The local council elections held last week were a disaster for the Conservative Party. It is however a disaster that was somewhat expected bearing in mind just how badly the Tories have mismanaged everything from the economy to culture by way of energy policy and border security.

I’ve yet to see any definitive figures for turnout in these elections but if my local polling station is anything to go by then turnout is likely to be low. My local polling station was almost completely dead, when my wife and I were casting out ballots, all the time we were there we were the only customers there to vote.

What does appear to have happened is that those who did bother to turn out and vote in these elections did so in order to protest the current Tory government, which is somewhat normal for local elections at times when the governing party is seen to be incompetent or generally awful. There seemed from what I can gather to be a lot of protest voting with these protest votes going to the Lib Dems and Labour as well as tactical voting being used to block Conservative Party candidates. In my area on the Welsh Marches we didn’t see a single Tory canvasser and I suspect that this is down to the fact that many Tory party supporters and workers were not prepared to put in the effort to support a party that is no longer recognisably conservative.

Sadly one prediction that I did make turned out to be correct and that is the collapse in the Reform Party vote. They got zero seats and this in my view is because of this party’s failure to organise between election ground games, something that is needed in order for smaller parties to create both name recognition and build support. Reform’s failure to impact on these local elections is in my view mostly down to Reform not having built a local branch structure which would have provided the party with willing bodies to knock on doors, distribute literature and generally build the party’s local profile. It’s interesting to contrast Reform’s electoral failure to the success in Leeds of the Social Democratic Party. They now have two seats on their local council and this has been achieved in large part from what I can see from having a coherent and competent local party branch.

For the first time ever I spoiled my ballot paper. Normally I can find at least one candidate who is not completely awful but in my ward there was none. I was faced with the Lib Dems, a party whom I refuse to vote for, a Tory who I could not find out anything about and an independent who turned out to be a deep Green who was too extreme even for the notably nutty local Green Party. I wasn’t prepared to keep a hold on the hand of the Tory nurse for fear of finding something worse so I marked my ballot paper with the words ‘nobody worth voting for, no candidate properly represents me’. In the end the Lib Dem won but even though his party is a nest of Janus faced perverts and charlatans, I have to say that he’s a good local councillor, but these days I can no more bring myself to vote for the Lib Dems than I would vote for the Commies or the Jackboot lickers, I despise the Lib Dems that much.

I suspect that in these elections many of those who would previously have enthusiastically voted Conservative have stayed at home and to be frank I can’t blame them for doing so. There is little these days that is recognisably conservative about the Conservative Party. At present the Tories don’t even have their reputation for being economically competent to give them any edge in elections. They’ve messed up the economy, border security, energy policy and even after over a decade in government, have failed to tackle the political and cultural biases of a left leaning public sector. The only jobs growth under the Tories seem to have been that of the more parasitical and nannying parts of the public sector, the parts that if removed would make the public sector work better than it does at present.

I suspect that in this election the apathy party has won. People feel that there is little worth positively voting for which has meant that extra weight has been given to those who are more concerned with negatively voting against the governing party and who may have been more motivated than others to turn out and vote.

It will be interesting to see whether this electoral shift away from the Tories in local government is reflected in the next General Election. In the past we have had situations where the Tories have been hammered mercilessly in local government but at the General Election Tory voters return to the party in order to keep out the Labour Party. Whether this happens at the next General Election is a moot point. Too many Tory leaning voters such as myself are utterly fed up with the Tories economic incompetence, their ideological intransigence over energy policy, the de facto open borders policy that the Tories have pushed on us and the failure to ensure that reasonable people occupy those in positions of authority over the people. It is quite possible that the next General Election will see a collapse in the Tory vote and that collapse will not be because Labour and the other opposition parties have convinced the electorate of the rightness of their ideas, but because natural conservative voters will stay home in disgust at what has happened to the party that once could be relied upon to represent them.

I want democracy to work, but for it to work there must be a real choice put in front of the electorate. Giving us just more Statism with different coloured labels is not giving the voters real and concrete choice and this could quite easily impact on turn out figures at the next General Election. We could end up with a Labour government, not because the population has been convinced of the party’s suitability for government, but because the Tories have hollowed out their brand with their incompetence, dishonesty and retreats from reality.