ALL THE evidence suggests that the May 1 elections were a grim night for Labour. Just as regrettable, it seems that it was also a very good night for Reform UK.

As a result, there is very little comfort to be drawn from the knowledge that the Tories are completely failing to recover from their near-death experience in the 2024 general election. It seems unlikely that the final tallies will alter this overall verdict.

They key question is where we do we go from here? A responsible leadership would accept that it needs to change course to avoid further local government disasters and ultimately a national disaster in the general elected expected to be in 2029.

Unfortunately, there seems to be no indication that the Labour leadership is even willing to recognise reality, let alone change course. The captain of the Titanic also knew the ship was heading towards an iceberg area but refused to change course because of his inner beliefs.

Disaster followed. Without a change of course, the Labour leadership is leading the party towards disaster.

It is important to analyse the election results objectively. Too much self-serving “analysis” of elections on the right is nothing of the sort, but simply a collection of clichés and spurious assertions to arrive at a preconceived outcome. Facts are largely absent.

Even though the final results are not yet in, it is clear that Labour is being punished for its record in office.  

We have lost safe seats and had huge majorities overturned. According to Professor John Curtice, the results were very much in line with national opinion polls, implying Labour is on 24 per cent and Reform a point or two ahead and the Tories a point or two further back.

In terms of the actual votes cast Reform UK won 39 per cent, well ahead of all other parties. But these seats were overwhelmingly in Tory territory.

It is the Tories who will have lost seats in far greater numbers than Labour. Their vote is estimated to be 25 per cent lower than in 2021. Contrary to persistent myth making by the Labour right and their friends in the media, this gives the lie to the claim that Reform is mainly taking votes and seats from Labour.

Comparisons are also helpful, with the last time these seats were contested being in 2021. Then they were so bad that in May 2021, it is reported that Keir Starmer considered resigning because of the outcome of the local elections and the defeat in the Hartlepool by-election. Reportedly, he thought Labour was going backwards under his leadership.

In 2021 Labour won just 17 per cent of the seats contested and suffered net losses of 327 council seats of 5,000 being contested. This year Labour will have lost far fewer seats because just 1,640 are being contested. This is less than a third of the 2021 total as some elections have been postponed due to local government reorganisation.

The proper way to understand these results is to see them as losses from what was already that disastrous low point, disastrous enough to consider resignation.

On the by-elections, Hartlepool in 2021 was a shock, the biggest sting to an incumbent party in the post-WWII era. It was widely attributed to voter disillusion with Starmer in opposition, and abandonment of all the popular policies of the Cobyn era (apart from by Peter Mandelson, who tried to blame Jeremy Corbyn for the defeat).

This time around Labour was defending the seat (Runcorn and Helsby). But a 35 per cent majority was overturned and Reform UK were the winners. This alone ought to prompt a sharp rethink among the Labour leadership.

At same time, it is estimated that even though Labour were defending just 300 local council seats, it may have lost up to half of them, according to Curtice.

While it is clear that the Labour Party did very badly, we should not expect a change of leadership this time around either. But we are entitled to expect some genuine assessment of why it is all going so badly wrong for Labour. Unfortunately, under this stewardship an honest accounting of current failings cannot be expected either. All the indications are that the current leadership will double down on policies that are clearly failing spectacularly.

The Guardian reports that a number of Labour MPs are unhappy with the focus on immigration and deportations. We are alienating our core voters by being too right wing. But the Labour leadership led with immigration in the final days of the campaign in a clear effort to outdo Reform UK.

The Labour MPs pointing to Labour’s losses to Greens, Lib Dems and others, especially pro-Gaza independents, were simply ignored.

But “Number 10,” which usually means Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, rejects this out of hand. Resorting to the age-old device of “private polling,” they argue that this issue is close to the top of voters’ concerns.

Of course it is. It has been pushed there by the stance of the leadership of all the main parties. It is completely self-fulfilling to campaign relentlessly on small boats and then say that they are a key concern to voters.

The flipside of this approach is the vow of silence taken on all the other issues that matter to voters, the cost of living, pay, public services, job security, energy bills, welfare cuts and so on. But the Labour secretaries of state for health, education, welfare and others were virtually absent from the airwaves.

This is because the focus on small boats is a complete distraction from these issues. It is a conscious effort to move the conversation away from these other pressing concerns because they have nothing positive to offer.

However, reducing politics to a spurious crisis around small boats is precisely playing into Reform UK’s hands. They only have one policy, which is to blame all society’s ills on migration, whether documented or undocumented, current or even historical.

It is an iron law of politics that, if you let your opponents set the agenda, they win. This is what the Labour leadership did.

We also do not need any mythical private polling to tell where copying Reform UK leads.

The May 1 elections were a large real-world experiment on the effects of Labour matching Reform’s messaging. It has led to disaster.

A radical and rapid political reorientation for Labour is needed. Otherwise, further disasters lie ahead.

Diane Abbott is Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington.