Exclusive poll: Labour would face wipeout in cancelled elections
Reform would be biggest winner while Sir Keir Starmer’s party stood to lose half of the seats it was due to defend, research shows.
AMY GIBBONS, OLLIE CORFE, DANIEL MARTIN
Labour majorities on 10 councils would be wiped out if cancelled elections were to go ahead, according to polling for The Telegraph.
New figures suggest Sir Keir Starmer’s party would lose half of the seats it was due to defend in May if it had not blocked dozens of elections from happening.
The “mega-poll” of 5,000 voters by JL Partners indicates that Labour would have lost control of six councils and squandered its majorities on a further four if the elections had been allowed to proceed.
It also shows the cancellations are “deeply unpopular” with the electorate, with 82 per cent of those denied a vote in May saying they wanted the contests in their area to go ahead.
Just 5 per cent supported the delays, one of the biggest margins ever recorded in modern political polling, according to JL Partners.
The results will fuel claims that Sir Keir is “running scared” of the electorate at a time when Labour is languishing in the polls.
They also undermine claims by Steve Reed, the Local Government Secretary, that the public would support cancelling the “pointless elections”.
Writing in The Times earlier this week, Mr Reed said that “running a series of elections for short-lived zombie councils will be costly, time-consuming and will take scarce resources away from front-line services”, and that voters “would probably say: don’t do it”.
Nigel Farage, the Reform leader, said the poll results proved that Labour had cancelled the elections because it knew Reform would win. The Tories accused the Government of “denying democracy”.
The Government is expected to cancel 28 elections due to be held in May using an obscure clause in local government laws, denying about four million people the vote.
The Telegraph has launched a Campaign for Democracy, calling for the clause to be scrapped and forcing ministers to seek a full vote in Parliament for any delay to elections.
The poll by JL Partners, carried out for this newspaper, looked at 25 of the council areas where elections are set to be postponed. It found that Labour is trailing 11 points behind Reform and 4 points behind the Tories.
Reform is predicted to win 28 per cent of the vote in places with cancelled contests, ahead of the Tories on 21 per cent and Labour on 17 per cent. The Liberal Democrats and the Greens would close behind on 16 per cent and 13 per cent, respectively.
Analysis by The Telegraph suggests that these results would see Labour lose control of six councils: Blackburn with Darwen, Cannock Chase, Exeter, Preston, Thurrock and Worthing.
In another four its majority would be wiped out completely, leaving the party clinging to power with the minimum number of seats required.
Overall, the party would be expected to lose half of the 188 seats it would be defending in the cancelled elections, based on JL Partners’ subset of 25 councils for which polling was available.
[…]
Sir Keir would be expected to haemorrhage votes in all directions. Some 13 per cent of those who voted Labour at the last general election said they would now vote Reform locally, while 17 per cent would back the Greens and 9 per cent would switch to the Lib Dems.
The Telegraph: continue reading
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