Mike Phipps analyses a grim set of results for Labour and explains why Keir Starmer’s promise to move “further and faster” with his current policies is the wrong lesson to draw.

“Undoubtedly, Reform will do very well on Thursday. Not least thanks to the heaps of media coverage they receive,” predicted analyst Phil Burton-Cartledge. “But it’s worth remembering that the last time this clutch of seats were up, it was at the height of Boris Johnson’s powers.”

That might help explain the scale of the Conservatives’ losses on Thursday. It doesn’t, however, excuse Labour’s dismal performance.

Results

With all 23 council results now announced, Reform took control of ten councils, the Liberal Democrats of three, and there are another ten now under no overall control. The Tories lost all 15 councils which they previously ran.

Reform won more seats than any other party — 676 out of some 1,650 — gaining representation on all 23 councils contested and winning 30% of the vote. The Liberal Democrats took 370 seats, a net gain of 163, winning majorities in three councils, with 17% of the vote overall.

Neither Labour nor the Conservatives won a majority on any council. Labour suffered a net loss of 187 seats, winning only 20% of the vote. But the Conservatives suffered the most: a net loss of 674 seats, with only 15% of the vote.

It was a terrible night for the Tories – and it could have been worse, if more county council elections had gone ahead. Several were postponed due to negotiations taking place over the establishment of new unitary authorities.

“If these results are bad for Labour, then they are truly catastrophic for the Conservatives,” opined Adam Bienkov. “To put these results into context, before the polling stations closed, Kemi Badenoch’s party held almost two thirds of the seats up for contention.”

But Labour too suffered an almost complete wipeouts in some areas. It was the worst set of results for any new Prime Minister on record. Labour lost one of their safest parliamentary seats in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election. The Party that once ran Durham for over a century from 1919 onwards now has only four county councillors left there. In Doncaster, Labour lost control of the council, shedding 28 seats, as Reform took power. Doncaster Mayor, Labour’s Ros Jones, survived – and launched a scathing broadside against the leadership, highlighting again the unpopularity of winter fuel and disability benefit cuts.

Voters may have been persuaded that Reform was somehow progressive and radical, hard as that may be to believe. Yet, for all their talk about reforming the UK political system and being the real party of change, Reform’s Andrea Jenkyns revealed their true colours in her first speech as the new Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, when she said illegal migrants “should be put in tents”. All the other candidates walked off stage in disgust midway through her speech.

Former Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg also understood the real meaning of the Reform gains. He described their winning streak as a big win for the “Conservative family”, adding, “Conservatism is having a fantastic 24 hours.”

The Greens made modest gains, up 44 seats, unseating councillors from the Tories, Labour and the Liberal Democrats. In the mayoral contests, Labour gained the West of England, albeit with just 28% of the vote, but lost Cambridgeshire and Peterborough to the Tories. The new mayoralties of Greater Lincolnshire and Hull and East Yorkshire were both taken by Reform.

There were some noteworthy victories for Independents of the left. Michael Lavalette, who was elected with 47% of the vote in Preston wrote: “Today in Preston no-one returned more councillors to the county than Preston Independents.” The Independents also won in Preston South East and Preston City Centre.

Also in the Northwest, an 18-year old medical student who was motivated to enter politics by the war in Gaza, Maheen Kamran, defeated Labour to become a councillor for Burnley Central East. Meanwhile Azhar Ali, suspended by Labour for antisemitism last year during the Rochdale by-election, was elected as an Independent for the Nelson East ward.

Broxtowe Alliance Councillors tweeted a picture of Teresa Cullin, saying: “This working class woman, after 40 years in the Labour Party, was disciplined and banned by them from standing for County Council. Because she spoke out about the Winter Fuel Allowance. She resigned. Today she took the seat from the Labour Group Leader.”

Earlier this year twenty Labour councillors in Broxtowe, Nottinghamshire, quit Labour in protest at its anti-working class direction. But Reform also won six seats there in last week’s elections.

How big a threat is Reform to Labour?

Reform are certainly a threat to Labour in some areas, the Northeast especially. But as Richard Burgon MP observed: “Polling shows Labour is bleeding at least as much support to its left as to its right. A YouGov poll earlier this year found Labour had lost seven per cent of its 2024 voters to the Liberal Democrats and six per cent to the Greens. That’s more than the five per cent lost to Reform UK and four per cent to the Conservatives.

“New research this week from Persuasion UK underlines that message. Only 11 per cent of Labour’s 2024 voters are ‘Reform-curious’. For every one of those, there are three or four Labour voters open to voting for the Greens or Lib Dems.

“Moreover, three-quarters of Reform’s support comes from voters who haven’t backed Labour in a general election in 20 years. They are historically anti-Labour voters who have overwhelmingly voted for various parties on the right including the Conservatives and UKIP and to a lesser extent not voted at all.”

Burgon concluded: “Trying to win over these Reform voters with rightward lurches risks doing more harm than good by alienating core Labour supporters and making vote-splitting amongst progressive voters even more likely.”

Stay the course or change direction?

Will the Labour leadership draw the right lessons from its defeats? Many on the left have been very clear about what needs to happen next. Momentum called on “MPs, Councillors, Party members and the wider labour movement to speak out, oppose attacks on living standards, and demand the Government change course by offering real Labour values and standing up for working class communities.”

Brian Leishman MP agreed, tweeting: “Labour must change course. People voted for real change last July and an end to austerity.” Former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell MP said: “The message to ministers is: drop the plans to attack the disabled.”

Nadia Whittome MP added: “Cutting disability benefits and scrapping the Winter Fuel Allowance made voters abandon us. The leadership needs to end its obsession with chasing the far-right on immigration.”

