Reform, Labour, Hysteria and the Politics of Permanent Dissatisfaction

Clearly this was a big night for Reform, a bad night for Labour, and a mixed night for everyone else. Labour lost seats to the Greens, to a lesser extent Reform, and to Plaid Cymru and the SNP. The Conservatives lost seats heavily to Reform.

But for the Government to lose seats at this point in a parliament is not unusual. In truth, this was not a disastrous set of results for an incumbent government in year two of a parliament. Reform are nowhere near looking like a party on the verge of winning a General Election. Farage is doing far worse at this stage of a parliament than Corbyn before 2017, Miliband before 2015 or Kinnock before 1992. Much worse.

For the main opposition party to lose seats at local elections is a much bigger story. The Conservative Party increasingly resembles a political corpse that occasionally twitches.

The Greens did reasonably well, taking votes off Labour in middle-class urban areas, but perhaps the biggest over-achievers in England were the Liberal Democrats. There is still a frustrating trend where Labour and Lib Dem voters will vote tactically for the Greens to keep Reform out, but the Greens do not always reciprocate. That may become a problem for the broader centre-left coalition at the next General Election.

Reform won large numbers of councillors and many councils went into no overall control. They did particularly well in Hartlepool in the North East, Newcastle-under-Lyme in the West Midlands and North East Lincolnshire. In Newcastle-under-Lyme they won overall control. In each case the pattern was similar: Reform swept through seats previously held by both Labour and the Conservatives almost equally.

Newcastle-under-Lyme is particularly interesting. It does not fit every stereotype of a Reform area. It is not a seaside “end of the line” town like Clacton or Skegness. But it shares enough characteristics: an ageing population, declining civic life, weak economic optimism and a growing sense that mainstream politics no longer delivers materially better lives.

The success of Plaid Cymru and the SNP also matters. Support for outright independence remains limited, yet both parties performed strongly. They are benefitting from voters who dislike the Labour Government, but dislike Reform even more.

In some ways the biggest winners of the night were not Reform or the Greens, but the nationalist parties. This follows a familiar pattern. When Labour governs in Westminster, Scottish and Welsh nationalists position themselves as the authentic progressive alternative supported in part by middle-class left-wing voters who increasingly see nationalism as somehow more radical than Labourism. Ironically this often weakens Labour and helps create the conditions for the British right to return to power, reinforcing the nationalist argument that only more autonomy, more borders and more distance from Westminster can protect progressive politics.

In Wales this dynamic was amplified by a strong anti-Reform tactical vote. Many voters who were unhappy with Labour were still prepared to vote tactically to stop Reform advances.

Reform and the politics of anger

In the run-up to the elections I encountered a remarkable number of people, mostly online, telling me that they had “just voted for Farage”. Reform’s messaging was heavily focused on the idea that a vote for Reform would somehow “get Starmer out” and propel Farage towards Downing Street. Much of it had very little to do with local government itself.

For many voters this was not really about bin collections, planning committees or local services. It was an expression of frustration with politics more generally and a desire to signal dissatisfaction with the direction of the country.

Reform are extremely effective at online campaigning. Their messaging is amplified heavily through social media ecosystems, sympathetic media outlets and online political networks. That matters because social media increasingly shapes political reality, particularly for voters who spend a great deal of time online.

I am a member of numerous political Facebook groups because I use them to promote this blog. Most of the groups I belong to are actually on the left, although left-wing Facebook groups have a remarkable tendency to split, feud and denounce each other every few months. Yet despite that, the political content fed into my timeline is overwhelmingly right wing.

There is an option to snooze individual accounts, but when one disappears another near-identical account appears posting almost exactly the same material. Either huge numbers of people are independently posting identical content and arguments, or somebody is spending a great deal of time and money ensuring that far-right narratives dominate large parts of social media.

The same thing has happened in many local Facebook groups and “have your say” forums, which increasingly function as pipelines for anti-immigration and anti-establishment politics. Many users probably do not even recognise that they are consuming highly ideological political content because it is framed as local outrage, humour or “common sense”.

