Voters in Scotland and Wales will elect representatives to their national parliaments, while a number of local council and mayoral polls will take place in England.

This includes elections in 30 English councils that will now go ahead after the government was forced to backtrack in the face of a legal challenge from Reform UK.

The Scottish Parliament election will decide who governs the country in key areas such as health and education and, as a result, the direction it takes on many issues.

Meanwhile, the Senedd election represents the biggest change to the parliament since powers began to be transferred to Wales in 1999.

It will determine who governs the country on many key issues.

The number of Members of the Senedd (MSs) will be expanded from the current 60 to 96 representatives from 16 newly devised constituencies.

The party that wins the most seats in the Senedd election would expect to lead the government.

However, no party has ever won a majority in the Welsh Parliament and the new system makes it highly unlikely that will change at this election.

So who will be the winners and losers on the first Thursday in May?

If the polls and bookmakers are to be believed there’s only going to be one winner – Reform UK – in England at least.

Reform is polling at around 26% among voters, down from highs of 31% in October but still well ahead of Labour, the Tories and the Greens.

They are all hovering in the high teens.

Traditionally, the party in power at Westminster does badly in “midterm” elections, so expect Labour to lose seats.

Some in Westminster are expecting a bloodbath for Labour which could trigger a leadership challenge for under pressure Sir Keir.

The Conservatives have struggled in the national opinion polls since the last general election despite the growing popularity of Mrs Badenoch.

She told her supporters at this week’s launch that the party was “coming back” but these elections could be a pivotal moment for the Tories.

Mr Farage believes they will be “annihilated”, leaving Reform as the only significant party on the Right.

May 7 is also the deadline that he has set for any more Tory defectors wishing to join his party.

“The Tories have had a good run for 200 years. I think we wake up on 8 May and realise that the Conservative party’s gone,” he recently told the Spectator.

Reform’s goal is to repeat the magic of last year’s local elections in which the party gained more than 600 council seats and won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election in a previously rock-solid Labour seat.

Over the next six weeks they will focus on three issues: crime, immigration and the cost of living.

Mr Farage intends to hold around 35 rallies across the UK in March and April and plans to devote the bulk of the party’s swelling financial war chest towards this.

Momentum is key.

Sunderland and South Tyneside in north-east England, Norfolk and Suffolk in the East, along with suburban London boroughs such as Bexley, Bromley, Havering, and Barking and Dagenham are some of their biggest targets.

Essex is another major target for Mr Farage.

He sees it as ground zero in the battle to destroy the Conservatives.

Some of the party’s biggest beasts – Mrs Badenoch, James Cleverly, Priti Patel, Alex Burghart, John Wittingdale and Mark Francois – are all MPs in the county.

Reform is polling in second place in Scotland behind the governing Scottish National Party, with Labour in third.

In Wales, Reform is vying with Plaid Cymru for first place in the Senedd.

Third place for Labour in either Scotland or Wales on May 7 would mark a historic defeat for Sir Keir’s party.

But it’s not all a foregone conclusion.

The British political landscape is hugely fragmented at the moment, especially with the rise of the Green Party on the Left.

The Greens, led by populist leader Zack Polanski, have done, in recent months, what Reform did in 2025.

That could again become Reform’s undoing in some areas as voters try to “keep out” Mr Farage’s party.

And then there’s the Liberal Democrats, currently polling on a par with the Greens and Tories, who generally fare quite well midway through the parliamentary cycle.

One thing is for certain, though. Labour will be “decimated” in the elections and should “hang their heads in shame” over the handling of the Birmingham bin strike – another key battleground area.

Those weren’t the words from a political rival but a Trade Union boss.

Unite’s general secretary Sharon Graham said working people were moving away from Labour in droves and called on the party to “wake up and smell the coffee”.

“I think it would be impossible to see a situation where this didn’t have an effect on the May elections … It’s a lot less tribal the way that people vote,” she said.

Refuse workers in Birmingham began their industrial action over pay and conditions in January last year, and it escalated into an indefinite all-out strike two months later.

The strikes, which could last beyond September, will be a key issue in Birmingham when all 101 council seats are up for grabs.

The results on May 8 will have a profound effect on the political landscape for the rest of this decade and will matter greatly as to how they could shape the next general election.

They may even bring about change in Prime Minister.

That is why May 7 is so important.