South Shields MP Emma Lewell also condemned the withdrawal of winter fuel payments, denial of compensation for the WASPI women and proposed disability cuts. She criticised the central message from ministers responding to the elections throughout Friday, warning: “It is tone deaf to keep repeating we will move further and faster on our plan for change. What is needed is a change of plan.”

Former Labour Chief of Staff Simon Fletcher agreed: “It is the Government’s current direction that is the problem, not its rapidity. Further and faster down the wrong path is the height of political wrong-headedness.”

Former Shadow Justice Secretary Richard Burgon MP said:  “The Labour leadership must urgently change course and govern with real Labour values to deliver the change people are crying out for. It should start by ditching the plans to cut disability benefits and increase taxes on the wealthiest instead.”

University of East London Professor Jeremy Gilbert questioned whether a return to ‘Labour values’ was sufficient, however. “It isn’t moral principles that matter; what matter are material interests,” he tweeted. “We need a leadership that isn’t aligned with landlords and banks.”

Anyone listening? Not the Home Secretary

Will the leadership listen to these voices? In fact, it seems set to draw the opposite conclusion. “Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff,” suggested the Financial Times, ”is likely to conclude that he is right to pursue a ‘Blue Labour’ strategy to address the populist threat.”

“What is Blue Labour?” asked Owen Jones. “In theory it’s supposed to be about fusing social conservatism with left-wing economics, but there is no left-wing economics here, so it’s social conservatism combined with clobbering pensioners, disabled people and children among others.”

In fact, Labour has already been doing this for some time and all it has done is legitimise a far right agenda. “Home secretary Yvette Cooper’s shameless decision, in the run-up to the May local elections, to publish statistics on the nationalities of foreign offenders and their crimes, and her amendment to the Borders Security Bill to bar all foreign nationals on the sex offenders’ register from making asylum claims, haven’t gained Labour votes, but have added fuel to a racist feeding frenzy of the kind that led to the far-right riots last summer,” argue the Institute of Race Relations.

And there is more to come. “Ministers will crack down on international students applying for asylum in the UK in a move designed to tackle migration figures, after a series of bruising losses to Reform in the local elections,” reported the Guardian two days after the elections.

This is just the latest in a long line of Home Office policies that have targeted international students. One side-effect will be that many universities, sometimes the main employers or ‘anchor institutions’ in red wall areas, could face bankruptcy. As Rob Ford, Politics Professor at the University of Manchester, noted: “Not obvious that bankrupting the largest local employer in many Labour voting towns and cities will prove an effective way to fight Reform in next year’s local elections.”

In any case, the evidence suggests that most people who express concerns about migrants as influencing their vote – and those numbers are still level-pegging with the NHS and the economy – when asked about specific migrants are mostly bothered about boat arrivals, not students.

Not that migration even made the top five reasons among those who voted Labour at the 2024 general election who now intended not to vote Labour at these elections. The removal of the Winter Fuel Allowance, the failure to reduce the cost of living or improve public services, broken promises and a failure to stand up to the rich and powerful were the key factors determining their alienation from the Party.

Such details will escape a government keen to appear to be ‘doing something’ about migration, a preoccupation which appears unlikely to change. As Rob Ford summarised: “Labour’s ‘Farage is right, don’t vote for him’ strategy, which was so successful on Thursday, looks set to continue.”

Writing in the Guardian after the election results, John McDonnell drew similar conclusions: “The strategy dictated by Starmer’s office appears to be that, to neutralise Reform, Labour has to position itself as close to Nigel Farage’s party as possible.” He concluded: “If Labour seeks to ape Reform, then voters will largely opt for the real deal and vote Reform, while at the same time Labour will alienate supporters who are aghast at the party adopting Reform-like positioning on immigration.”

Writing for Labour List, Nadia Whittome MP agreed: “The government has already spent months talking tough on migrants – introducing policies to deny some refugees citizenship, filming deportations, and continuing the Conservatives’ criminalisation of those arriving by irregular means.

“This performative cruelty hasn’t stopped Reform’s rise. In fact, it has probably contributed to it. We have legitimised the far right’s narrative, instead of challenging it and addressing the material problems in people’s lives.”

Ben Ansell, Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Oxford University, confirms these opinions.  Drawing on the re-election of the Australian Labor Party and the Canadian Liberals, he argues that centre-left incumbents are staying in power by aggressively pushing back against right wing  populists, not by aping them. “Even Democrats, who had it seems hoped to deal with Trump 2.0 by hiding in a cave breathing into a paper bag, have started to realise that punching bullies back is their best move,” he adds.

Renew Party democracy to advance a progressive agenda

Will the leadership learn the lessons from these results? John McDonnell is realistic: “The usual mechanisms for communicating signs of discontent are broken… because the centralised control of the party under Starmer has meant that political debate in constituency Labour parties is closed down or ignored and dissent expressed by Labour MPs is met with threats of the withdrawal of the whip.”

So Party members not only need to make their voices heard for a change of direction and a return to real Labour values. They also need to mount a campaign to restore Party democracy so that the views of the grassroots can exercise real influence over its elected representatives at all levels.

The Party leadership may shrug off these results as the product of a difficult first ten months. But if Labour continue to lose seats at this rate in future by-elections and local elections over the next two years, there will be louder demands for a change of course – and not just from the left. Many centrist councillors, MPs and ordinary members will, if only from the standpoint of self-preservation, want a new direction – witness former Cabinet member Louise Haigh’s criticisms of the leadership in the aftermath of these elections. And if a change of line is not forthcoming, there will be growing demands for a new leadership too.

Union leaders also need to appreciate the seriousness of the situation. If Labour is replaced by an ultra-right wing government, it will be a huge defeat for the working class and the unions who represent them. To prevent that happening. now is the time to apply real pressure on the  Party leadership to stop the cuts and embrace a popular, radical agenda.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

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