Will Smaller Parties Continue To Rise In 2025?

6 min read27 December

The Liberal Democrats, Reform UK and the Greens all had reasons to be delighted by the 4 July General Election. There are signs that smaller parties could enjoy more success in 2025.

At that election, Ed Davey's Lib Dems won a record 72 House of Commons seats, largely coming at the expense of the Conservatives. Nigel Farage's Reform won five seats, including one for party leader Farage himself, while the Greens returned four MPs. It was also a strong night for pro-Gaza independent candidates.

While Labour's huge victory and the Tory collapse were the main headlines of the night, the performance of Britain's other parties was also a major development, raising questions about the future of the Westminster political party system.

Next year there will be opportunities to get a sense of whether this phenomenon was a flash in the pan, or whether this challenge to the historic domination of Labour and the Conservatives is here to stay.

Thirty councils and unitary authorities will be up for grabs when local elections nationwide take place on 1 May.

Unless a by-election takes place between now and then, those local elections will represent the first electoral test for Kemi Badenoch as leader of the Conservative Party, as well as for Prime Minister Keir Starmer nearly a year on from his landslide victory.

While it is a long way off, the two main parties have reasons to be pessimistic heading into 1 May.

Incumbent governments usually perform poorly at votes held between general elections and there are currently no signs that next year's local elections will be any different for this Labour administration. Starmer's approval ratings have dropped sharply since entering No 10 and support for Labour in the opinion polls has taken a significant hit.

Meanwhile, Badenoch — who is still an unknown quantity to most voters — is haunted by the spectre of a Tory brand that most people agree will take a long time to repair.

The local elections will be fought in very different conditions to what they were back in May 2021 when this selection of seats was last up for grabs.

“It's really important when assessing each party to remember the baseline. It’s always central to when you’re looking at local elections,” Rob Ford, Professor of Politics at the University of Manchester told PoliticsHome.

At the time, then-prime minister Boris Johnson was on a high, boosted in large part by the rollout of the Covid vaccine. His Conservative party enjoyed an eight-percentage point swing in the polls, gaining 13 councils and 235 councillors. The Tories also won the Hartlepool by-election — a staunch Labour seat since its creation in 1974 — by almost 7,000 votes.

This means that the Tories have a long way to fall in May 2025.

“The local elections were based on a spectacularly good year for the [then] government, for the Conservative Party," said Tory peer and polling expert Lord Hayward.

“In 2021, there was the Boris vaccine bounce, and no governing party I can recall has ever done so well in local elections which were not associated with a general election."

He said that on 1 May, the Tories face an uphill task "defending virtually every seat in Nottinghamshire, every seat in Derbyshire, in places where they never would be expected to do well to the extent that the Tories now have no parliamentary seat in Derbyshire”.

According to Britain Elects' Ben Walker, the largely “unrepresentative” selection of councils up for grabs in May — including a large number of rural areas — could be the recipe for "big wins" for Farage's Reform.

"They could absolutely score some big wins," he told PoliticsHome.

"You could see them picking up all of the Lincolnshire coast. You can see them doing about two dozen seats in Norfolk, a few dozen in Kent,” he said.

The Lib Dems are also in an auspicious position to gain further electoral ground after only making meagre gains in 2021.

Both Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire councils are going to the polls on 1 May and are currently under no overall country. The party has eight MPs across both councils after strong performances in these parts of the country at the General Election. The Lib Dems essentially wiped out the Tory MP presence in Oxfordshire on 4 July.

“The Lib Dems will look to cement their status in those kind of places as the dominant local party – and if they fail to do so they will be very disappointed," said Ford.

“Now they are looking to defend 70 plus seats [in Parliament], and if they want to defend those seats they have to be particularly strong in local government."

The Greens are less likely to enjoy success on 1 May due to the nature of the council seats up for grabs. The party, co-led by Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay, is usually viewed as a threat to Labour from the progressive left in big English cities that are not going to the polls.

At the General Election, the party received 10 per cent of the overall vote share and came second in 40 seats, including in Sheffield, Huddersfield, Bristol and several seats in London.

But what favours the Greens is they start from a much lower base than other parties. In addition, they are seen by enough voters in the Home Counties and provincial England as an option to beat the Tories where Labour is not competitive.

“The Greens are the catch-all protest party,” Walker told PoliticsHome. "That’s how they won Suffolk, did so well in Waveney Valley, and the same in Herefordshire [on 4 July],” he said.

One caveat to the May elections is that under Government plans announced this month to abolish some councils some new-look authorities may end up being short-lived, and it is possible that some may not go to the polls in early May as currently planned.

Speaking last week, Prime Minister Starmer's official spokesperson said "the assumption is that all elections are going ahead". However, they added that ministers would be willing to postpone local elections for councils with "a clear commitment" to delivering the Government's devolution plans and that need "specific arrangements" to do so.

Pollsters also stress that there are key differences between local elections and general elections. For example, people are more likely to vote on local issues at the former, while turnout tends to be higher at the latter. There is also the fact that the next general election is not for another four years and a lot can happen between now and then.

Even with caveats applied, it is clear that 2025 will at least provide some further clues as to whether the rise of smaller parties will be a long-term headache for Labour and the Tories.

PoliticsHome Newsletters

PoliticsHome provides the most comprehensive coverage of UK politics anywhere on the web, offering high quality original reporting and analysis: Subscribe