A party which is engineered to fight the Conservatives has been confronted with the advance of Reform into its heartlands – via both the symbolic Runcorn and Helsby by-election win and also a patchwork of council gains which will bring Nigel Farage’s general election campaign closer to Keir Starmer‘s voters, piling up seats (and thus local presence and organising muscle) in crumbling “Red Walls” from the North-East to the Midlands.
It now controls the county council in my native County Durham and across much of the “Red Wall” which helped give Starmer his majority. Break it gently to the south, but this is not all the result of disaffected ex-mining communities and the unemployed or old.
Head south and something similar is afoot: look at the curling leaflets from the west ward in Whitstable, East Kent, and the local Labour council candidate was squeezed by the Greens on environmental issues (like the appalling dumping of raw sewage in the sea) while Reform won in the neighbouring ward.
In bracing comments to the leadership, she has put her finger squarely on Labour’s sciatic nerve. It is becoming a party that the more comfortably off can afford to vote for because it aligns with their blend of trad centre-left views and a pragmatic desire not to be on the fringes of power. But for many other traditional or target Labour voters, the last months have brought little to attach their hopes to.
In truth, Reform’s quick-fix promises are mainly empty drums, and will return to haunt them where they wield power locally and have to take the strain in difficult times. The result, however, suggests that many parts of England on which Starmer and co rely for their majority don’t really understand what the priorities of the Government are – and why it will benefit them or their families. Living on the never-never is rarely a commanding recipe.
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It muddles up creditable micro-ideas – like getting needy kids fed breakfast before school (and then having difficulty with the scale of that on the cost front, which suggests its policy grip is looser than it needs to be), and a union-led discourse about Ofsted, school organisational structures and a vague idea of how standards should be measured. No wonder voters are confused, and look around for other suitors based on local conditions or grievances.
And when Leader of the House of Commons Lucy Powell was triggered on Any Questions by Tim Montgomerie, a Reform-aligned commentator, into some extraordinarily badly phrased pushback on his comments on the failure to deal with grooming gangs – “Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now, do we? Yeah, OK, let’s get that dog whistle out” – it was wince-inducing.
Overall, the impression is a nettled defensiveness in the Government about people expecting things to change because it is in power at Westminster. But the threat is real. Reform now has what Labour had in 2023 and the Tories used to have: a mix of momentum, strengthened data and organisational base, monied donors switching to be part of its story – and more middle-class voters prepared to give it a shot, alongside “left behind” Britain.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor at Politico POLITICO and co-host of Politics at Sam and Anne’s
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