Labour's Growing Suburban Support And Tactical Voting Could Deliver "Double Whammy" Defeat To Tories

The Conservatives could suffer a "double whammy" of a Labour vote share that has spread outside of it's usual concentration in urban centres and tactical voting across the UK at the next general election, according to pollsters analysing the local election results.

Labour Together, a think tank formed in 2015, is working "closely" with Labour's shadow cabinet in the run-up to the general election and carries out polling and focus groups in order to help the party get into power.

Director of Research Christabel Cooper told PoliticsHome that the recent local election results, where Labour gained 186 councillors and the Tories lost 474, showed that Labour's vote share across the country was becoming more efficiently spread rather than concentrated in a smaller number of predominantly metropolitan seats, and development that could help them gain a majority in Parliament.

"[Labour's] vote in the 2010s was just really inefficient," Cooper explained.

"It was piling up votes in inner city areas, so getting really huge majorities in some places like Hackney and Islington etc, or Liverpool or central Manchester, but then not winning all the kinds of marginal towns outside that that they needed to win. 

"You can really see from these local election results that Labour is now doing better in places it was doing worse, so that inefficiency is unwinding."

This would mean that Labour would be able to win a larger number of seats with a lower share of the overall vote. According to Cooper, the "inefficiency" of the spread of Labour's votes under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership between 2015 and 2020 led to scepticism that Labour could overturn the Conservatives' 2019 majority within one term.

"You'd have needed something like a 12 per cent swing