Local Elections Are Just Weeks Away and Will Be Seismic – This Is What’s Going to Happen

Britain’s local elections have become one of the most closely watched events in the political calendar, with the results expected to provide another important test of the country’s rapidly changing party system.

The elections scheduled for 2026 involved 172 English local authorities, including all 32 London boroughs, as well as six local authority mayoral contests. The Electoral Commission confirmed the scale of the contests and the range of authorities involved.

The political significance was heightened by the extraordinary changes already visible across British local government.

Reform UK entered the year seeking to turn its growing national support into local representation, while Labour faced the challenge of defending councils it had controlled for years. The Conservatives were also under pressure, particularly in areas where Reform had begun competing directly for their traditional voters.

But while the headline attached to the elections may describe them as “seismic”, the actual picture is more complicated than any single party’s campaign message.

Reform’s extraordinary local breakthrough

The strongest evidence of the changing political landscape came from the results themselves.

Reform UK made major gains in England, taking control of councils including Essex, Havering, Suffolk, Sunderland and Newcastle-under-Lyme. ITV reported that the party won hundreds of council seats and described the result as a major political shift.

Sunderland provided one of the clearest examples.

Reform went from having no councillors on Sunderland City Council to winning 58 of the 75 seats after the May election. Labour, which had governed the city since the council’s creation in 1974, was reduced to five councillors.

Such a result demonstrates how dramatically local political loyalties can change.

It also explains why Reform has been using the language of a “turquoise tidal wave” to describe its expansion.

However, local elections are not identical to general elections. Local issues, individual candidates, turnout and tactical voting can all affect the result.

That makes it dangerous to assume that a council result automatically translates into an equivalent number of Westminster seats.

Labour faces a difficult political test

For Labour, the elections represented a particularly important test because the party entered office after its overwhelming 2024 general-election victory.

Local elections can be difficult for governing parties because voters sometimes use them to express dissatisfaction with national policy rather than simply choosing between competing local candidates.

That dynamic was visible in the 2026 results.

In parts of northern England, Labour lost substantial numbers of councillors to Reform. In South Elmsall and South Kirkby, for example, Labour’s vote share fell dramatically compared with its performance at the 2024 general election, according to BBC reporting.

Voters interviewed in the area cited a combination of issues including immigration, the cost of living and dissatisfaction with the national government.

The significance of those results lies less in any single constituency than in the broader evidence that Reform has been able to penetrate areas that had previously provided Labour with substantial support.

The Conservatives face a different challenge

The Conservatives have also been affected by Reform’s rise.

For years, Conservative strategists relied on support from voters who wanted lower taxes, tighter immigration controls and a more sceptical approach to the European Union.

Reform has increasingly competed for precisely those voters.

That creates a complicated electoral problem.

A Conservative candidate can lose support directly to Reform while Labour remains strong enough to win another section of the electorate. Alternatively, Reform can split the right-of-centre vote and allow another party to win with a relatively modest share.

The result is that small movements in support can have disproportionately large effects under Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system.

This is particularly important in council elections where wards can be won by relatively narrow margins.

London tells a different story

The political picture is not identical across England.

YouGov’s MRP analysis of the London borough elections projected major gains for both Reform UK and the Greens, alongside significant Labour losses. Its model showed Labour leading the vote in 15 boroughs, compared with 21 at the 2022 election.

Reform was projected to lead the vote in three boroughs, while the Greens were projected to lead in four. The Conservatives were projected to remain ahead in five, with the Liberal Democrats leading in four.

But YouGov also emphasised how close many of these contests were.

In ten London boroughs, the projected gap between first and second place was two percentage points or less. A further six had margins below five points.

That fragmentation is perhaps one of the most important features of the current political landscape.

London is no longer simply a contest between Labour and the Conservatives. Reform, the Greens, Liberal Democrats, independents and local parties are all capable of affecting the outcome in particular areas.

The West Midlands provides another warning

The West Midlands has also demonstrated the extent of the political realignment.

Before the election, YouGov’s MRP model projected Reform to be competitive across all 13 councils in the region being contested.

Its central projections put Reform ahead on vote share in 11 of the 13 authorities, although several contests were extremely close.

In Birmingham, Coventry, Sandwell and Wolverhampton, the model identified multi-party contests in which Labour, Reform and the Greens were all capable of attracting significant support.

The numbers illustrated another important trend.

