Why the Hate Towards Labour?
Now the dust has settled on the local elections, the results weren’t exactly a shock.
The Conservatives took a predictable beating—squeezed by the Liberal Democrats in the South and by Reform UK everywhere else. Reform are now well-positioned to take over the right of British politics. They’re peeling off Tory voters in traditional heartlands, while the LibDems are quietly planting themselves to the right of Labour on key issues, like opposing VAT on private school fees. Another Tory civil war seems inevitable. The odds of the party splitting increase by the day. The political commentators who once fawned over Boris Johnson are now rolling out the red carpet for Nigel Farage.
Labour, by contrast, had a mixed night—losing a by-election by a whisker and some council seats. For a party in government, that’s not a disaster.
But on social media, you’d think Labour had been annihilated. Reform supporters are jubilant, claiming they’ve delivered a crushing blow to the Labour Party. This meme, circulating widely among Reform fans, sums up the mood:
There’s a huge wave of online animosity towards Labour—almost on par with the Corbyn era. Some of it’s just the usual anti-Labour noise: sore losers who still haven’t accepted the 2019 election result. The conspiracy theories are back too—Jimmy Savile, Starmer’s alleged secret life, and so on.
Some of the anger is about winter fuel payments. This persists despite a sharp fall in excess winter deaths among pensioners, which you might think would calm people down. It hasn’t.
Beneath the noise, though, there’s a deeper hostility. It’s amplified on social media, particularly by older, less digitally native voters. Many blame Labour for the decline of their towns—conveniently ignoring that places like Durham have had a Conservative-led council for four years and a Tory government for 14 of the last 15.
We all know the story: Margaret Thatcher’s government shut down mines, shipyards, and steelworks with breathtaking indifference to the communities they destroyed.
The towns that once existed to serve those industries were left adrift—economically and existentially.
When Labour returned to power in 1997, it did create new opportunities. But they came with a catch: to take advantage of them, young people had to go to university—usually far from home. And when they left, most never returned. Thatcher took the jobs. Blair took the youth.
When those young people came back to visit, they’d changed. University made them more liberal, more outward-looking—and they often found themselves at odds with the more socially conservative, even bigoted, views of the communities they left behind.
That brain drain left a vacuum. It was filled by immigrants—many of whom now run local small businesses or work in health and social care. Ironically, the towns most hostile to immigration often have lower-than-average immigration levels. But fear isn’t about data—it’s about emotion. And in these places, it’s also about hierarchy. There’s a deep resentment towards people perceived as “getting above their station”—a coded form of class discipline.
I grew up in similar communities. I was told, constantly: “Don’t get too big for your boots,” “Remember where you came from,” “Don’t get ideas above your station.”
This is why there’s such mistrust of Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner. They came from working-class backgrounds—but they dared to rise. In the eyes of many socially conservative voters, that’s unforgivable. These voters believe in a fixed social order, and Labour’s leaders violated that unspoken code.
But there’s something deeper still. The areas turning towards Reform are places gutted by decades of globalisation. Some of us thrived in that world—but many didn’t.
Globalisation enriched the professional middle class and made it more diverse. The owners of capital retreated into distant boardrooms. Middle-class professionals thrived by managing the chaos capitalism unleashed—often without having to look too hard at the cost. At the same time, this professional class embraced a narrow, managerial definition of diversity: race, gender, sexuality—yes. Class? Not so much.
The Labour Party followed suit—aligning itself more with these emerging professional values than with its traditional working-class base. That’s not to sneer at progress. The gains made by women, by ethnic minorities, by LGBT people were real and important. But they happened within class boundaries that the winners pretended had disappeared.
This is the root of a lot of the anger. Labour champions the struggles of Black and Asian communities—and rightly so—but has far less to say to the white working-class families who feel they’ve been left behind, overtaken by newcomers who now run the GP practice or the corner shop.
Labour can’t beat Reform by playing on their turf. Reform are selling voters a fantasy: a Britain where the only brown faces are behind a takeaway counter, women are back in the kitchen, and gay people are back in the closet. It’s absurd, it’s unachievable—but it’s emotionally powerful. It taps into deep desires for identity, group belonging, and protection from outsiders.
Labour used to have councillors in County Durham who could connect emotionally with socially conservative voters—even as the party became more liberal. But those councillors have been sidelined—some by Corbynism, others by Starmerism. Without them, the emotional bridge between the party and those communities has collapsed—with enormous consequences.
It’s naïve to think Labour can win these voters back by shifting left or right. It needs to give people a reason to feel connected—emotionally, not just economically.
Labour today is poised to transform Britain. That may sound surprising, but it has the most ambitious legislative agenda of any incoming government in decades—on workers’ rights, green energy, nationalisation, and the NHS.
But it needs to speak about these policies not as bullet points, but as stories—stories about how lives will change. Managerial language won’t cut it. Emotional resonance will.
Right now, Labour is losing that emotional battle—and losing it badly.
PS
A story about the last time Farage won control of a council
In May 2015 Ukip, gained control of Thanet district council. Before it won Durham, it was the only time any of his parties won the power to run anything.
Ukip’s 10-seat majority in Thanet lasted Six months. Fve of its councillors defected, following internal rows about a local airport. The following year, 12 Ukip councillors peeled off to form an independent group. Ukip’s days in charge of Thanet were over. In 2019, it fielded just three candidates. They all lost.