Now that the dust has settled on the local election results, it feels like a good time to attempt a realistic assessment of their meaning. There are plenty of ways of looking at these results that don’t look quite so bad as we first thought, but here’s the spoiler alert – those ways all involve an element of self-delusion. That is a dangerous pastime right now.
The danger of delusion
The first comforting thought is that only around one-third of the public voted in these elections, and less than one-third of the council seats were up for grabs. There is absolutely no guarantee that those who stayed at home think the same way as those who turned out to vote for Reform UK Ltd. The seats that were being contested were mostly in areas that are favourable to them, and there were no seats in London and relatively few along the M4 corridor or in other areas that voted against Brexit.
In places like Oxford and Cambridge, the Lib Dems did very well, and their strong performance in this set of local elections has been seriously under-reported by the media. They might hope to do even better in a general election. Reform doesn’t seem to be winning anywhere near as many seats in a large swathe of the country where the Lib Dems are strong, and those areas return a lot of MPs.
As a Green councillor, I could point to the fact that the Greens doubled their seat tally in this election and are well placed to win more MPs. If I were a Labour spin doctor, I might point to the fact that several of the mayoral elections resulted in their candidate winning, they only lost the parliamentary by-election by six votes, and there are four years to go before the next election. Things might pick up, and there is plenty of time.
Brutal local election results
Nothing could be more dangerous than to indulge in such sloppy thinking. The results were brutal. Reform won 677 council seats. Labour won 98, finishing just narrowly ahead of the Greens on 79. Even the Lib Dems’ good performance trailed them badly behind Reform on 370, with the Conservatives slumping even further into their terminal decline on 319.
The total share of the vote won by Reform was 31%. The Conservatives got 23%, Lib Dems 17%, Labour 14% and Greens 9%. That reform vote was only three percentage points lower than the Labour Party vote of 33.7% in the General Election, which provided its thumping majority.
Under a first-past-the-post system, with every prospect of a weak Conservative Party doing a last-minute deal with Reform, that could easily deliver Britain into the hands of a Nigel Farage majority government.
Building our own strength
Before turning to the vital issue of how best to fight back, there is one final piece of the puzzle that needs to be understood. Blaming this on the media or unfair finances may be accurate, but it is not a good strategy. The right will always have more money than the rest of us.
The early Labour Party didn’t rise from obscurity to power because it had more money and better newspapers. It got there because it was rooted in a community where it was delivering achievements and voicing aspirations that those who voted for it saw as being in their best interests.
Pandering isn’t strategy – it’s surrender
Unfair media coverage is always with us. A situation where the far-right pose as the defenders of inner-city communities that have long been neglected is not. Unless the current government radically shifts tactics and starts delivering real improvements to the lives of people in deprived communities, then we are all at risk. Joe Biden worked on a strategy of trying to fix the economy and provide reasonably competent centre ground leadership in difficult times. How do you think that worked out for the Democrats at election time?
By contrast, Mark Carney decided to take the huge risk of standing up to Donald Trump and imposing retaliatory tariffs, which are genuinely hurting Trump but also painful for the Canadian people. That firm stance resulted in him romping home despite his party having had a pretty poor recent record in government. The Australian prime minister seems to have gained from a similar determination to stand up for what he believes in and to call out the lies of the far right.
In other words, it is not just morally wrong to pander to Reform’s agenda – it is bad tactics. What is the point in quietly pretending that Brexit has gone well and refusing to speak the truth to the British public that it has failed? Both the Lib Dems and the Greens have tried to honestly articulate some of the problems caused by Brexit and increased their vote share substantially.
What’s the point in trying to out-compete Reform on excluding immigrants, even when they are university students bringing good money into our country, or care workers helping to deliver vital services for an ageing population? If you hate immigrants, you aren’t going to vote for the party that hates them a little bit. Neither Labour nor Conservative leaders can hold off the threat of Reform by trying to offer Reform-lite. If people want to vote for an anti-immigrant party, they know who to choose.
Confronting the rise of Reform
What works is going on the attack and calling out Reform for the threat it poses to the NHS, Farage’s enthusiastic support for the Liz Truss budget, and his share of responsibility for the Trump tariff disaster. What works even better is delivering genuine improvements in the lives of people who live in working-class communities.
I challenge anyone now to articulate Labour’s strategy for improving Britain’s inner cities in a way that will cut through to and be understood by the people who live in those communities, and who placed their trust in change. That is not to accuse the new government of changing nothing or having entirely wrongheaded plans. It is to accuse them of not having a sufficiently clear strategy for urban renewal that can inspire voters to believe things are getting better at a pace.
You don’t beat the far right by inviting them to take tea with the King. You don’t win the hearts and minds of voters who feel crushed by decades of neglect by promising that you will eventually build a tram line, build a lot of new homes in the suburbs and finish building a lot of nuclear power stations that will put up their bills.
You might do it by giving them a free battery that will cut their energy bill significantly overnight by using off-peak power. You might do it by building good-quality housing in disused mills or renovating run-down terraces. You might do it by attracting enough new immigrants to work in the NHS to turn around the waiting lists quickly.
Bravery or breakdown
There is a reason why the public is dissatisfied with mainstream parties. It is that they see too many of them as not being a champion of the community they represent. The disconnect cannot be fixed by centrally selected politicians uttering carefully thought-through statements about the need to be cautious and saying the problems are all the fault of the last lot. In dangerous times, a bit of bravery is needed if we are going to fight off the enemy.
Either that bravery arrives and starts to produce change on the ground, or the electorate is going to be faced with a choice between a far-right alternative and left-leaning parties such as the LibDems, Greens and SNP that offer more determined resistance to the likes of Trump and Farage. I wish I could tell you that the signs are promising. What I can say is that it is up to each of us to influence those we trust with our votes to show the courage needed to stand against the very dark forces that closing in on us.
