What should Labour do now?

In the end, these elections are looking straightforward. Wherever you turn your attention Reform are surging. For instance, I just heard this morning from colleagues in Scottish Labour that Reform votes are ‘piling up’ in West Lothian. If they fall short in Scotland it will be because of a category error in their campaigning. Reform are ultimately one of four parties – in addition to Labour, Lib Dems and the Tories – splitting the unionist support, while the SNP reap the first past the post (FPTP) premium for being the only separatist party standing.

None of this is to take away from the scale of Reform’s victories. They are sweeping up seats and councils across England. They have won their first borough in London: Havering. They have gained counties like Essex. They are running neck and neck with Plaid Cymru in the Welsh Senedd where Labour look to be reduced to single figures in a country they have dominated for over a century – longer than any democratic party anywhere else in the world.

That is the other fact of these elections: Labour are losing everywhere. Despite the floundering SNP government, Labour are nowhere in Scotland. Hackney has a Green mayor. A close friend says the count in Lambeth is looking extremely bad. Manchester has seen big swings to the Greens, while Greater Manchester has gone Reform. Birmingham City council has split to every party – except Labour.

This summary picture – Reform advancing, Labour in retreat – has already generated some early takes which are simple, obvious and wrong. MP and NEC member Luke Akehurst, a key organiser of the Labour right, was out quickly with his view. On X, he quoted The Spectator’s political editor Tim Shipman, who wrote: ‘Whisper it quietly, but was Morgan McSweeney right to tell the Labour party Reform was a bigger threat than the Greens?’ Akehurst added: ‘I’m shouting this as loudly as I can.’ But as Professor John Curtice, expert on UK polling, has been pointing out, this is a radical misreading of what is going on in UK politics. Multi-party politics is here. There are five viable parties in England at the moment, six if you include Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party and the Muslim independents, and six, of course, in Scotland and Wales because of the nationalist parties.

What matters in a fragmented landscape is how you can articulate and dominate a particular electoral bloc. The SNP have spent the last 20 years creating and leading a separatist bloc in Scotland. Nigel Farage has successfully fought it out with the Conservatives and now Reform are the dominant party of the centre-right bloc of voters. With that established, Conservative votes – and seats and councils – have flowed to Reform. This is in contrast to the 2024 general election where a more balanced division of right bloc voters between the Tories and Reform allowed Labour to come through the middle and helped convert 34 per cent of the vote into a landslide. The boot is now firmly on the other foot. While the right bloc has only two parties – with one dominant – the progressive bloc has four parties with the historically dominant one – Labour – in decline. As Professor Curtice observes: ‘A sharp fall in Labour’s performance is accompanied by an above average Green performance than it is by a strong Reform performance.’

The real debate in the Labour party has to be about the rise of the Greens. The Labour leadership have to recognise that they did the most to create the recent Greens surge. The National Executive Committee blocking Andy Burnham from standing in the Gorton and Denton by-election gave the seat to the Greens, and with that credibility and momentum. That must never happen again and the Labour leadership must make it clear quickly that they would welcome Andy Burnham back in parliament as soon as possible to strengthen the team in government.

But that is just table stakes. The real task is to challenge the Greens solidly on the areas they get badly wrong: defence and energy. And to harass them for the truly appalling candidates they have stood in London boroughs.

Labour must also unapologetically be a government of the left: the one that has given rights to workers and renters, the one which has nationalised the railways, the one which has refused – for the first time in 60 years – not to enter an imperial war with the United States. It’s time for the party to be real Labour, not Reform Lite.