Local elections are strange beasts. They’re a partial snapshot of the country – yesterday’s elections were for just 23 councils, six mayoralties and one parliamentary seat – and political parties often use the run-up to them to talk at length about how terribly they’re going to do in the hope of surprising on the upside (though no-one seems to have told Reform this).
Even the order in which the results are announced can have a marked impact on the narrative that ultimately emerges. Think back to the last time these same council seats were up for election, in 2021. The announcement of Labour’s loss in the Hartlepool by-election came first, in the early hours of Friday morning, and set the tone for the rest of the results, even though the eventual overall picture – including a series of Labour mayoral wins – was much more mixed. As we now know, that Hartlepool result and the panic it engendered even pushed Keir Starmer to the brink of resignation.
The temptation, especially in the era of 24 hour news coverage and endless social media takes, is to draw a definitive national narrative from incomplete results of elections that only took place in a fraction of the country. The same is happening this time around, despite warnings from Professor Sir John Curtice and his team that an exercise (calculating a Projected National Share) which is always flawed, is “particularly difficult” to do this time around.
At the time of writing, we have the results of the parliamentary by-election (Reform having won Runcorn and Helsby by an incredibly tight six vote margin), four mayoralties (three wins for Labour and one for Reform) and two councils (both lost by the Conservatives, one to Reform and one to no overall control). On that basis news websites are running stories about how “the Reform revolution has begun” and predicting the demise of Keir Starmer’s government less than a year after its landslide victory. Yet later on today we are likely to see other elements of the story emerge: the scale of Conservative losses and the prospect of the Liberal Democrats becoming the second largest party in local government.
All of this gives rise to two risks. The first is that, for the government, the early narrative of these elections – Reform is up at Labour’s expense, threatening to take power nationally – gets set in aspic and starts to assume the status of political law in Westminster. The second is that, in response to this simplistic telling of a complex election results story, the government feels compelled into a hasty response and as a result is blown off course from what it was elected last year to deliver.
So what should the Prime Minister do? As Margaret Thatcher said to the first President Bush, “this is no time to go wobbly”. The underlying fundamentals of British politics, and of the challenges facing our economy and society, have not changed overnight. Nor should the government’s prescription for addressing them.
This is not to counsel complacency nor that the Prime Minister should effectively stick his fingers in his ears and ignore the national mood around him. It’s not to say that in the face of what is clearly considerable electoral volatility, the government should not change anything at all and plough on regardless. A politically astute government should always be aware of public opinion and shifting trends, and adapt accordingly. But this should be an adaptation of tactics, not strategy.
Keir Starmer doesn’t need to look far to see what a panicked response to Reform’s rise achieves. Over in the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch is testing to destruction the strategy of saying “Nigel Farage is right; don’t vote for him”. The challenge for Starmer and his team remains to articulate and deliver a progressive alternative to Farage, not a lite version of what he is offering to the country.
In doing this, Labour needs to remember it has one major advantage that its rivals to the right (and left) do not have: it is in government in Westminster, with its hands on the levers of power. It can act, while at national level the other parties – as Labour politicians and advisers know all too well themselves from 14 years of opposition – can only talk.
Labour must use that to its advantage and outdo its opponents not on rhetoric, but on delivery. That must not lapse into deliverism – the technocratic pointing at graphs and spreadsheets in the expectation that voters will be suitably grateful, that undid Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the USA. The government needs to focus on meaningfully making good on its promises, in ways that connect with people, which they feel and which they attribute back to the actions of the state.
The real challenge Labour has in achieving this is that the central means it has to deliver – the British state itself – is on its knees. Those levers of power are not working, and the machinery of government is not set up to deliver the radical reform the country needs. In the coming hours and weeks siren voices are likely to say that such talk is inward-looking and technocratic; a luxury that cannot be afforded in tough times. In fact, the opposite is true: the challenging nature of the current context makes it more urgent, not less, that the Prime Minister follows through on his commitment to rewire the state. As our Director Nathan argued last week, now is the time for Starmer to double down on that commitment, and “turn government inside out”.
If he can do that, there is hope for the future of progressive government. And the Labour UK government can take heart from recent reversals elsewhere in the world of the trend against incumbents retaining power. My colleague Shuab has identified some of the lessons we can draw from the incredible resurrection of the Liberal Party in Canada, and this weekend we may well see Australian Labor’s Anthony Albanese defy the odds and return to power. The death of progressive government looks like it might have been exaggerated.
That’s why, rather than panicking, the Prime Minister and his team should keep those “cool heads” he spoke about recently and stick to the political programme on which he was elected convincingly last year. As results continue to come in from this latest set of elections, Keir Starmer doesn’t need to rip up his strategy; he needs to hold his nerve.
