The criticism flung at Labour councillors who push the party to condemn the war in Gaza is that they should stick to bin collections, local parks and grass verges. Foreign policy, international law and the logistics of delivering humanitarian aid are not considered to sit within the purview of local councillors, or metro mayors. When the former first minister of Scotland, Humza Yousaf, pronounced on Britain’s policy on Gaza or requested Foreign Office briefings he was rebuffed. This, some Tories argued, is a power reserved for Westminster. A version of this phenomenon has dogged Labour since the war erupted in October. Back then, the main opposition to Keir Starmer’s support for Israel came from councillors. Labour quickly lost Oxford City Council ...

Labour’s connections in Washington DC are well-documented. David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, is friends with Barack Obama and organised a meeting between the former president and Keir Starmer. Rachel Reeves has taken inspiration from the US treasury secretary Janet Yellen, while Lammy has spent time courting senior Republican figures, such as the Donald Trump cabinet hopeful JD Vance, the former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, and Matt Pottinger, Trump’s deputy national security adviser. The party’s links in Europe are not as well-advertised – but I hear Lammy is devoting significant time to building links with French lawmakers and Emmanuel Macron’s Élysée Palace. Such connections will be essential if the party enters government. A security pact with the EU is a ...

After apocalyptic election results, it may appear as if nothing is going the Conservatives’ way. But Downing Street believes the economy is an exception. This month, it hopes, will see a return to positive GDP growth (following a short recession), a further fall in inflation to the Bank of England’s 2 per cent target rate and perhaps even a cut in interest rates. The UK, Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt will argue, has “turned a corner”. Rachel Reeves’ speech in the City of London was, aides say, an attempt to pre-empt the Conservatives’ “victory lap”. In her address, which was introduced by the former Conservative minister Nick Boles (who is advising Labour), she declared that the Tories were “gaslighting the British ...

The Conservatives set the bar low – and still fell below it. Potential consolations – Andy Street winning in the West Midlands, Susan Hall running Sadiq Khan close in London – evaporated. The only result Rishi Sunak has to celebrate is Ben Houchen’s victory in Tees Valley and the 16.7 per cent swing there would see the Tories lose all five of the seats they hold in the region.  Faced with all this, the Conservatives have one thing left to cling to: the notion that a hung parliament is possible or even probable. This belief has been lent academic legitimacy by the metric known as projected national vote share. Had the entire country voted on Thursday, professors Colin Rallings and Michael ...

Let’s begin with the bleeding obvious, only because so many commentators are shying away from it: Keir Starmer’s Labour Party had a storming election night and is further poised for a storming general election later this year. It won councils and council seats in all the areas it needs for a parliamentary majority and won the Blackpool South by-election with a dramatic swing of 26.3 per cent. The mayoral results were impressive too and although there are obvious areas of concern for Starmer to think about, the results were towards the top end of expectations. For the Conservatives, despite Ben Houchen’s re-election in Tees Valley, the results were awful. They had assumed that the defeated Andy Street would hold on pretty easily ...

“Loss aversion” is a well-documented psychological phenomenon: as humans we have a cognitive bias that makes the pain of losing something we already have feel more powerful than the pleasure of gaining or the disappointment of not gaining something we didn’t. That may partly explain why the Conservatives, though thoroughly bruised by the council results we’ve received so far for the local elections, are taking a glass half-full attitude. Yes, they are down 250 councillors and an MP (a loss the Tories are attempting to write off as a personnel issue, given the circumstances in which Scott Benton departed parliament). But Ben Houchen defied the odds to win a historic third term as Tees Valley mayor with 53.6 per cent of ...

At the same time, Tory mayor Ben Houchen has held Tees Valley despite a landslide-level swing of 16.7 per cent to Labour, a testament to personality politics playing a greater role than ever. Across local councils, the situation is telling. This is the best barometer for the state of public opinion in the absence of a general election. Labour scored early blood, winning Hartlepool council off the Conservatives (the same seat it lost in a by-election three years ago). In Grimsby, Keir Starmer’s also enjoyed widespread gains unlike last year.  In the more traditional battlegrounds between Labour and the Conservatives, Labour won big, sweeping up Redditch, Thurrock and, most strikingly of all, Rushmoor, a council held by the Tories for the last ...

The local election results are sending an unambiguous message: Labour is heading for government and the Conservatives for opposition. Keir Starmer’s party has gained councils including Hartlepool, Redditch, Rushmoor and Thurrock and it has won the North Yorkshire mayoralty (encompassing Rishi Sunak’s own constituency). But what do the swings tell us about the likely outcome of the next general election? For an essential guide, follow Ben Walker’s unique ward-by-ward map on State of the Nation, our polling site, charting all 2,700 council contests. ...