The shape of England’s local government this morning is one that neither of the governing parties of the previous century would recognise.
Reform controls councils across a geography that would have seemed fantastical three years ago: the coalfields of Yorkshire and the North East; the post-industrial heartlands of the West Midlands; the prosperous Essex commuter belt; a London borough; the county halls of ancient Conservative shires. The party that did not exist at a local level in 2022 is now the second largest force in English local government.
Labour has lost control of towns it has governed since the age of Harold Wilson. The Conservatives have lost county councils they held through Thatcher and Major and every convulsion since. Both parties are being eliminated simultaneously, Labour in the post-industrial north and midlands, Conservatives in the shires, by the same insurgency operating through different electoral vintages in different places.
The political establishment consoled itself after 2025 with explanations about protest votes and mid-term difficulty and the challenges of governing. Those explanations have not survived 2026. The protest vote does not win fifty-eight of seventy-five seats in Sunderland. The mid-term difficult does not take Wakefield from a party that held it for half a century. Something more fundamental has changed, and the thirds system means that those councils still holding on by accumulated history will find out, in twelve months, what Wakefield found out on Thursday.
The tide is still rising. The next wave is already dated.
If this midterm voting pattern were repeated at a General Election (there may be a Labour Party recovery by then – but let us play along, assume there is no Labour Party recovery) it would produce a hung Parliament – with the Reform Party as the largest party in the House of Commons, but lacking a majority.
Would all the other parties then “do an Austria” – do what the other political parties did to the Freedom Party in Austria, combine to keep it out of office?
I do NOT believe so – I believe that faced with a choice of joining with Labour and the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists (who are not really nationalists – but there we go) the Conservatives would, instead, ally with the Reform Party.
But we need not theorize when we can observe.
Between them the Conservatives and the Reform Party now have a majority on Birmingham City Council (the 2nd city of England – it is Birmingham not Manchester “Andy” Burnham), will the Conservatives and the Reform Party cooperate – or will they behave like cats-in-a-sack?
We shall have to wait and see.
Birmingham really is the test – the test of whether votes can be translated into governing.
And it is a very difficult test – as Birmingham is in a terrible mess, what is happening there is awful, the people of the city are suffering.
Of course, even 38 seats (the combined Reform and Conservative seat number) is NOT enough for a MAJORITY on Birmingham City Council – so the situation is incredibly difficult.
Demographic change has been radical in Birmingham – with the new demographic (the new population) mostly voting for various leftist groups, both the Conservatives and Reform tried to counter that by reaching out to the new demographic, but with little success.
In London the Reform Party worked very hard indeed to reach out to the new population – but, again, with very limited success (ditto the Conservatives – who only just retook Wandsworth, as well as Westminster).
Yes, of course one can never know, but I am expecting quite the opposite & with considerable confidence. By 2029, things will be so bad economically & socially the Labour party might as well be radioactive. Time is *not* on their side.
That looks like Hemingway’s line about going bankrupt.
Paul:
I tend to think that any attempt by right wing parties to “reach out” to people who fundamentally hate them is doomed to failure.
I note that the areas where Reform has done particularly well, such a Newcastle, Sunderland, Essex and Suffolk can fairly be described as white. There is no point trying to persuade someone who votes for Gaza independents to vote for Reform instead. It cannot and will not happen.
Even in Greater Manchester, the Borough of Tameside, which voted Reform, is largely white. It is comprised of white working class people whose families were moved out of Manchester after the war to populate council estates built out in what then was the countryside. Central Manchester would be a complete waste of time for Reform, It is my home city, I was born there, and now when I visit I am not sure if I am in Karachi or Mogadishu. I just don’t recognise the place, and it leaves me feeling depressed. Not exactly fertile ground for the Reform candidate.