well in traditionally Labour areas. It also had a breakthrough in Wales, winning seats in the Welsh Assembly for the first time ever (seven out of 60). UKIP has never done well outside of England, so the party’s new strength in Wales may reshape Welsh politics in the same way it has reshaped English politics, bringing immigration policy to the forefront. This surge did not extend to Scotland, as the party won no seats and just 2 percent of the vote.
SNP (Scottish National Party): The Scottish National Party maintained control of Scottish Parliament for the third straight election. However, it fell two seats short of the outright majority it had previously enjoyed, which means the SNP will not be able to call another referendum on Scottish Independence without the support of another party. Only the Scottish Green Party supports independence, but since the party openly says that independence is not a priority, the Greens would be unlikely to provide the votes for a new referendum.
Green Party: Speaking of the Greens, they performed well in Scotland, actually winning a higher percentage of the vote than the Liberal Democrats and taking six seats. They lost three of their 48 English council seats, though, and won no Welsh Assembly seats.
Plaid Cymru: The Welsh nationalist party gained one seat in the Wales Assembly as the leader of their party, Leanne Wood, defeated a Labour cabinet minister. That was the only seat Plaid Cymru gained, though, in an election where it had hoped for more, and some believe its focus on this seat hurt them elsewhere.
Little change occurred in the Northern Ireland Parliament, which is jointly run by the largest unionist and nationalist parties. The unionist DUP and nationalist Sinn Fein will continue to govern, with all major decisions needing the support of both sides.
There’s one final take-away: The BBC’s attempts to take these various local election results to project national vote percentages for each party, and the number of seats in Parliament each might win in a hypothetical general election. This is far from a perfect system, as many people vote differently in different elections (just as we do here in local versus national elections), but it can give a good sense of where the parties are as of now.
The BBC projects Labour would have 31 percent of the national vote, Conservatives 30, Lib Dems 15, and UKIP 12. It also projects that Conservatives would have won the most seats in a general election, with Tories winning 301, Labour 253, SNP 53, and Lib Dems 19. (While Labour once did better in seats than percentages, the Tories now hold that advantage for a variety of reasons, in much the way Republicans in the U.S. won a majority of seats in the House despite trailing the Democrats in the national popular vote.) But of course, these projections don’t provide for much clarity as Labour squeaked out a percentage lead, while the Conservatives would have won the most seats but fallen short of a majority.
And there’s another very big election coming right up: UK voters will return to the polls in just seven weeks to decide whether or not their country should remain in the European Union.