GUEST POST Councillor defections: The trickle becomes a stream

Augustus Carp presents some remarkable figures in his latest report on councillors who have resigned the whip or joined another party.

It doesn’t just continue, it gets worse. One would have thought that the run up to the last major local elections – held not quite two months ago – would have prompted wavering councillors to reconsider their political affiliations then, but it seems not.

Since 1 May there have been 154 identifiable instances of councillors changing their stated political allegiances. Some of these changes have led to an ostensible change of control of the Council. 

The net figures are:

Conservatives: -56; Labour: -41; Lib Dem: +4; Greens: +3; Nationalists: no change; Reform UK: +16; Independents: +74.

This means that 1.26 per cent of Conservative councillors have defected since 1 May. The figure for Labour is 0.66 per cent.

As ever, the press and broadcast media are obsessed with Reform UK, who are getting all the headlines, but the significant number of councillors leaving the Labour Party is surely worthy of some coverage. Are they going because of Gaza, or the Winter Fuel Allowance, or Sir Keir Starmer, or because they regard their erstwhile group as chumps? More information would be welcome

The defections from the Conservatives replicate the tensions within the wider party, with councillors going off "in all directions at once" – to Reform, to the Lib Dems and even to Labour. 

In several councils (e.g Dumfries & Galloway, Sevenoaks, Solihull, Wirral) former Tory councillors have congealed into new "Definitely Not Conservative" groups, which are regarded as Independents for analytical purposes.

Defections of this order of magnitude must be having an impact on the parties' campaigning ability at constituency level.

Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.