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“There is not a world in which these elections are not going to be tough in terms of numbers,” Conservative MP Jack Rankin told the most recent episode of PoliticsHome podcast The Rundown.

The MP for Windsor, widely seen as one of the party’s brightest talents, spoke frankly about what likely awaits the Tories when voters in England, Scotland and Wales go to the polls for a highly anticipated set of local elections on Thursday.

Two years on from their devastating general election defeat, the Conservatives are braced for more electoral discomfort later this week. Tory peer Lord Hayward recently predicted that the party would lose around 600 council seats on 7 May, losing votes to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK to its right and Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats to its left. The party also faces dramatic collapses in support in Scotland and Wales. 

In Westminster, Conservative MPs are generally in a more upbeat mood about the state of their party than they were a year or so ago, when there were questions over how long Kemi Badenoch would last as Leader Of The Opposition. There is now a belief that Badenoch is clearly growing into her role, particularly in her Prime Minister’s Questions performances, while her personal ratings have steadily improved in recent months. Appearing on The Rundown last week, Rankin described the mood as “buoyant but realistic”.

It’s partly for this reason that very few Conservatives believe that Badenoch’s position will be put at risk by the results of these local elections.

A senior Tory MP acknowledged that they are “going to be very bad” but said “there is nothing that can be done” given the situation the party is in, namely, still in the process of repairing its brand after being emphatically removed from office less than two years ago. “I see this as something we have got to live through to get to the other side,” they told PoliticsHome.

But there is some concern with this approach, particularly in parts of the country where the party is expected to suffer major losses on Thursday, like Essex, Hampshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. Conservative MPs in those areas make up more than a fifth of the total parliamentary party. “In reality, it’s highly likely we’ll lose control of all those councils,” said one Tory MP.

In Hampshire, the Conservatives currently have 50 of 78 council seats, having held overall control of the local authority since 1997. Seven of the county’s MPs are Tories. One of them told PoliticsHome that losing the council “would stop the small recovery that the party has made over the last nine months, and it would show that actually, we have a lot more work to do before we’re anywhere near winning the next election”.

There is a similar picture of Essex, where 49 of the council’s 79 councillors are Conservative. A more pessimistic Tory MP said “it could be a total wipeout” in Essex, where Reform, like in Hampshire, is eyeing significant gains. Speaking to PoliticsHome, Hayward pointed out that the county is home to “a string of Tory front benchers” including Badenoch herself.

There is nervousness in these areas that Tory losses on Thursday could resemble what happened in Kent at last year’s local elections, when the number of Conservative councillors was dramatically reduced from 62 to 5, with Farage’s party being the beneficiary.

Results that bad would “pose real questions over the party’s direction”, according to one Tory MP, who told PoliticsHome it would “cause a huge amount of soul searching in the party, especially as there is a feeling that there has been a lot of gain over the last year, with conference seen as the turning point”. Another Tory backbencher said: “If Reform does as well as in Kent, it’s obviously problematic for the Tory party and would be really bad news.”

A different Conservative MP stressed that losing councillors has “very serious” practical consequences, as it means a weakened “grassroots campaigning force”. They added: “[We] can’t be going backwards at this stage. We’re nearly halfway through the Parliament.”

Badenoch denied being “complacent” in conversation with The Times at the weekend, and insisted that the public was starting to listen to what the Tories have to say. In an interview with The House magazine in the run-up to last year’s Conservative Party conference, she said that she would be a leader who peaks in time for the next general election, rather than “on day one”.

However, speaking on the most recent episode of the Political Currency podcast, former Tory chancellor George Osborne said his party required an “ethical reset” before it can win again, arguing that it was yet to “really confront” the reason why it lost in such devastating fashion in July 2024.

He added that Badenoch had not yet answered the fundamental question of “what do the Conservatives offer, which is distinct and better for the country than Reform”.

While major losses later this week are unlikely to raise questions about Badenoch’s leadership, they could put her under more pressure to produce an answer.

For a country that prides itself on hating the Tories, this is very odd.

And if you don’t see how, let us illustrate.

If you simply combined the Tory and Reform votes from the latest poll, the election would be on a knife-edge, with the right-wing alliance just three points behind the SNP on the constituency vote and six points AHEAD on the list. On that basis it would likely win the election as the biggest party, though it would need Labour and Lib Dem backing to form a government.

(It would be genuinely unpredictable and interesting to see who could win the vote to be First Minister in this scenario.)

This is the Devolved Elections projection, showing Reform edging it by a single seat over the SNP, with a comfortable Unionist majority of 21, compared to the 11-seat “pro-indy” majority projected by More In Common on the actual poll numbers:

The map would look like this, with the right-wing alliance sweeping the traditional strong Tory areas of the Borders and the north-east and encroaching towards the middle, with the Lib Dems taking a huge chunk of the Highlands and Islands and the SNP reduced to the Central Belt, with Labour clinging to their existing pockets.

Considering that a right-wing party (the Unionist Party, forerunner of the modern Scottish Conservatives) last won an election in Scotland in 1955, that’s an extraordinary stat. If Tory voters switched en masse to Reform on Thursday, according to this poll there would be an earthquake of utterly transformative impact on Scottish politics which would make the SNP’s 2007 victory, and 2011 majority, seem like a fieldmouse farting by comparison.

(If you count the SNP, Labour and Greens as all representing various degrees of “the left”, with the Lib Dems on the soft right it’s close, about 53-45 in favour of the left.)

