This chart is telling. It covers all the local authority election results and comes from The Guardian:
The message is clear.
Tory votes and seats went, overall, to Reform.
Labour voters went to the LibDems and Greens.
Independents split all over the place.
But what that says is the Tories are over. They make no sense to right-wing voters any more. Those voters only want slogans, and the Tories are out of stock of them.
And Labour has lost to parties to the left of it, not that they are hard to identify these days. That is what their voters want.
It does not require a terribly sophisticated analysis to interpret this.
The Tories are wiped out.
Labour can only survive by going left, and seriously so. There is nowhere else for them to go where voters might be interested in them.
That's the message from these elections. Well, that, plus the failure of first-past-the-post.
Will Labour pay any attention? There was no sign of it last night. Pat McFadden was doing interviews for them and was as terrible as ever. They really are in trouble.
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The Left is behind a paywall, as in go Left, don’t get paid. If a party wants to go leftwing, it needs to be funded by the people. Corbyn managed it, Bernie Sanders did too.
I agree Labour can only survive by going left, and seriously so, but I don’t see a mechanism now for this to happen. Starmer (along with Reeves, etc) is tainted, so no move left with him still in office is going to convince. I can only see Labour changing leadership AFTER it has lost the next general election. Like the US, I think the UK will have to go through the purgatory of Trump-lite government before it sees sense.
The only other possible scenario is a Labour split, and Starmer losing his majority. In that case, maybe it’s possible for a left/green alliance, like the Front Populaire in France, or the recent successful Iberian coalitions, to fend off a Reform/Tory double act.
The only hope is that Labour backbenchers recognise what’s going on and what needs to happen, and get rid of Starmer. Sadly, the Starmerite purges have got rid of most of the people who might make this a reality.
I guess we should all be putting our weight behind the Greens and Lib Dems.
Since on several policies Lib Dems are left of Labour and rising in popularity, on alternative would be for significant defections from Labour to Lib Dems.
I’m not saying I see this happening, but Lib Dems might do well to court some defying the worst policies by saying if they’re dropped by Labour for defying the whip on something like PIP reform then they would be welcome to explore moving over to a party that understands the challenges faces by families with disabled members.
Is it possible that Starmer / Reeves are actually in place to ensure the destruction of the Labour Party? Starmer certainly firstly undermined Corbyn and then lied to get elected as leader. Has he ever actually shown himself as being someone who believed in the old Labour Party principles?
Has Starmer ever been ‘left’?
Oh yes, when he was first getting into politics. He even used to sell “The Militant” newspaper and speak at “Free Palestine” rallies.
But then at that time he needed to sound left wing to make progress.
He is quite the political chameleon, “any creed will do” to misquote the technicolour dreamcoat lyrics.
Do we really know what we are looking at? It seems like a poly-crisis.
Deform are a one-trick pony – focused on immigrants (the issue being whipped up by the media and the likes of Bad-Enoch – ref a recent question time – pathetic). It is an issue/a symptom… only because so much else is failing in the UK
State-capture by finance/nomadic war machines (private equity) – which means – no change (look mummy that’s a huge jobby floating in the river)
Synthetic gov finance rules by a woman that is, always was clueless/captured by her “advisers”……so no change in e.g. health funding or local gov funding
Gov ministers shamelessly prostituting themselves (in polite society it would be called “lining their own pockets) – with no consequence.
All this less than 1 year into a gov that was supposedly going to sort 14 years of tory insanity out?
& we are surprised that Uk serfs have given the current clueless rabble the finger?
Do we have the numbers for the total votes cast for each party? The number of seats is what counts in our system but it often doesn’t reflect the real levels of support. Some of the results I saw yesterday had parties winning with, by historical standards, quite low levels of support. Lincolnshire excepted.
I have not seen that total. Has anyone?
There is indeed a massive gap to the left of Starmer’s Labour, with up to 50% of the population potentially occupying that space – the kinder, fairer, redistributive zone. I so wish the Green Party were not so flippin’ ineffectual! A Red/Green, People & Planet Party has never been so needed.
Politics and media have been captured by the rich. Inequality has grown monstrously. The standard of living of ordinary people has stagnated or fallen. 1% of the population now own 54% of the wealth.
