A senior Labour MP has predicted the party will not need to go into coalition after the next general election, despite results from this week’s local elections showing they could be short of an overall majority. Labour gained 536 seats, based on changes from the number of seats immediately after the previous elections, and took control of another 22 councils as it became the largest party in local government for the first time since 2002. It took advantage of a routed Conservative party, which lost more than 1,000 seats in its latest slump. Reports suggested the Conservative party HQ had only suspected it would lose 600 seats. However, analysis by Sky News’s Michael Thrasher has found that if the results were repeated at next year’s general election it would put Keir Starmer’s party 28 seats away from having a majority in the House of Commons.
But the shadow Northern Ireland secretary, Peter Kyle, was bullish, and said the party would not have to strike an agreement to gain power. Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he said: “We are going to win outright. We’re not going to need to go into coalition. Every indication is saying that is going to be the case. All the extrapolations people are making from the local elections include a status quo in Scotland; we know the status quo in Scotland is not going be the result that comes out in a general election. “Whereas all these parties from the Tories to the SNP and others are clinging to the hope that they can ride on the coattails of the Labour party, it will not be the case. If you look at the current polling, if you look at people’s attitudes to the general election, we will win decisively.” The SNP has claimed that in the event of a hung parliament at Westminster, it would “drag Labour to the left”. The party’s Westminster deputy leader, Mhairi Black, said “a strong team of SNP MPs would put Scotland in the driving seat of a minority UK government”, adding that they would “keep Labour honest”. She said Starmer had flip-flopped on Brexit, tuition fees, nationalisation and electoral reform – citing this as evidence he was not trustworthy. “At the next election, voting SNP is the best way to lock the Tories out of Scotland,” Black said. “A strong team of SNP MPs would put Scotland in the driving seat of a minority UK government – and ensure the power to determine Scotland’s future is transferred to Edinburgh.” Meanwhile, Scottish Labour’s deputy leader, Jackie Baillie, argued the SNP would not be effective in a hung parliament. “Mhairi Black and the SNP aren’t left wing – they are chancers and the game is up,” she said. “The next election is about getting rid of this morally bankrupt Conservative government, not electing SNP politicians to moan from the sidelines.” In an interview on Friday in Chatham, where Labour took control of Medway council, Starmer said the party was on course to win the general election, and later repeated his message to Labour staff. Thrasher told Sky News on Friday that Labour was likely to “become the largest party, but in a hung parliament. [It is] a very good result, but not quite getting over the line.”
Rachel Wolf, who helped write the Conservative party’s manifesto in 2019 when it won an 80-seat majority, said it was a “very, very bad [result] for the government”, which was struggling to overcome the “ruckus” of Liz Truss’s six weeks in Downing Street. She told the Today programme: “It was good but not great for Labour and what is clear is that people are rejecting the Conservatives at the election rather than jumping for an alternative, but that is often enough at this stage. There is a lot that the government has to do to be competitive again at the general election.” There are difficulties in assessing how the results from Thursday’s voting could be replicated at a general election, because of a lack of polls in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. While Thrasher gave Labour a seven-point lead, his fellow polling expert John Curtice gave Labour a lead of nine points, which he said would be “just enough” for a slender majority, giving Starmer a similar entry to Downing Street experienced by Harold Wilson more than five decades ago. • This article was amended on 9 May 2023 to provide information about the basis on which the number of seats gained by Labour was calculated.