Reform’s projected support across the 13 councils was around 30%, while Labour was around 21%, the Greens 18% and the Conservatives 17% in the model’s central estimates.

Those figures were projections before polling day, not guarantees of the final results.

Nevertheless, they demonstrated how different the electoral landscape had become compared with the previous elections, when Labour and the Conservatives dominated many of these contests.

Why “seismic” does not necessarily mean one-party dominance

The word “seismic” can be misleading if it suggests that one party will simply sweep everything before it.

The more significant development may actually be fragmentation.

Britain’s traditional two-party local-government system has increasingly been replaced by contests involving Labour, Conservatives, Reform, Greens, Liberal Democrats and independent candidates.

That means a party can make substantial gains without necessarily controlling every council in which it comes first in the popular vote.

The electoral system matters.

A party may win the largest share of votes but fail to win an overall majority of seats. Conversely, concentrated support in particular wards can produce many seats even when a party’s overall vote share is relatively modest.

YouGov explicitly warned about this issue in its London modelling, noting that the first-past-the-post system means the largest vote share does not necessarily guarantee outright council control.

What the results mean for Nigel Farage

For Nigel Farage, local government has become an important proving ground.

Reform’s breakthrough gives the party an opportunity to demonstrate how its promises about cutting spending, reducing bureaucracy and changing local government work in practice.

That is different from campaigning for Westminster.

Councils have legal responsibilities for services such as social care, waste collection, housing, roads and local planning. Any party controlling a council therefore has to make difficult choices about taxation, spending and service provision.

Reform’s performance will increasingly be judged against those responsibilities.

If the party continues to gain council seats, its organisational infrastructure will expand. More councillors provide more opportunities to build local campaigning networks and establish a presence ahead of future parliamentary contests.

But they also expose the party to greater scrutiny.

Every controversial decision made by a Reform-controlled council can become part of the national political argument.

What the elections cannot tell us

There is another important limitation.

Local elections cannot provide a precise prediction of the next general election.

Turnout is generally lower than at Westminster elections, and the electorate can behave differently when choosing councillors.

Local personalities and ward-level issues also matter much more.

The 2026 results can therefore demonstrate that Reform has made major gains without proving that the party would achieve an identical performance in a future general election.

The same applies to Labour and the Conservatives.

A poor local result can be politically damaging and reveal changing public attitudes, but it does not automatically determine what will happen at a later national election.

The bigger political shift

What the elections do demonstrate is the scale of Britain’s current political realignment.

In 2024, Labour won a huge Commons majority despite receiving less than 34% of the national vote. Two years later, local elections produced a dramatically more fragmented political map.

Reform has established itself as a major force. The Greens have expanded their reach in several areas. The Conservatives remain competitive in parts of the country, while Labour continues to hold substantial support in other regions.

That makes the political environment considerably less predictable than the traditional Labour-versus-Conservative model.

The West Midlands projections before the election illustrated this particularly clearly: Reform could lead in many areas while still facing close three-way contests elsewhere.

What happens next?

The most important consequence of the local elections may not be a single headline result.

Instead, political parties will examine where their support has grown, where it has collapsed and which groups of voters have changed allegiance.

For Reform, the question is whether its local breakthroughs can be converted into durable political organisation.

For Labour, the challenge is whether it can rebuild support in areas where voters have moved away from the party.

For the Conservatives, the key issue is how to compete in a political environment in which Reform is now contesting much of the same electoral territory.

And for the Greens and Liberal Democrats, the fragmented political map creates opportunities in areas where the two traditional major parties are weakening.

The 2026 local elections therefore deserve the “seismic” description not because the outcome can be reduced to one inevitable result, but because the underlying structure of British politics is changing.

The official election timetable itself shows how broad the contests are, with London boroughs, metropolitan districts, districts and other authorities facing elections under different cycles.

The results will provide a detailed snapshot of Britain’s political mood.

They will show which parties can translate national campaigns into local support, which voter groups are changing allegiance and where the established political map is breaking down.

But the most important lesson may be that there is no longer a single straightforward story.

The political earthquake is not necessarily about one party replacing another everywhere. It is about the emergence of a more fragmented electoral system in which Reform, Labour, Conservatives, Greens, Liberal Democrats and local candidates can all compete for different parts of the electorate.

That is what makes the elections so consequential — and why their impact is likely to be debated long after the final council results are declared.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.