Bruised From Both Sides

In a surprise to absolutely no one, the 2026 Local Elections proved to be bruising and punishing to Labour. With the majority of the votes now counted, Labour have found themselves with around 1500 seats lost, a projected national vote share of only 17% (below both Reform at 27% and the Greens at 18%), Labour out of power in Wales for the first time ever, Scotland results setting us even further back there, and a wave of calls telling Starmer to do one thing: go.

I opened here by saying that this is no surprise to anyone. We all knew Reform would gain scores of seats and the Greens would punish Labour in urban areas. Indeed, with Reform gaining 1450 seats and the Greens gaining around 450, this has certainly been the case. But why? Why should this come as no surprise?

Before we get too carried away with the ritual armchair bloodletting, it is worth stating something that feels increasingly alien in modern political commentary: Labour have actually done quite a lot. In fact, in legislative terms, the Government has moved on a number of areas that would have been considered significant progressive reforms not long ago, and really still ought to be. The Employment Rights Act has brought in new protections for workers, including day-one paternity and parental leave, stronger statutory sick pay, greater protection from unfair dismissal, an end to the draconian and exploitative zero-hours contracts, and a new right to bereavement leave. This is really meaningful, material legislation.

The same is true of renters’ rights where, as of May 1^st, Section 21 no fault evictions can no longer be used in England, landlords must give a reason for evicting tenants, advance rent is capped at one month, and tenants have new rights around pets and tenancy security. Again, for a generation of people treated less like human beings and more like inconvenient furniture in someone else’s asset portfolio, this is incredibly important and a vital foundation for the long-term fight for tenants’ rights. It may not yet (understandably) feel revolutionary when rent still consumes half your pay, but it still remains a concrete shift in the balance of power.

On housing, too, the Government has at least attempted to face the beast rather than simply asking it whether it might stop eating young people’s futures. The planning reforms announced in December are the biggest rewrite in over a decade, with the explicit aim of accelerating progress towards 1.5 million homes over this Parliament. Brownfield development, density around transport hubs, and faster approval for good-quality projects are hardly the stuff of revolutionary folk songs, and I can’t personally see Phil Ochs rising from the ground to create a new tune about it, but they do at least recognise the basic problem: Britain has spent decades treating housebuilding as though shelter were an optional lifestyle accessory rather than the cornerstone of a functioning society. Thatcher, on this front (and many, many others) has an awful to answer for. Who knew selling off council homes and not replacing them would be an issue? Anyway.

Then there’s Great British Energy, the new publicly owned clean energy company, which represents precisely the kind of state-led industrial ambition Labour should be shouting about from the rooftops, and ideally rooftops with solar panels on them. A publicly owned clean energy company, investment in renewables, community energy, and attempts to cut bills through domestic energy security are all exactly the sort of practical, progressive, patriotic politics Labour should be selling. It is not abstract eco-communism that Reform would have you believe, nor is it the undergraduate cosplay the Greens would try and sell you. Rather, it is the state doing something useful because the market, left to its own devices, has an extraordinary habit of producing massive dividends for shareholders and destitution for everyone else.

Now I know I know, this all sounds very much “Oh, the adults are back in the room” type of tripe that people hate. Indeed, here lies the problem: politics is not marked like coursework. You do not get a 2:1 for good legislative intent while the electorate waits for tangible substance. People do not feel better off because a government press release says they soon might. They feel better off when the direct debit stops making them wince, when the GP appointment exists, when the pothole is filled before it gets its fifth birthday cake, and when a trip to the Co-op no longer requires the kind of financial modelling usually reserved for nuclear submarines (honestly, the co-op were charging £5.50 for mini eggs, what is that about).

Labour has done things, this much is true and fairly well documented (even if not as in the public eye as we may wish). The issue is that, for millions of people, those things have either not arrived yet, not gone far enough, or have been drowned out by the sheer noise of daily exhaustion and petty squabbles too often at the heart of government.

There is an impatience in the electorate that can feel unfair and fickle at times. Labour inherited the political equivalent of a rental flat after fourteen years of student tenants, with walls stained, a boiler broken, something suspicious in the fridge and a landlord insisting it was “like that when we got here”. Brexit, austerity, Liz Truss, crumbling local government, NHS backlogs, stagnant wages, sewage in rivers, collapsing trust, and an economy seemingly held together by crossed fingers. To expect this to be repaired in two years is, frankly, absurd.

But voters are not patient project managers. They are tired, angry people living inside the consequences of a catalogue of missteps and sleaze. That is the cruel reality of government. You inherit the mess, but you also inherit responsibility for clearing it up. “Well, we didn’t cause this” may be true but, after a while, it starts to sound like telling someone whose house is flooding that, technically, the pipe was fitted by the last plumber. Correct, perhaps, but of absolutely zero comfort. That’s why the last guy was sacked, you’re here to fix it.

