The collapse of the main parties in the local elections is a warning that their right turns just feed the far right, but there is potential for a left alternative, argues Kevin Crane

Just because something is not a surprise, doesn’t stop it from being a shock. We knew that traditional political parties were in trouble going into this election, and we knew who the big winner was going to be, but that doesn’t stop the fall of Britain’s century-old two-party system from being spectacular.

Local elections have become slightly bizarre in this country. It was for a long time true that the public were using them to give an opinion on the national government of the day, more than to determine who runs public services (which is what they are notionally about), but in the mid-2020s this increasingly feels like all they prove. Partially, this is to do with unpolitical tone of much of the campaigning, but it also has a lot to with the fact that, after fifteen years of austerity policies, local government actually doesn’t decide or even do that much. This round of council and mayoral elections is going to be remembered, but much more for its impact on national-level politics. That has been huge, as Labour and Tories have pulled in their first-ever combined vote of less than 50%.

Labour and the Tories have both suffered terrible defeats, which one was the bigger loser depends on your definition. The Tories have lost by far the largest number of seats, although this is partially because the distribution of local election contests in this year did mean that Labour had a lot fewer to defend. In other words, we can be fairly sure that if more Labour councillors were up for re-election this year, more of them would have lost.

Even with the caveats, Tory leader Kemi Badinoch is not likely to survive this election. She launched the almost invisible Conservative Party campaign by warning her side that things would be ‘difficult’ but there was no way of bracing 600 councillors to lose their seats. As of Friday night, the party has lost control of over a dozen local authorities, and not in narrow defeats: it has collapsed entirely in counties like Kent, where it used to have a near monopoly on political power.

Tory heads have not stopped spinning since they lost the general election, and this further set of blows will almost certainly lead them into further internal chaos. No small part of the problem for the Tories is that their only solution to anything is to try to bank further to the right, which is what their shrinking membership base demands, but they are barely able to differentiate themselves from Starmer’s Labour on this basis, let alone Farage’s Reform UK. The main thing we can expect to get from the Conservatives for the near future will simply be more racist and anti-environmentalist noise to add to mood music of the political system: the prospect of them regrouping and winning elections again is a long way off.

Wages of austerity 2.0

Labour’s woes may be smaller in number, but they are more dramatic. The big story is, of course, losing the Runcorn and Helsby by-election. This totally avoidable defeat, literally caused by a thick thug of a Labour MP beating one of his constituents, was a truly historic loss. The Reform UK candidate overturned a more than 50% Labour majority. Pathetically, Labour apologists have been trying to point to the narrow margin of the win, six votes, as if this means it ‘doesn’t count’ in some way. You just have to laugh at these people sometimes.

Keir Starmer himself has managed to make himself into a deeply pathetic figure, by saying little and still managing to sound absurd with the little he did say. He spent Friday avoiding social media, and didn’t even congratulate Labour candidates who did manage to win mayoral elections (in some cases unexpectedly). He made a brief appearance in the afternoon to say only that the results showed that Labour needed to deliver change ‘further and faster’, before disappearing again. This intervention caused dismay amongst Labour ranks, because it just confirmed that he and Rachel Reeves do not intend to learn a thing from the election or any of the feedback party activists got from voters. One successful Labour mayor, Ros Jones, who narrowly held Doncaster away from Reform, explicitly condemned Starmer’s refusal to listen in her victory speech.

Even more scathing words came from veteran socialist Labour MP Diane Abbot, who tweeted:

‘Labour’s campaign for these elections was non-stop boats, asylum, deportation, courts. It was all about copying Reform UK. It was a disaster. It should stop.’

The leader of the largest teaching union in Britain, Daniel Kebede, also had a clear message for Labour, focusing on the deep failures of Labour’s economic policies:

‘People voted for change last year. The change they got was cuts to the winter fuel allowance, [to] cheap bus fares and [to] disability benefits. The problem is these self-imposed fiscal rules are paving the way for Farage, a toy-town Trump, to masquerade as a man of the people and waltz into number 10 in four years’ time.’

Kebede’s observations are strongly backed up by on the ground reports from Labour canvassers, who have stated over and over again that the turbo-austerity of Starmer and Reeves has destroyed any good will this government had, and in record time, given that it still hasn’t been a year since the election. The one thing we should add, however, is that Starmer has also burned through a lot of Labour support by his craven support of Israeli and American warmongering.

There’s no debate about who the big winner is. Reform UK are now a major party in Britain’s political system, with control over multiple local authorities and a new MP. They have gouged seats from both the old parties: from the Tories in Kent and from Labour in places like Durham, laying waste to historic political cartels around the whole of England. This is obviously no good thing: contrary to some of the belief-beggaring predictions by some of their detractors in both Labour and the Greens, the far right now command a series of major platforms from which to both assert their legitimacy in the political system and be a thorn in the side of the government. As has been argued elsewhere on this website, the left urgently needs to form meaningful strategies against the threat of Reform, which can no longer be confronted as a marginal or external force.

Alternatives?

The other main parties in English politics had, by contrast, fairly subdued results. The Liberal Democrats made fairly modest gains, essentially by doing the opposite of politics. Their present leader, Ed Davy, was minister in the first government to introduce austerity between 2010 and 2015, when the Lib Dems had their catastrophic coalition with the Tories. Davy has rebuilt the party’s fortunes, not by opposing successive governments’ policies, because he doesn’t fundamentally oppose them, but by simply positioning his party as fuzzy ‘not them’ entity that picks up discontented votes from people who dislike the effects that austerity has, but who do not wish to vote for any form alternative to it. It’s basically gaming the electoral system, at this point, and it suggests that, long-term, the Lib Dems are destined to find themselves in a position to join another terrible political coalition purely by default, and to share the decline of other parties.

The only large party to run on any sort of anti-austerity platform, the English Greens, did not have a great election. Their gains have been modest at best, and evidence suggests that they were picking up roughly half the disaffected ex-Labour voters that were otherwise going to the Lib Dems, despite that party being pro-austerity! Perhaps the biggest shock for the Green Party was their showing in the West of England Combined Authority. Some pollsters had thought that they could even win this contest, creating the most senior Green politician in British history, but in the event, they finished in third place, behind unexpectedly strong showings by Labour and Reform. This tepid performance should trigger a debate amongst the Greens about how they are failing to capitalise on widespread popular concern about climate change, inequality and privatisation, on all of which they have left-wing policies.

I personally suspect that if that discussion were honest, it would have to involve criticism of their four current MPs, who have just failed to show leadership within the social movements, being basically far too reluctant to participate in the anti-austerity movement or protests against the Gaza genocide. It is also unfortunately the case that where the Greens run council administrations, such as in Bristol, they are basically the same as Labour administrations with all the same disappointments. This problem has dogged them in their original electoral base in Brighton for many years now, and undoubtably reduces the party’s appeal. 

There has been some good news, notably the election of three Palestine-plus socialist independents in Lancashire, a country that was solidly Labour but that has otherwise been swept by Reform, and polling on issues continues to show that large numbers of Britons want a left-wing rather than right alternative. However, in the short term, these results ensure that the gallop to the right in British politics is going to be sustained for some time. Until a mass socialist challenge can be formed, socialists must continue to focus on organising outside parliament and council chambers.