Voters want a change. That is the message they overwhelmingly sent to the government in last week’s local elections. The Conservatives lost more than 1,000 councillors, a dismal result that puts them on a projected national vote share of just 26%. Parties to the left of the Conservatives – Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens – between them captured more than two-thirds of the projected national vote share.
This is a rude awakening for Conservative MPs who hoped Rishi Sunak could revive their party’s fortunes. It suggests voters have had enough of a Conservative government that has presided over deep cuts to the welfare safety net and rolled back public infrastructure, that has inflicted economic pain on the country through deliberate policy choices, and that has sought to distract from its appalling record by introducing unworkable and punitive measures for desperate asylum seekers.
For Labour, it was a very solid result; its best local election result since 1997 and the first time it has been the largest party in local government since 2002. There has been much discussion about the fact that, if replicated in a general election, its projected national vote share would result in Labour being the largest party but without an overall majority. That may be true, but there is a risk in extrapolating too far from voter choices in local elections: there is still more than a year to go to a general election, and some of the Liberal Democrat and Green vote is highly likely to transfer to Labour. Labour secured gains in a range of areas in which it would need to perform well in order to win a general election: it made advances in parliamentary seats the Conservatives have won from Labour in recent years, such as Stoke-on-Trent and Hartlepool, and captured councils in long-standing Conservative areas such as Medway and Dover. It is a remarkable transformation in the party’s fortunes from 2019, when it suffered its worst general election defeat since 1935 under Jeremy Corbyn.
The questions that hang over Labour are not about last week’s results. Rather, there are fair critiques of Keir Starmer’s struggle thus far to communicate clearly to voters what his party stands for and how Britain would look different under a Labour government. Starmer deserves much credit for bringing Labour to this point in just over three years. But he must now seize this opportunity to set out Labour’s response to the big challenges we face as a society. How would a Labour government respond to the rapidly growing number of people who will never own their own home, with all the implications that has for their children and their retirement? What would it do about the fact that so many older people go without the basic help they need with washing, dressing and eating? What about the large swathe of low-paid jobs with poor progression prospects that some young people are simply expected to embrace with enthusiasm?
This is what Starmer must answer in the run-up to the next election. It will help convince voters the Labour party is not just a repository for anti-Tory votes, but deserving of a majority large enough to transform the country over more than just a single term. And it will provide the ambitious agenda for a government that can start to put right some of the terrible damage the Conservatives have done to Britain over the past decade.
