By KD Tait

Keir Starmer won 411 seats and a huge parliamentary majority in July 2024 on a single promise: ‘change’. On 7 May, voters answered: what change? Their verdict was one of Labour’s worst results in modern history.

Local elections in Britain have always had a double meaning. They judge councils that empty bins, organise care, manage housing lists and pass planning decisions. But councils operate inside a state machine that keeps real power in Whitehall and the Treasury. No wonder millions use local elections as the only referendum on Westminster between general elections.

The BBC’s projected national vote share put Reform on 26 per cent, the Greens on 18, Labour and the Tories on 17, and the Lib Dems on 16. Sky’s national equivalent vote suggested that, if repeated in a general election, the result would produce a hung parliament with Reform as the largest party: 284 seats, Labour on 110, the Tories 96, Lib Dems 80 and Greens 13.

Hubris

This was more than the usual mid-term tantrum priced in by governing parties. Labour’s 2024 landslide was always weaker than it looked: not a popular mandate for the empty vessel of Starmerism, but the product of a split right-wing vote, low turnout and a first-past-the-post system that turns minority support into parliamentary domination.

The political ‘geniuses’ around Morgan McSweeney and Labour Together mistook an inflated majority for popular consent. Now Labour has been punished in every direction.

To its right, Reform has broken out of protest politics and into local administration. Farage’s party feeds on anger created by collapsing services, insecure work, housing scarcity and a Labour government that offers no future. Its answer is reaction: attacks on migrants, Muslims, refugees, ‘woke councils’, net zero and trade union rights.

More dangerous still, a British ruling class faced with a discredited Labour government and a hollowed-out Tory party could turn to Farage as the next vehicle for austerity, racism and Atlanticist nationalism. When Labour accepts the limits set by the markets, the Treasury and Nato, and joins the right in treating immigration as the problem, it legitimises Farage’s attack lines. The crisis in housing, services and the NHS is not caused by migrants or refugees but by austerity, privatisation, landlordism and decades of underinvestment. By refusing to name those causes, Labour leaves Reform to turn social anger into racism and reaction.

But Labour was also punished to its left. The Greens advanced in cities, among renters, younger voters and communities radicalised by Palestine, climate breakdown and the cost of living crisis. Their gains in Hackney, Lewisham and other Labour strongholds express a rejection of Labour’s policies and contempt for its supporters.

What comes next?

Now comes the real test. Green councillors and mayors will be told there is no money. If they accept that framework, they will administer capitalist austerity with better press releases. If they want to represent the people who elected them, they must refuse cuts, open the books, mobilise tenants, workers and service users, and demand that the Labour government restores the local government grant cut since 2010.

Every Green council, every Labour council and every independent left councillor faces the same choice: manage decline or organise resistance.

Inside Labour, the knives are out. Starmer and Reeves have taken Labour to disaster. Demands for policies that “help working people” are, belatedly, being made by everyone from Unison general secretary Andrea Egan to right-wing MPs like Josh Simons.

But here too the central question is being evaded. Serious reforms now mean confrontation with capital. Restoring council funding means taxing wealth, profits and property. Ending poverty means confronting landlords, banks and the City. A serious foreign policy break means ending arms sales to Israel, opposing Nato rearmament and refusing Britain’s role as Washington’s junior partner. Maintaining climate commitments means taking energy, water and land into social ownership and running them under democratic planning.

The Labour left, union leaders and new formations to Labour’s left cannot simply call for left-wing policies without explaining how they would be defended against the markets, courts, civil service, press and Labour right. The lesson of the last decade is not that a left-talking leader should manage the same machine. It is that working-class politics needs its own organisation, programme and power.

The Socialist Campaign Group and Trade Union Coordinating Group have put forward a 10-point programme of mild reforms, alongside demands to ‘restore’ Labour Party democracy. The programme barely touches what is needed to combat the rising cost of living and youth unemployment, now 15.8 per cent. The democracy demand ignores Labour Together’s grip on the parliamentary party and the Millbank machine.

The first electoral test of Your Party underlined the same problem. Despite courageous and energetic campaigns by socialists backed by Your Party branches, especially in London, Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership refused to turn the new party into a clear national challenge to Labour rooted in unions, workplaces and campaigns. Instead it offered scattered personal endorsements, local deals and a deliberately limited strategy.

The result was not a fighting political alternative but another proof, as if one were needed, that Labourism survives outside its host party: electoral combination over class organisation, personal intrigue over political principle.

Times are changing

The splintering of the old two-party system reflects the exhaustion of the settlement that held Britain together after Thatcher and Blair. British capitalism is weaker, more dependent, more regionally divided and more unsure of its place in the world. Brexit was the sharpest expression of that crisis: not a solution, but a moment in the ruling-class struggle over whether Britain should align more closely with the European Union or the United States.

The Conservatives can no longer monopolise the right. Labour can no longer monopolise the working-class vote. Substantial parts of Scotland and Wales are deeply alienated from Westminster and its parties. Metropolitan centres, deindustrialised towns and rural counties are moving in different political directions. First past the post can distort this process, but it cannot hide it forever.

Changing the leader will not solve Labour’s problem. An Andy Burnham, Angela Rayner or Wes Streeting leadership might change the tone. But unless Labour breaks with fiscal restraint, rearmament, refugee-bashing and partnership with business, it will remain trapped inside the same crisis.

That crisis will deepen as the Iran war and the energy shock hit Britain. The labour movement needs a different answer. Trade unions should demand an emergency programme: restore council funding; impose price controls on rent and essentials; raise wages and benefits and link them to prices; build council housing; tax wealth; nationalise energy, water, transport and the banks under democratic and workers’ control; scrap the anti-union laws; and cut the mushrooming defence budget, including a ban on all military exports.

But demands on Labour are not enough. Workers need organisation in workplaces, estates and unions capable of forcing them through. Councillors who claim to oppose austerity should refuse to vote for cuts and help build local resistance. The unions should stop funding politicians who attack their members and start organising coordinated action against the government and employers.

The need for a new working-class socialist party has not gone away. It has become more acute since Labour took office. For now, it is blocked by trade union leaders and left MPs who refuse to break from Labour, and by Jeremy Corbyn himself, who squandered the opportunity to build such a party in order to protect his own unaccountability.

These elections show that millions are looking for a way out. If the working-class movement does not provide one, Farage will. That is the message of 7 May.