Local Elections: ‘Keir Starmer’s Rightward Shift Is Laying the Ground for Nigel Farage’

Now we can see with the real clarity of votes at the ballot box, what the consequences are of a Labour Government that responds to the economy’s deep-seated problems with yet more cuts to pensioners’ winter fuel payments and attacks on disabled people.

Runcorn and Helsby was one of the most rock-solid of Labour seats. But less than a year into Keir Starmer’s Government, Labour’s 14,700-vote majority has been demolished, with a 17% swing to Reform and Labour’s share of the vote down from 52.9% to 38.7%. Even if Labour had somehow narrowly held on, the fact that Runcorn & Helsby was even in contention is an indication that something is going very badly wrong.

The signs have been there for months. Polling heading south, Keir Starmer’s satisfaction ratings at rock bottom, council by-elections with Labour’s vote in freefall, even in seats the party held onto. The boost that Scottish Labour enjoyed at the prospect of a UK Labour Government has evaporated. 

Nigel Farage Is Killing the Conservative Party and Starmer Must Change Course to Avoid the Same Fate

Telling voters that the Reform leader is right, but they shouldn’t vote for him anyway, is no more likely to work for Labour than it has for the Conservatives, argues Adam Bienkov

Adam Bienkov

Now with a slew of elections taking place on one night there is a much clearer sense of the impact of Labour’s ten months in charge. Not only has the party lost its first by-election test in Runcorn and Helsby in dramatic terms but it is in trouble on many other fronts. 

The night began with Labour losing a council by-election in Hartlepool, setting the scene for some very bad results in the North. Labour’s majority in the North Tyneside mayoralty was slashed, a post that was not previously considered in contention. In Northumberland the party lost twelve seats, down to eight, whilst Durham has been a bloodbath. Labour’s Ros Jones held the Doncaster mayor on a sharply cut majority, prompting her to say that the winter fuel payment cuts were wrong and that Labour needed to listen to what people are saying. 

However, sadly all the signs are that Labour’s leadership is still not listening. Instead, their script for the broadcast rounds was to argue that Labour was taking the tough choices the country needed after years of Conservative mistakes and that the Government needs to go much further and faster with its current approach. In this, members of the Cabinet will merely compound the growing public view that they are out of touch and complacent. 

It is the Government’s current direction that is the problem, not its rapidity. Further and faster down the wrong path is the height of political wrong-headedness. The repeated lesson of Labour governments – and indeed left of centre governments around the world – is that voters expect them to improve their living standards and when they do not, they withdraw their support. Labour in the 2020s has not somehow magically leapt out of this political reality. 

Public opinion hardened against Labour over the winter fuel payment cut, which was Rachel Reeves’ emblematic first major mistake. Now Labour intends to keep going, with a spending review in June and a vote imminent on its huge programme of welfare cuts.

“On every door it was the same story – winter fuel and PIP,” reported the BBC’s Henry Zeffman from Runcorn, referring to the £5-6 billion planned cuts to payments to disabled people. 

EXCLUSIVE

Reform UK Facebook Groups Are Full of Racist Far Right Posts and Islamophobic Conspiracy Theories

Groups set up by Reform UK officials contain posts calling for Muslims to be lynched and suggestions that Jewish people are trying to “dilute out country with foreign invaders”

Olly Haynes

There are lessons that can be drawn from this, even if Labour won’t listen to them. One is that it is simply not possible to out-Reform Reform. Labour went into the Runcorn and Helsby by-election campaigning on a Reform demand of shutting a hotel housing asylum seekers. It is less than a year since riots saw asylum seekers attacked in their accommodation. Labour’s adoption of Reform’s messaging only assists the right’s framing of immigration and asylum issues, and opens the door wider to Reform. It also does not work. Over two thousand votes were cast for the Greens in Runcorn. Those Green votes would have been more than enough to see off Reform’s majority if Labour’s appeal included these voters. 

Indeed, although Reform will dominate the headlines today, Labour has created a problem of softness within its own base that makes it vulnerable to other parties to a larger extent than Nigel Farage’s party.  Recent research from Persuasion UK concluded that there are approaching three or four times as many 2024 Labour voters who are considering switching to the LibDems or Greens than those to Reform, with about 11% of the Labour vote shown to be ‘Reform curious.’ The core Reform vote is by contrast solidly anti-Labour. 

Persuasion’s findings bear out what is happening to politics as a consequence of Labour’s economics. What potentially binds together the Reform-curious sections of Labour’s 2024 vote with Lib Dem/Green-curious Labour voters is support for clearer interventionist economic policies such as investment in public services and wealth taxation. Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer stand in contradiction to that potential alliance with Reeves’ iron straitjacket of fiscal rules and the ‘tough choices’ designed to meet them.

The Government’s domestic problems flow overwhelmingly from its economic framework. Ruling out progressive taxation and redistribution has led to the cancellation of pensioners’ winter fuel payments, eliminating the £2 bus fare cap, retention of the two-child benefit cap, and a programme of departmental spending cuts that is yet to be fully announced, including more loathed welfare cuts.

General Government investment is projected to be falling by the end of this Parliament according to the figures released alongside Rachel Reeves’ spring statement. Growth is minimal. And by using no levers to raise up household living standards the majority of the population feels no better off, and have no sense of whether and when they ever will be. It is a sign of how far off kilter this Government is that it can find more money for higher defence spending while cutting welfare for the poorest.

Not only is Downing Street not listening on policy, but there are rumours that Keir Starmer will pivot into a reshuffle in order to try to shift the agenda onto his own terms. That is unlikely to offer genuine change either. Each of Starmer’s reshuffles to date has moved Labour further rightwards. Indeed, Labour’s strategists will no doubt see the results as confirmation that they should continue to tack even further in that direction. Such a move will only compound the very problems that voters are shouting at them about. 

All of this matters not because of any sentimental concern for the Labour Party but because the party’s current course is creating the conditions for the Faragists to thrive and drag politics even further rightwards. Opposition to Labour’s approach from the left is a necessary reaction to the hard right’s exploitation of Labour’s mistakes.

If Labour were listening to what their critics on the left have been saying for many months now, it would respond to the results last night by delivering change with policies that transform the economic situation, and use the wealth that exists in British society to shift the balance in favour of the majority. It would move faster on tackling and adapting to climate change and it would halt the welfare cuts. If it were listening.