This online dominance helps explain something important about Reform’s changing electoral geography.

In 2015, just before the Brexit referendum, UKIP won 3.7 million votes but no MPs. In 2024 Reform won 4.1 million votes and secured representation in Parliament because their support had become far more geographically concentrated.

In 2015 UKIP support was spread broadly across England and across demographics, although older voters were always central. By 2024 Reform’s vote had become concentrated in areas with older populations, high levels of economic inactivity and declining civic infrastructure. The lower the proportion of economically active people in a constituency, the stronger Reform often performs.

This concentration makes their vote more efficient under First Past the Post and gives them a clearer route to winning seats. But it also places limits on their coalition. Reform perform far less well in areas with younger working-age populations, stronger graduate economies and more dynamic labour markets.

That is why comparisons with Trump should be treated cautiously. There are similarities in style, branding and the intensely personal loyalty many supporters feel towards both men. But the electoral coalitions are not identical and Britain’s electoral geography is very different from America’s.

Do local elections predict General Elections?

Not really.

British political history is full of local election results that appeared to point towards one outcome before delivering another entirely.

Before the 2005 General Election Labour lost more than 2,000 councillors while the Conservatives gained heavily. Labour still won comfortably.

Before 2015 Ed Miliband’s Labour was making strong gains in local government while many commentators assumed the Conservatives were finished. David Cameron still won outright.

Before 2017 Theresa May was gaining council seats but lost her parliamentary majority. Before 2019 the Conservatives were losing large numbers of councillors while Boris Johnson went on to win a landslide months later.

And between 2019 and 2024 Labour’s local government gains were actually relatively modest compared with the scale of the parliamentary majority they eventually achieved.

Local elections are often less about governing choices and more about emotional signalling. Voters use them to express frustration, identity and dissatisfaction in ways that do not always carry through to General Elections.

The deeper problem

There are voters across Britain who feel that politics no longer improves their lives regardless of who wins. They want ordinary things: security, stability, decent public services, the ability to get on, maybe a holiday once a year, their children doing slightly better than they did.

Instead many feel poorer, more insecure and less optimistic than they did ten or fifteen years ago.

Their anger is real. Their frustration is understandable. And it is not irrational that many now vote for Reform, Greens, independents or nationalist parties simply to express that dissatisfaction.

But there is also a hard reality that none of these parties can easily escape. Britain is moving towards a fiscal and demographic crunch that severely limits what any government can realistically do.

At the moment Labour is trying to walk a narrow path between maintaining market confidence and funding public services. That balancing act is politically unpopular, but abandoning it entirely risks something much worse. A genuine financial crisis, another Liz Truss-style collapse in market confidence, or rapidly rising borrowing costs that would force even harsher cuts.

That is why constant talk of leadership challenges inside Labour is largely detached from reality. Financial markets currently back the Government. Borrowing pressures are easing slightly. The legislative programme is moving forward. Small boat crossings are falling. There is no immediate governing crisis, however loudly sections of the press insist otherwise.

Much of the media narrative of permanent crisis reflects a concerted attempt to weaken the Government by political and economic interests who either resent Starmer personally or fear elements of Labour’s programme.

But regardless of who governs next, the underlying constraints remain the same. Britain has made a series of poor economic and political choices over decades, of which Brexit is only the most obvious.

No government can simply wish those constraints away. Not Nigel Farage. Not a more radical Labour leadership. Not the Greens. Not anyone.

And that is the real danger beneath all of this. Democracy increasingly struggles because voters are demanding outcomes that politics alone cannot deliver. In an age of social media, instant gratification and permanent online outrage, that creates a profound instability.

Democracy is not magic. It cannot abolish economic reality. And the gap between what voters are promised and what governments can actually achieve is becoming dangerously large. We have become infantilised, demanding instant solutions that bend the laws of economic reality. Until we grow up politics will be governed by hysteria.