This is where Labour has made life so much harder for itself. The Government needed ruthless message discipline, emotional intelligence and a constant sense that it understood the country’s pain. Instead, it has too often given the impression of a managerial class steadying a ship of managed decline. The Mandelson appointment was a particularly needless self-inflicted wound because it only reinforced a broader perception that Labour still has a strange instinct to reach for the haunted ornaments of the New Labour attic when what the country needs is clarity, urgency and renewal.

Beyond all of this, the good, the bad, and the ugly, sits a deeper truth. Namely, that you can have the best political communication operation in the world and it will still fail if people do not feel better off. A brilliant slogan cannot pay the electric bill. A ministerial visit in a hi-vis jacket (I love Ed Milliband, but he really doesn’t suit hi-vis) cannot make a voter believe in change if most aspects of their life still feel stagnant. Delivery matters, of course, but felt delivery matters more, and Labour’s task was never merely to govern competently but to go further and make competence feel like hope and change. At present, it has too often made it feel like administration.

So why Reform? Why, faced with a country battered by underinvestment, weak public services and insecure work, have so many voters turned to a party whose economic pamphlet risks worsening precisely those problems? The answer is depressingly simple and well covered in previous articles: Reform offers explanation, emotion and enemy. Labour offers process. One fits neatly into a clip shared on Facebook by someone called “Patriots Against the Woke Mind Virus” while the other requires an implementation timetable. The latter is, clearly, how you govern, but it isn’t sexy, appealing or comforting (3 things I wish I was, but there you go).

The problem is that Reform’s answers are not serious answers. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (I know, actual sources! We’re going upmarket today…) warned that Reform’s economic offer amounts to very large tax cuts funded by large and often unspecified cuts to public services, with the personal allowance pledge alone potentially costing £50 billion to £80 billion a year. The IFS also noted that this vision would involve spending cuts going far beyond simply “cracking down on waste”. In other words, the party posing as the defender of ordinary people risks offering a programme that would make the state smaller, public services weaker and the lives of many of its own voters so much harder.

But, again, Labour has not helped itself here. By accepting too much of Reform’s framing, particularly on immigration, borders and “toughness”, Labour has allowed the ground to shift beneath its feet and has sat arguably idle as the Overton Window pivots ever further Right. It has tried, at times, to sound like the sensible version of an argument that should have been challenged more directly. That is a losing game that wins no one over and bleeds votes and trust. If the electorate wants the politics of grievance, it will usually choose the original pint of grievance over the low-calorie supermarket own-brand version. Labour’s job is not to legitimise Reform’s worldview with better manners. Rather, we need to be far bolder and expose it as a dead end: a politics of anger that turns pain sideways, away from power, and towards those with even less of it.

The Greens, meanwhile, have eaten into Labour from the other side. Their success is just as easy to understand emotionally. They offer many disillusioned left-wing voters a release valve. In urban areas, among younger voters, renters and graduates, they have become a natural protest vehicle, and the 2026 results show that clearly. Green support was strongest in areas with younger populations, higher education levels and more renters.

The difficulty is that protest is not the same as government. The Greens are very good at being right in a room full of people who already agree with them. They are less convincing when the question becomes not “what would be morally ideal?” but “how would this survive contact with budgets, law, planning constraints, trade-offs, angry residents, procurement rules and the general pain of actually running things?” The IFS put this brutally in relation to both Reform and the Greens, arguing that while radical tax and spending plans are legitimate, they must be realistic, and that claims by both parties to be presenting realistic options “fall apart”. On the Greens specifically, it noted plans for additional spending on a scale large enough to transform the size of the British state, with borrowing that the IFS suggested was not prudent.

Moreover, because I live in Brighton, I am legally required to mention the i360 at least once per article. The Greens’ record here remains a cautionary tale in the difference between moral posturing and competent administration. The £36 million i360 loan was approved under a minority Green administration with some Conservative support, while Labour voted against it. The council is now repaying the outstanding Public Works Loan Board loan at about £2.2 million a year until 2041. A vertical pole on the seafront as a monument to over-ambitious projections and vanity politics is, admittedly, almost too on the nose.

This is not to say the Greens are always wrong. Far from it, and they are right about the scale of climate action needed, right to push Labour on civil liberties, poverty and inequality, and right to challenge the deadening caution of Westminster politics. But being directionally right does not automatically make you administratively credible. At some point, politics has to move from the seminar room to the bin collection schedule and vital local services. So, do forgive me if I do not immediately hand the national treasury to a party whose relationship with local government has too often consisted of holier-than-thou platitudes and incompetence.

