https://anotherangryvoice.substack.com/p/predictions-for-the-2026-local-elections

Predictions for the 2026 local elections, Scottish Parliament election, and Welsh Senedd election.
What is likely to happen in the biggest set of elections before the next general election?
Another Angry Voice
Mar 18, 2026

May 7th 2026 will be the biggest set of elections until the next general election (probably 2029), and they're going to deliver some huge political earthquakes.

Scottish Parliament

The SNP and Green Party look set to win the highest ever share of seats for the pro-independence parties between them, Labour will record their worst ever performance in the Scottish Parliament, and the Tories look likely to lose their position as the main opposition party due to Reform nicking a huge chunk of their voter base.

As usual there’s a lot of debate over what to do with the list vote to maximise the pro-independence representation. Quite predictably the SNP say 'both votes SNP' while the Greens are more keen for people to vote SNP-Green.

Welsh Senedd

Labour will record their worst ever performance in the Welsh parliament, where they’ve been the biggest party ever since it was established in 1999.

It looks like a fight between Plaid Cymru and Reform to win the most votes, with Labour slumping to third place.

It looks like the only way Labour could keep their unbroken streak of forming the government of Wales is as a junior member of a left-liberal coalition led by Plaid Cymru.

London

A bombshell poll last week predicted that The Green Party will win the most seats in London (up from 18 to over 500) and they’re predicted to win control of as many as nine London councils.

It’s the only London-specific poll so far, so a London Green wave is by no means guaranteed, but it would be a major shock if they don’t increase their elected presence in London by hundreds, or even thousands of percent.

Reform look set to make significant gains in the capital too, going from zero seats won in 2022 to probably over a hundred.

Labour look set to suffer an electoral bloodbath, losing at least half of their London council seats, all of which are up for election.

If losing Wales and losing control of a load of metropolitan councils in the midlands and north would be bad, getting stomped in London would be an absolute catastrophe.

Local Elections

Labour have by far the most to lose in this set of local elections, because this time around they’re defending more councils and more council seats, than all of the other parties put together.

It’s going to be the worst local election mauling in Labour’s history, something akin to the absolute walloping the Tories took in 2025, when 674 Tory councillors lost their seats, and the party lost control of 16 councils.

Labour’s had attempted to postpone the local elections for 30 councils, but it the policy was withdrawn after legal advice that it could be unlawful, alongside concerns that allowing councils to decide when they’re up for re-election is an obvious conflict of interest. This backfired plan is only likely to worsen their electoral woes in May.

Campaigns

Nigel Farage has bragged that Reform are going to splurge at least £5 million on these elections, bombarding people with their far-right propaganda via the mail and social media.

The Electoral Commission are so incompetent that locally targeted social media ads are still not included in official campaign spending limits, so parties with big slush funds like Reform can bypass the strictly limited amount they’re allowed to spend locally on stuff like leaflets, banners, press conferences, and party political broadcasts, to flood people’s social media feeds with targeted "dark ads".

Reform are likely to try the same lies that won them 10 councils in 2025, namely saying that they’ll cut Council Tax, then hiking it by the legal maximum. The councils they won aren’t up for re-election, and it’s unlikely that Reform voters in the council areas that are up for election are aware of the chaos, ideological insanity, and broken promises that’s going on in Reform controlled councils.

The Green Party has more than tripled their membership since the last set of local elections in 2025, meaning they’re going to have unprecedented numbers of candidates, activists, and canvassers.

The Greens are also benefitting from widespread public disillusionment with Keir Starmer’s Labour. People know that if they want to punish Labour for their wild lurch to the right, going out and voting Green is the way to do it.

The Lib-Dems are the third biggest party at the local level, and they know that if they hold onto their local strongholds, and continue to make moderate gains, they’re likely to overtake the Tories on their way down. It probably won’t happen at this election, but they can be extremely confident that they’ll significantly close the gap.

Success for the Tory party will only be stemming the losses, as they bleed even more votes to Reform. It’s entirely a problem of their own making after the deliberate Ukipification of the Tory party under Theresa May and Boris Johnson. They radicalised their own voter base with years of extreme-right rhetoric, then delivered the biggest immigration surge in history after Boris Johnson’s hopelessly bodged Brexit deal.

Labour councillors and activists know that they’re slow-walking into an electoral disaster, and there’s basically nothing they can do to avert it.

Support AAV

Aftermath

Much like the Tories in 2025, hundreds of Labour councillors are going to suffer the backlash against the party’s deeply unpopular Westminster leadership. It’s difficult to have a lot of sympathy for them though, given that the thousands of elected Labour councillors did so little to oppose Keir Starmer’s diabolical leadership; his spectacularly unpopular policy agenda; and his complicity in Israel’s live-streamed genocide.

In particular, had Labour reversed Tory austerity cuts, especially to local government funding, people could have seen the benefit of a Labour government as things improved at the local level. Instead, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves stuck with myopic Tory austerity penny-pinching, instead of strategically investing in the nation’s infrastructure, services, and future economic potential.

Keir Starmer has only been able to cling on as Prime Minister after the Mandelson-Epstein scandal and the shocking Gorton and Denton by-election debacle, because the party needs him to take the fall for the looming electoral catastrophe in May. He’s only still there so his successor didn’t have to start out with an electoral walloping.

He’ll go after the results come in, but that’s not going to save the Labour Party from itself, because one of the first things Starmer did after lying his way into the Labour leadership, was to rig the nominations process to ensure his successor will also come from his right-wing faction of the party.

It’s 50-50 whether Kemi Badenoch will be forced out as Tory leader if they end up losing even more of their seats to Reform. She somehow managed to cling on after the absolute annihilation they took in 2025 so she may well survive another electoral mauling. The problem for the Tories seems to be that there’s no obvious successor amongst the smallest (and still dwindling) number of MPs the party has ever had.

The Greens will experience another membership surge after by far the best set of election results in their history, possibly even taking them above Labour and Reform to become the biggest mass-membership party in the country. If they aren’t already established as a genuine alternative for left-wing and socially liberal voters to turn to now, they absolutely will be by May.

Reform will gain loads of seats thanks to the ongoing collapse of the Tory party, and the vast sums they’re raking in from mega-rich donors like the Thailand-based ex-Tory donor Christopher Harborne.

The Lib-Dems will do relatively well, but their successes will be overshadowed by Reform and the Greens.

The SNP will point to the pro-independence Scottish Parliament majority, to make the case for another Scottish independence referendum, and if Plaid Cymru become the main party of the Welsh government, Welsh independence will be closer than it’s ever been.

The Electoral Commission will do absolutely nothing to rein the £millions being splurged on targeted social media dark ads. If they didn’t do anything after the absolute farce of the 2019 general election, they’re never going to do anything.