LAST WEEK’s local elections were a seismic shock to both Labour and the Conservatives — who are often and not unfairly considered as two faces of the same political coin — with massive wins for the far-right Reform.

Much media analysis has focused on the Tories’ collapse, as they traditionally dominate county council elections and had most seats to lose, but Labour also collapsed, falling to 81 seats — a net loss of 172 seats — only 12 ahead of the Greens and just one above the number of independents, who performed well in some areas. 

In at least 81 wards, particularly in the south-west, Labour did not manage to get even a single vote.

Labour’s collapse was also catastrophic in percentage terms, not just in the number of seats. According to expert psephologist John Curtice, Labour’s vote share was just 14 per cent. Early projections had put Labour at 20 per cent, which would have already been its worst since the 1980s.

These were quickly adjusted to 19 per cent, which would have been the party’s worst local election performance in 124 years since records began — so the final result five points lower than that was catastrophic for Keir Starmer’s party.

The extent of the wipeout of Labour and the Tories is hard to overstate. Of the 23 councils contested, Reform UK won eight (including, Kent, Staffordshire, Doncaster, Durham, Lincolnshire, Hull and East Yorkshire); Lib Dems three; and all the others were in “no overall control” even among which, councils like Leicestershire announced that Reform would be in charge — neither Labour nor the Tories held even one by the end of last week.  

Of the six mayoral contests — two city mayors and four metro areas — Labour fell to third to lose Cambridgeshire and Peterborough to the otherwise-disastrous Conservatives, held onto Doncaster by fewer than 700 votes with a vote share dwarfed by the combined Reform-Tory share, north Tyneside by just over 400, just held on in West of England and placed third or worse in all the others.

The results were not without their comedic aspects. Some Reform candidates were reported as highly upset at wins they didn’t expect, as poorly remunerated council duties would interfere with their highly paid jobs that they didn’t want to lose or curtail. But overall, the results were grim, not because of the losses of Labour and the Tories, whose political bankruptcy was rightly punished, but because that political bankruptcy has gifted such a surge to the extreme right.

Nigel Farage’s party won, from zero, over 600 seats, including both new mayoral contests and control of eight councils. But just as Starmer’s Labour won a massive parliamentary majority in the 2024 general election on a poor share of a low turnout, Reform’s seat gains do not reflect mass popularity with voters. 

As election analyst Prof Will Jennings has pointed out, the threshold (median vote share required) for a win last week had “fallen to the lowest level since records began — to just above 45 per cent.”

As Jennings has also pointed out, Reform’s performance last week may have been a “seismic shock to the political status quo,” but Reform’s results look very familiar because they closely mirror the local election results for Ukip in 2017, in which Ukip performed most strongly in working-class areas and those with fewer university graduates.

The major difference between 2017 and 2025 is an obvious one. Ukip’s performance in the local elections came just a month before Jeremy Corbyn stunned the political and media classes by coming within a few thousand votes of a win in the 2017 general election. Corbyn’s expected hammering in that election turned into the “Corbyn surge” as election rules forced media to give less biased coverage to Labour’s politics and policies and the buzz they created led to huge crowds turning out every time Corbyn showed his face, despite the smears of his opponents and attempted sabotage from within Labour’s own ranks.

Voters, weary and disgusted after seven years of Tory austerity, were excited by the prospect of real change for the better and turned out in their millions to give Labour its biggest gain in votes since 1945 and a vote share comparable with the best that Tony Blair achieved even in 1997.

Now, with the Corbyn years for most voters a dim memory eclipsed by the drabness and dishonesty of Keir Starmer’s leadership and disgust with his policies and broken promises swollen by almost a year of his government, voters are being fooled by the rhetoric and supposed insurgency of Reform.

The average voter is unaware of the fact that Reform’s plans for the NHS and for the working class are just as dangerous and damaging as those of the Tories and Starmer’s Labour. Reform’s laughable anti-Establishment claims make the party at least look different from the red and blue status quo and without a significant political voice prepared to point out the evils of its racism and its Trumpian policies and hypocrisy, enough voters who cannot stomach the status quo have turned to Farage’s outfit.

Starmer has made clear that he has no intention of recognising, much less filling, the vacuum on the left that voters will flood to fill given the chance. Instead, he wrote an article in the Murdoch press signalling that he will lurch even further to the right in pursuit of voters who support racist immigration policies, which he imagines means all of those who voted for Reform.

This leaves a clear opportunity for the left, but also highlights the left’s failure since Corbyn to either articulate its vision, policies and difference to the wider electorate or to organise to present them at local or national level. What can be achieved when we do is shown by the successes of independent candidates in these and earlier local elections and in last year’s general election, and in the gains of the Greens last week. 

What can be achieved when the left unites was seen in last year’s French parliamentary elections, but more than five years on from the end of Corbyn’s Labour leadership, there is still no identifiable, genuinely left party or coalition that is effectively filling the huge hole that Labour, the Tories and Reform are leaving open in Britain.

This is not to allocate blame. The media landscape is intentionally shaped against the emergence of such a left entity and against it making its voice heard as widely as it would need to if it did emerge. But we are where we are and the sole encouragement of last week is that it made the need for left politics clearer than ever, for those willing to look. We need a new left political party.

The struggle is ours and with the forces stacked against it the gaping wound in our society and its politics will not fill itself. The left must get itself organised and it must do so now.

Claudia Webbe was previously the member of Parliament for Leicester East (2019-24). You can follow her at www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE and x.com/claudiawebbe.