Labour’s central problem, then, is that it is being pulled in two directions and pleasing almost no one in the process. To Reform voters, we can look too metropolitan, managerial, embarrassed by patriotism, and too slow to change anything tangible. To Green voters, we look too timid, triangulating, too willing to compromise with bad arguments and too frightened of our own moral instincts. Labour is trying to stand in the middle of the road, and as any political strategist or mildly competent hedgehog could tell you, that is a dangerous place to loiter.

The answer cannot be to chase Reform into the swamp. Labour will never out-Farage Farage, and nor should we try. The answer also cannot be to pander to Green impossibilism, where every compromise is betrayal and every fiscal constraint is apparently a neoliberal hallucination. Labour must instead rediscover the confidence to be what it is supposed to be: a party of practical, progressive change. A Labour government should be able to say, clearly and without embarrassment, that strong public services, secure work, affordable housing, clean energy, fair taxation and social solidarity are not fringe ideas. They are the basic ingredients of a decent country.

That requires radicalism, but radicalism rooted in reality. Build homes, tax wealth more fairly, end child poverty with the seriousness it deserves, and invest in clean energy as industrial strategy. These are principles that make me proud to be a Labour member, and proud of what we have achieved so far on a legislative level. This is the space Labour must occupy, not Reform’s politics of resentment, nor the Greens’ politics of beautiful impossibility. Labour’s politics should be change that can both survive scrutiny and tangibly improve lives. We’re halfway committed to this, but still caught between an ideological tug of war with 2 Parties for whom we know full well will not work. Indeed, I would go so far as to say Reform and the Greens also deep down know full well their platforms won’t work, but that’s political opportunism for you.

Now for the point I’ve been putting off. We come, inevitably, to Starmer. The Prime Minister’s defenders will say, not without some justification, that he inherited a nightmare, that the Government has passed meaningful legislation, that the global economy remains difficult, and that local elections are not general elections. All true, but politics is not merely about being able to assemble a defence but going further an ensuring people are still listening by the time you have finished making it. At this point, the evidence and polling suggest many are not.

For Starmer, the issue is now existential. Not whether he is intelligent, for all his flaws he clearly is, not whether he is serious, again he clearly is, and not whether his government has done some really good things, it has. The issue is whether he can make the country feel anything other than procedural disappointment. There comes a point where unpopularity becomes self-sustaining and every policy, announcement, and speech is viewed through it. This is a wrong, unobjective reading, but we all do it whether we like to admit it or not, we’re human.

This is why the Burnham question will not go away, and the question of other potential future leaders like Streeting and Rayner won’t either.

Rayner has many strengths, not least an authenticity and life experience that the Labour front bench often lacks. However, the question is not merely who members like, or who gives the best and most authentic conference speech, or who makes the party feel better about itself. It is who can rebuild a national coalition under brutal conditions. I’m not convinced Rayner is quite there yet. Streeting, meanwhile, is clearly capable, but has the personal appeal of a damp cloth and is someone who represents more of the same old Blairite type Labour that was rejected more than 15 years ago. Additionally, the idea that he would be any more popular than Starmer, particularly in light of his connections previously to Mandelson, is fanciful.

Burnham, for all his flaws and complications, is the only figure who currently looks capable of doing that. His appeal is not that he is some perfect saviour descending from Greater Manchester, carrying the flame of perfect Socialism, but that he communicates in a way that seems recognisably human, authentic, and competent. He has executive experience, a regional power base, a proven ability to speak beyond Westminster, and a politics that can sound both rooted and radical. The obvious problem, of course, is that he needs to get back to Westminster. Labour’s earlier decision to block his parliamentary return looked short-sighted at the time. In hindsight, it looks like a party hiding the fire extinguisher because it didn’t match the curtains.

So where does this leave Labour? Bruised and punished? Certainly. Doomed? Not yet. The party still has a record it can be proud of and build on, a majority it can use (lest we forget we do still have an enormous majority), and reforms that may yet be felt by the time the country votes again. The warning, however, could hardly be louder. Labour is losing in different directions because voters are expressing different forms of despair. Reform voters are saying the system has failed and someone must be blamed while Green voters are saying Labour has failed to be bold enough and must be punished. In both cases, Labour is being told that administrative competence is not enough.

Starmer got Labour into power, and history should not deny him that. After fourteen years of Conservative vandalism and national contempt, that achievement counted enormously. However, the country no longer needs Labour simply to not be the Conservatives, it needs Labour to make the case for a better future before the vacuum is filled by those selling anger on the right and unrealisable purity on the left. We need our Party, Labour, to be Labour.

In 2024, Labour won because the country was exhausted by chaos. In 2026, Labour has been punished because exhaustion has not yet turned into hope or enough in the way of delivery. These things take time, but that is the danger. Unless Labour fixes it quickly, with increased delivery, conviction and a leader who can be heard again, the next election will be a referendum on whether people believe Labour ever really understood the change it promised.