LATIKA M BOURKE: UK council poll shows Starmer’s Labour headed for wipeout

Ten years after voting for Brexit, the same voters are still dissatisfied and are continuing to buy whatever it is that Nigel Farage is selling.

On Thursday, British voters went to the polls in local elections in Scotland and Wales.

Not all the results are in. But the early counts held the best news for Reform, which gained more than 300 seats while Labour lost more than 200.

Reform’s heartlands are Labour’s old stomping grounds, the north, where working-class voters 10 years ago voted for Brexit, then for Boris Johnson and following his ousting as Conservative leader and prime minister — Reform.

In Hartlepool in north-east England, Reform won all of the 12 seats up for grabs. In Tameside, in Greater Manchester, where Angela Rayner, one of the touted replacements for Keir Starmer is the MP, Reform grabbed 18 of the 19 seats on offer, leaving Labour with one.

In Newcastle-under-Lyme, a barometer seat that voted for Brexit, then for Boris Johnson in the 2019 Brexit election and for Labour in 2024, Reform won 27 of the 44 seats, the Conservatives won 15, and Labour managed two.

In Wigan, which is represented in the House of Commons by four Labour MPs, every one of the 20 seats up went to Reform.

This will be a serious jolt for Andy Burnham, the so-called King of the North and Manchester Mayor who is the soft-left’s star candidate to succeed Starmer.

But Burnham has been blocked by Labour’s head honchos from running for the Commons. These results could hasten an MP to step aside and allow Burnham to run, but they also show that a by-election victory, i.e. a safe Labour seat in Manchester, can no longer be guaranteed.

Nigel Farage said yesterday’s politics were gone.

“Forget left-right. There is no more left-right. It’s gone, it’s out of the window, it’s finished. As you can see, we are scoring stunning percentages in traditional old Labour areas,” he said.

“We’re way exceeding anything that I thought. This is happening right across the north. What you’ll see tomorrow is the same pattern repeated across the south … It is the most huge change in British politics.”

The results show that Reform is an established and durable force in British politics. It is no one-off, and Labour and the Conservatives cannot rely on an implosion or internal personality clash for survival.

The party has been leading in the polls for more than a year, although the size of that lead had come down from a high of 33 per cent last October to 28 per cent in May 2026, according to More in Common.

“This isn’t just a risk to lose a Labour government; We could lose the Labour Party,” John McDonnell, a hard-left MP who was a key lieutenant of the former leader Jeremy Corbyn said on LBC radio.

“It’s a pretty brutal set of results for Labour. Let’s see the final count but there’s a clear direction of travel. Labour’s not cutting through with the public and the stranglehold of the two-party system is gone,” Ayesha Hazarika, a Labour peer, said on Sky UK.

But she doubted this meant an instant political death for Starmer.

“I can’t see a big coup taking place in the immediate future. I don’t think there’s one candidate ready to go.

“Unlike our sister party in Australia, knifing sitting prime ministers is not in the DNA of the Labour Party and Keir Starmer will really dig in. But more of the same is clearly not tenable.”

Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy attempted to provide reassurance by likening the government to a plane flight in mid-air, telling the BBC: “You don’t change the pilot during the flight.”

The results in Scotland, Wales and councils where the Greens are expected to do well will be instructive for how soon or not Starmer goes.

But Starmer’s inadequacy for the job is concealing a greater issue for British Labour. Early counting in London suggests their metropolitan base is not punishing the party in the same way voters in the north are.

It is impossible to imagine that Keir Starmer will go head-to-head against Nigel Farage by the time of the next general election, which is not due until August 2029.

The party must between now and then accept that under the status quo, it cannot hope to hold onto a progressive inner-city base as well as the working classes it purports to represent. The next leader cannot hope to bridge this divide by personality alone.

And the MPs who have frustrated Starmer’s attempts to cut welfare spending must decide if they want to enable their government to make some drastic decisions — such as on immigration, welfare spending and economic policy — that would show the voters they don’t need to vote for populism to break and reform the system.