And there’s another thing. More In Common didn’t ask about independence, but a poll for the Sunday Times at the weekend put support at Yes 55 No 45. Yet just 37% of people voting in the election are going to vote for ostensibly pro-independence parties.

That means that one out of every three independence supporters is refusing to vote SNP or Green in order to try to achieve it, and more than two out of every five are refusing to vote SNP. Just 57% of indy supporters say they’ll vote SNP on Thursday, and another 10% will vote Green.

(We suspect that once turnout is factored in those numbers will fall further.)

It really is quite hard to overstate how surreal all this is. On just over 30% of the vote, the SNP look set to either win an absolute majority or come close to it, while a combined Tory/Reform vote of over 32% will get them less than a quarter of the seats in the chamber.

Despite John Swinney offering a “100% guarantee” of a second referendum if he gets that majority, barely more than half of indy supporters look like they’ll bother to go out and vote for his party to get it. Meanwhile Tory voters will pass up a no-brainer chance to kick the SNP out and definitively end any threat of independence for the foreseeable future, despite being by far the party most obsessed with the constitution.

(Labour voters at least have the excuse that their party is still clutching at the comically absurd notion that they can win the election themselves, and the Lib Dems just want to carve out a few more seats, but Tories know full well that they’re looking at an epic humiliation AND a thumping SNP win unless they decide to throw their lot in with Malcolm Offord’s motley crew at the last minute.)

This, then, is an election in which both indy supporters and Unionists seem to be locked on a suicidally self-destructive course, each doing their best to throw it. The SNP is urging Yessers to waste their second vote and maximise the number of Unionist MSPs, while the Unionist parties are so engrossed in fighting among themselves that they’re going to get 61% of the vote yet still find themselves sitting irrelevantly in an indy-majority Parliament for another five years.

(Neither side much cares, they’ll get the gravy either way.)

As for the voters, nobody expects even half of them to turn out at all, so scunnered at they at the rotten catalogue of options being presented to them.

Our wee country’s gotten itself in a right old pickle, folks.

George Pickering is a researcher at the think tank Bright Blue. He holds a doctorate in Economic History from the University of Oxford.

​“I am not a Nazi or an antisemite. I love Jewish people. … It’s not just me who ruins their entire life once a year despite taking meds every day and being told by the so-called best doctors in the world that I am not bipolar, but merely experiencing ‘symptoms of autism.’” ​

​These touching words greeted readers of The Wall Street Journal earlier this year, in the form of a full-page apology by Kanye West for offensive remarks made between 2022 and 2025. However, the rapper’s heartfelt contrition was apparently not enough to spare him from recently being blocked from entering the UK, touching off widespread debate about whether the government ought to have such power over those whose opinions it finds intolerable.

​This controversy could not have been better timed to draw attention to a recently drafted billwhich would enshrine free speech in UK law, similar to the First Amendment in the United States. The proposed Freedom of Speech Bill was described by one of its authors as being “designed to teach English politicians and English activists, listen, there is a way within your constitutional system that you can replicate American free speech protections … It gets the Government out of the business of policing the opinions of the British people.”

​While it is not clear whether the proposed bill is likely to be introduced to Parliament soon, there is no denying the seriousness of the issue it is designed to address. Last year it was revealedthat police in England and Wales were making more than 30 arrests per day for social media posts and other messages which were deemed to have caused “annoyance,” “inconvenience” or “anxiety”. This heavy-handed and costly policing of online speech, alongside other high-profile cases such as the upcoming trial of a woman accused of silently praying near an abortion clinic, highlight the extensive powers the government already has to punish those whose opinions it deems unacceptable.

​But would a Freedom of Speech Bill actually be able to prevent such overreach? The example of the First Amendment to the US Constitution does little to suggest the effectiveness of on-paper protections. Less than a decade after the First Amendment was ratified, congress passed the Sedition Act of 1798, which enabled the government of President John Adams to successfully convict leading opposition newspaper editors. Later, during the First World War, the US Supreme Court unanimously decided that Charles Schenck’s right to free speech had not been violated when he was arrested for distributing leaflets arguing against military conscription. And as recently as the 1960s, the comedian Lenny Bruce was routinely arrested for ‘obscene’ jokes which seem mild by today’s standards, including implying that some people are cross-dressers and using the Yiddish word “schmuck”.

​How were US government officials able to curtail these forms of expression, despite the explicit protection of free speech by the supreme law of the land? Surprisingly, the answer to this question was provided more than two centuries before the founding of the United States, by an obscure, provincial French magistrate.

​Étienne de la Boétie may be most widely remembered today as the subject of Michel de Montaigne’s famous writings on friendship.

However, in the mid-sixteenth century La Boétie wrote one of the most strikingly original and influential works in the history of political thought: The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. The central argument of The Discourse was that even undemocratic governments require the consent — or at least the acquiescence — of the people, who always vastly outnumber their rulers. “He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body … Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you?”

​Violations of the First Amendment in the US would have been no mystery to La Boétie: officials were able to effectively break the law because they knew the public, at the time, lacked the will to insist that they be held to account. The same reasoning explains how the British government was able, for example, to enforce restrictions of uncertain legality during the COVID-19 pandemic.

​Unfortunately, the British public simply does not value free speech.

A YouGov poll found last year that only 28 per cent of people believe that one should be able to speak one’s mind on social media, while 61 per cent felt it was more important that online abuse and threats should be prevented.

Until the public ceases to tolerate violations of free expression the government would continue to limit free speech, either directly or by pressuring private companies to do so, regardless of whether a Freedom of Speech Bill were passed.