Millions of voters across England went to the polls on Thursday for local council elections that were widely seen as the most significant electoral test of the Starmer government since the 2024 general election. With 1,847 council seats contested across 88 local authorities, the results will be closely scrutinised for evidence of whether Reform UK’s surge in the national polls is translating into actual votes and seats on the ground, and whether Labour can retain the working-class northern and Midlands communities that it won back from the Conservatives in 2024.
By the early hours of Friday morning, with results from approximately half of the contested authorities declared, the picture that was emerging was a complex one that defied simple characterisation. Labour had lost control of two councils in the East Midlands — Amber Valley and Erewash — to Reform UK, which had run strong campaigns focused on immigration, the cost of living and opposition to local planning decisions. However, Labour had held several councils in Yorkshire and the North West that had been widely predicted to fall, and had performed better than expected in metropolitan areas.
Reform UK’s performance was being described by its supporters as a historic breakthrough and by its critics as a significant but uneven advance. The party gained over 200 council seats in its strongest ever local election performance, winning control of three councils outright — all in areas that had historically been Conservative strongholds rather than Labour territory. Nigel Farage, speaking from Reform’s election night event in Birmingham, claimed the results represented “a political earthquake” and called on Prime Minister Starmer to call a general election.
The Conservative Party, fighting to establish itself as the credible alternative government under Kemi Badenoch’s leadership, had a mixed night. The party lost further ground in several of its traditional southern England strongholds to the Liberal Democrats, who continued their strong run of local election results with gains in Surrey, Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire. The Conservatives did make some gains from Labour in areas where Reform split the left-of-centre vote, but these were smaller than the party had hoped.
Prime Minister Starmer, appearing before journalists at Labour’s Southside headquarters in the early hours of Friday, acknowledged that the results showed “real concerns” among voters about the pace of economic change and insisted the government was “listening.” He pointed to the party’s retention of its key northern strongholds as evidence that Labour’s core vote remained solid, while admitting that the party needed to do more to demonstrate tangible improvements in people’s lives.
Political analysts were already debating what the results meant for the trajectory of British politics. Most agreed that Reform UK had established itself as a durable electoral force rather than a protest vote phenomenon, but disagreed about whether its advance would be sufficient to win significant numbers of seats in a general election under the first-past-the-post system.
— Thomas Hargreaves, London Capital Post
