Labour has been battered, but moving right is not the lesson of the local elections

What is left of Labour?

Labour and the Tories have had a shocker of a local elections, with Reform sweeping councils across the country.

While Sir Keir Starmer’s party won the majority of its mayoralty battles, it still lost a Labour stronghold in Runcorn and Helsby, and the Conservatives could only manage a dismal second in Greater Lincolnshire, with former minister and now Reform ultra Andrea Jenkyns becoming mayor with a majority of almost 40,000.

Nigel Farage has described the results as an “earthquake”, but in truth they are more of a fracture. It was a disastrous night for the Labour party, the fault lines are visible, but they could yet put in place the foundations for change.

Due to Farage’s involvement in this, there will be lots of rash conclusions in the coming days, and calls for reflection. People will say it's because of immigration. Voters were fed up of woke. In reality, these are almost insignificant factors, at least according to what canvassers were hearing on the doorstep. The public weren’t worried about trans people being able to play cricket, they just felt poor before the election and that things had gotten even worse since.

Labour came in with a mandate for change, a promise to build a better Britain, and instead they’ve stripped away support for the poorest, all in the name of sound financial management. That was not on the ballot box. Volunteers were not galvanised because they thought benefits had gone too far, they didn’t kick the Tories out dreaming of cutting foreign aid.

Some in the party think these results are a sign to go further, meeting voters where they are. But given Jenkyns suggested putting migrants in tents instead of hotels, those in Blue Labour must ask themselves, what sort of party do they actually want to be?

Reform UK's Dame Andrea Jenkyns also mocked the accent of a rival candidate

It is of course easier to say that from the sidelines, as the SNP are wont to do, despite being a government set to face the very same issues, a frustrated public who recognise the impact of global events, but still expect competency, if not good-will. Failing to deliver in Scotland is also what saw the party monstered last year, with the SNP routinely missing its targets on everything from ferries to child poverty, from net zero to cutting car use. They are a Government built on winning, not governing, and Labour, if they continue to behave like this, are going to let them get away with it.

All the failures of policy, the chaotic changes of leader, the streaming football on iPads, the ministerial cars to games, it’s seemingly faded in importance with recency bias.

The key question is how to respond to it. It is not, as some are already arguing, to embrace the politics of division. Labour was a close second in many of its seats. It does not need to put on the clothing of the wolf. It needs to dress as it actually is, if it even knows, and bring voters over by improving their lives, rather than smiling while actively making them worse.