As before in history, the conditions are rife for loud-mouths to spout nonsense and worse. Without a competing, kinder, farirer, redistributive narrative, many voters stay home. The field is left to those who are noisy and offer cheap fixes – Gary Stevenson’s ‘The Problem is Foreigners Parties’.
Obviously funeral director McFadden’s scripts had been finalised even before the polls opened.
The private company ‘Starmer McSweeney Ltd’ that Labour have become , don’t encourage discussion, ideas, curiosity – and are determined to go ‘further faster’ on the disastrous course they have set themselves, presumably with more ‘difficult decisions, to increase destitution, wreck services etc.
I wouldn’t even describe what’s needed as going ‘left’ Richard – its just going with what is necessary to improve the economy and society – fair taxation, public monopolies owned by the public etc which, as many on here have said probably no more left than Harold Macmillan.
Accepted
It is not going left
It’s just caring
Awesome .
Simple and clear, thanks.
I hope Labour read this.
Country is crying out for unifying politics that protect people in the face of huge threats. More Neoliberal Labour just drives forward Reform.
Correct
And on it goes, doubling down and doubling down again. Trying to ‘out Reform Reform’:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/may/03/labour-targets-international-students-claiming-asylum-after-losses-to-reform-in-local-elections
(What Jo White (fittingly in the Telegraph!) is saying, with the Trump implications (she no doubt alluding to the brutal ICE raids in the US and so on) is positively evil (sorry there is no other words that I can express it.)
More on this in the morning
Knackered tonight
Labour’s McTeam have responded to Thursday’s election results.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/may/03/labour-targets-international-students-claiming-asylum-after-losses-to-reform-in-local-elections
Obviously they still think outFa***eing Fa***e is the answer. Out come the racist dogwhistles. Again. Sometimes I wonder if the two of them get confused and think they are leading a sectarian riot in Belfast or Glasgow, or an anti-immigrant protest in a Dublin suburb. Isn’t it time they grew up a little? This is a whole COUNTRY we are talking about and it needs a proper GOVERNMENT, not another McTeam focus group.
When it comes to deciding who the “deplorables” and “racists” are, then clearly we need look no further than Labour’s McTeam of incompetent fixers, and all who believe in their strategy, because ANYONE who believes that blowing this sort of anti-foreigner anti-immigrant xenophobic dogwhistle is acceptable to attempt to win votes, is a RACIST who cares little for the real world consequences of inflammatory xenophobic rhetoric. (Yes, Yvette Cooper, I mean YOU – this is dangerous Home Office racist psephological politicking and you know it!)
It also runs counter to their own (flawed) strategy for paying for universities, and driving the construction of block after block of new (student) accommodation in our cities (including my own).
If that doesn’t wake Labour MPs up, and provoke a PLP revolt (a real one), then they need to be preparing for new jobs in 2029.
Even if Fa***e HAS lost his shine by 2029, why would voters want a pale LINO reflection of him, after 4 more years of Reeves austerity combined with global economic chaos and an even hotter planet?
But if they DO decide to flex their muscles, I hope they remember – “it’s the economy stupid” – and although Fa***e is a useful catalyst to provoke change, the real enemy is NOT Fa***e, but neoliberal “household budget”/austerity economics which stops the Chancellor dealing with the REAL problems facing UK voters, which require significant investment from governent, and quickly.
Remember this from June 2016? We’ve come full circle and Labour are in far deeper trouble now.
https://www.politico.eu/article/inside-account-of-labour-mps-attacks-on-jeremy-corbyn-shadow-cabinet-resignations-brexit/
It’s time for the PLP to do it again, but without all the horrible hypocrisy of 2016, and THIS time, it’s fully justified.
Thanks
A week is a long time in politics. Trying to predict the outcome of the next general election based on these results is tricky, regardless of the amazing showing by Reform. If Reform and the Tories get together in some shape or form that could be tricky for other parties but given the current dearth of nouce in the current batch of politicians and global volatility, nearky anything is possible.
The Richard Murphy genius continues – all the evidence points to the population looking for something to the right of Starmer and your advice is for Starmer to go further left!
Talk about being oblivious to what is taking place in front of you! Perhaps a career in comedy rather than political economy might be more appropriate.
Some of the public are far-right.
The vast majority are not.
The election proves that.
It takes a fool to not notice that.