Labour endured another smattering of defeats at the ballot box this week after a wave of 20 council by-elections were held on Thursday.
The governing party endured a net loss of four seats in a series of local contests held across the UK.
Conservatives gained two seats from Labour while the Liberal Democrats and Greens took a seat each from them. The by-elections took place across the south, north and midlands, as well as Scotland and Wales.
The Sunday Telegraph reported last week that Labour had haemorrhaged 11 council seats in by-elections since September.
Although council by-elections tend to have lower turnouts than parliamentary elections, and can be more easily swayed by local issues, senior Labour figures are gearing up for England-wide local elections in May 2025.
These elections, for 30 English councils and two new combined authority mayoralties, will be Labour’s first big electoral test since coming to power.
But the current trend against the Government in local election results suggests there is little enthusiasm for Labour after barely 100 days in office, and shows little sign of a “honeymoon period” with voters.
The results come in the wake of a series of controversies which have plagued Sir Keir Starmer’s new administration – from the freebies row and questions over the influence of millionaire donor Lord Alli, to the turf war among the Prime Minister’s top aides and fears over the upcoming Budget.
It also comes as new polling by Savanta, exclusively conducted for the Sunday Telegraph, shows a lack of enthusiasm for the Government.
The polling finds that Sir Keir’s net favourability rating has dropped from a high of +15 at the end of July to -13 in October, a 28 point collapse into negative ratings. The favourability ratings for Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, and Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, have similarly gone down since the election, with Rayner on -9 and Reeves on -16.
Further, 39 per cent of those polled said that general competence and trust in Government has fallen under Labour, while a quarter said it had improved.
According to Savanta, only a quarter of the public think that the country has improved since election day, and half of those aged over 55 believe it is worse since Labour took office in July.
Most worrying perhaps for the Government, given its electoral strategy of retaining and building on its 2024 voter coalition, is that fewer than half of Labour voters polled say they think the country has improved in that time.
‘Change has been uninspiring’
“Labour campaigned under the slogan of ‘change’, but for many voters’ that change has been either uninspiring or simply negative,” said Chris Hopkins, a political research director at Savanta.
“Public opinion can be fickle,” he added, “and public approval is far easier to lose than win. It is clear that Labour’s first three months in office have severely disappointed, and that can be hard to reverse especially if, as expected, there is more doom and gloom to come from Labour in this month’s budget.”
The polling shows that the Conservative party is also struggling to win over the public. A majority of those polled said the opposition party is divided, unelectable and does not understand the issues facing the country.
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