On May 6, the United Kingdom held its biggest democratic outing since the disastrous 2019 general election. On what was dubbed “Super Thursday,” local council elections were combined with ballots for municipal and regional mayoralties and elections for the devolved assemblies of Wales and Scotland. The Labour Party also chose that day to hold a by-election for the vacant UK parliamentary seat for Hartlepool, a small seaside town in the North-East of England.

The headlines on May 7 spoke uniformly of the continuing, indeed accelerating, collapse of the Labour vote, but when looked at in detail the results were more mixed. While the elections were indeed catastrophic for Labour in much of the country, it did much better in some regions and performed very well in some quite specific places.

Labour’s mixed performance was driven by two key dynamics. The first reveals the political map of the UK being rewritten as the country’s changing class composition produces new divides that manifest geographically. In short, Labour did better in those parts of the country where the population is growing and getting younger.