Britain's electors will go to the polls on May 6 in the biggest public vote since the December 2019 General Election.

Elections postponed from last year because of the COVID crisis are now combined with this year's scheduled voting to provide a major test of public opinion.

Electors will be casting their votes for the Scottish and Welsh devolved parliaments and for local councils across England.

Normally, the biggest point of interest would be whether or how much support has been lost by the ruling party at the national level. Boris Johnson and his Conservative Party swept to office 18 months ago on the slogan "Get Brexit Done." 

Fed up with pro-EU MPs blocking implementation of the 2016 referendum result, enough Labour voters in the old industrial towns of northern England abstained or switched to the Conservatives or the Brexit Party to hand Johnson an 80-seat majority in the House of Commons.

Shortly afterwards, COVID-19 struck and British society shuddered almost to a halt. At the same time, Jeremy Corbyn stood down as Labour Party leader to be replaced by Sir Keir Starmer, chief architect of the party's disastrous General Election policy to call for a second referendum on EU membership instead of enacting the result of the first.

With the British media having successfully slandered Corbyn, a principled socialist and anti-racist, as an unpatriotic, anti-Semitic traitor who would scrap Britain's military defenses, Starmer enjoyed a brief honeymoon period in the opinion polls. 

He was helped by Boris Johnson's disastrous mishandling of the COVID outbreak, when he put big business profits above the public health and wider interests of the population.

However, the Conservative lead in the polls has widened again since the beginning of 2021, boosted to eight percentage points and more by the rapid roll-out of anti-COVID vaccinations across Britain. Fresh allegations of financial sleaze against Johnson and previous Prime Minister David Cameron have yet to dent Conservative popularity.

For his part, Starmer has said and done little to enthuse his own party's members, let alone the wider electorate. Not only has he failed to fulfil his pledge to maintain his predecessor's left-wing policies, many of which – unlike Corbyn himself – enjoy quite widespread public support; he has actually driven socialists out of leadership positions and out of the party altogether, including Jeremy Corbyn himself.

That is why the leadership of the Labour Party, rather than that of the Conservative Party, is likely to be one of the two big issues on May 6.

The other is the constitutional future of Scotland. The governing party in the Edinburgh parliament, the Scottish National Party, is promising to secure a second referendum ("Indy 2") on Scottish independence. In the previous referendum, in 2014, Scots voters opted by 55% to 45% to remain part of the U.K.

Since then, opinion has shifted more towards breaking the link, although the SNP's version of "independence" would involve keeping the English monarchy, remaining in NATO and applying for re-entry to the EU. Whether it would also mean keeping the English pound sterling, adopting the Euro or creating a separate Scottish currency is not yet clear.

What is certain is that on May 6 the SNP will again win a majority of the seats north of the border.

Recent scandals surrounding the past and present leaders of the SNP have had little public impact so far, although ex-leader Alex Salmond's breakaway Alba Party might gain some seats. 

The majority of Scots are anti-Conservative and anti-Brexit and regard their own government in Scotland as both more competent and less reactionary than Boris Johnson's regime in London.

What remains to be seen is whether or how a victorious SNP can win the necessary agreement from London for Indy 2. At the moment, Prime Minister Johnson flatly opposes any such proposal.

In Wales, the Labour Party continues to enjoy substantial support. However, the left-of-center Welsh nationalist party, Plaid Cymru ("Party of Wales"), has been gaining ground as some anti-Conservative electors lose faith in Labour at the British and Welsh levels.

Across Britain, the Greens are hoping to win some votes and seats from Labour; the Liberal Democrats are trailing badly in the polls; and the far right have yet to recover from the implosion of the fascist British National Party.

The Communist Party is also standing in all three nations, with enough candidates in Wales to qualify for party election broadcasts on television and radio in the English and Welsh languages. 

The party's manifesto opposes a return to austerity policies, urges a fightback against rising unemployment and calls for mass campaigning for left-wing policies of wealth redistribution and the public ownership of key industries and services in a federal Britain.

The two other contests on May 6 attracting media attention are in London and a parliamentary by-election in Hartlepool, north-east England.

The present mayor of London, Labour's Sadiq Khan, is a supporter of Keir Starmer, but with more of a populist touch. He should win, provided enough Labour supporters resist the temptation to cast an anti-Conservative protest vote for the Greens or LibDems.

Hartlepool was hit hard by the decline in its traditional shipbuilding, steel and engineering sectors. It has been solidly Labour most of the time since 1945 but, having seen a heavy pro-Brexit vote, only the division between the Conservative and other anti-EU parties has kept it that way.  

Whatever the results, people across Britain will wake up on May 7 facing the same problems of COVID-19 recovery, unemployment, insufficient housing, big business corruption and political sleaze as before. As the proverb puts it in Hungary, "Money talks, the dogs bark and the caravan moves on."

Robert Griffiths is a former Senior Lecturer in Political Economy and History at the University of Wales and currently the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Britain.

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