The voter turnout for the English local elections last week was 31.5 per cent (Alamy)

3 min read2 hr

England’s local political map has been transformed. But beyond the sweeping changes in local political control, one notable feature of last week’s local elections in England was that, in many areas, turnout tended to be above the usual low levels associated with local contests.  

In my home council area of Calderdale turnout was 45 per cent, up by almost 11 per cent on the last local elections held here in 2024. The pattern was similar elsewhere. 

While still not generally ‘high’ by any stretch (there’s much more to be done to improve electoral turnout both locally and nationally), higher than normal turnout is perhaps indicative of current public sentiment. 

At first glance, higher turnout seems counterintuitive. Public trust in politics remains exceptionally low, and dissatisfaction with institutions is widespread. But increased turnout may indicate that many voters are increasingly willing to participate when they feel sufficiently motivated to register frustration or demand change.  

The causes of voters’ discontent appear both national and local.  

Undoubtedly, there’s dissatisfaction with the pace of change nationally, and growing impatience with stagnant living standards, stretched public services and the continuing cost-of-living crisis. 

The message to the government in Westminster is clear: it must radically transform what it’s doing if it’s going to succeed. There is a growing demand for visible improvement in people’s everyday lives, particularly in communities that feel economically overlooked. 

But interpreting these elections purely as a referendum on the government would miss a crucial part of the story. Beneath the national political turbulence lies a more localised crisis in confidence about the ability of councils themselves to deliver. 

After more than a decade of cuts, many local authorities are operating under severe financial pressure, with local spending power much lower than it was in 2010, pre-austerity. 

While the current government have provided additional financial support, councils across England remain constrained by a system that leaves them struggling to meet their statutory obligations and adequately fund other services. In many places, residents have seen libraries closing, parks deteriorating, roads going unrepaired, and their high streets declining.  

These are the types of things that shape people’s daily experience of government most directly. For many voters, local government no longer seems capable of improving the places where they live. People feel they’re paying more council tax every year while getting less back in return. 

As a result, there appears to have been a growing willingness to “roll the dice” electorally and replace incumbent administrations with alternatives promising disruption or change. 

Beyond the introspection at the national level, therefore, another key takeaway from these elections should be that local leaders need more political and fiscal autonomy to deliver for their residents.  

There’s a growing need to fundamentally reform local government finances so councils can act. This should mean radically reforming the council tax system, fixing social care provision, and delivering bold fiscal devolution.  

This should go hand in hand with the government building on the progress it’s made on devolution and going further and faster on decentralising power so that local areas have greater control over things like economic development, transport, housing and public services.  

This not only matters for delivery but also for enhancing local democratic engagement. International evidence shows that when local government has the power to genuinely change things, people are more likely to turn out to vote regularly and engage with it positively, enhancing local turnout over the longer term. 

Rebuilding confidence in local government, empowering councils to deliver visible change and sustaining higher levels of democratic participation will be essential if trust in local and national politics is to be renewed. 

Ryan Swift is Research Fellow at IPPR North, writing on devolution, local democracy, ‘levelling up’, and regional identity

Sir Kier Starmer’s speech on Monday morning painted an almost apocalyptic picture of the future of his country, were he to be ousted from the Prime Ministership. He said “our country will go down a dark path”. Referencing the gains by Reform UK and the Greens, he stated that Labour is “battling the despair upon which they prey”. “Change cannot come quick enough”. “People need hope”. “Incremental change won’t cut it”.

Starmer described “a battle for the soul of our nation”. There’s the rub. He is Prime Minister of a multi-national country. There was no focus on Scotland, Wales nor Northern Ireland. Indeed, England wasn’t referenced. It didn’t need to be: for Keir Starmer and the Labour bigwigs, Englishness and Britishness appear interchangeable. This was a speech by a decent Englishman which had no resonance for the non-English UK nations.

The election results have seen the annihilation of the old British unionist parties in Wales and Scotland. Together, the Labour and Conservative parties won 22% of Scottish seats, and 17% of Welsh seats. (Remember that, unlike the English-local or Westminster elections, the Scottish and Welsh electoral systems are proportional.) Nothing like this has been seen before, electorally.

These two old parties are sclerotic. They cannot imagine a British government that doesn’t include one of them. They are majoritarian by nature. They won’t trust the people of the UK with a proportional electoral system, believing themselves above the people. They see nothing wrong with a party that gains one-third of the vote winning two-thirds of the seats, as happened in 2024. Their hubris will result in a farrago of Faragistas running the UK into the ground and the departure of Scotland and, possibly, Wales. (Politico poll of polls currently has Scottish independence running at 51% – 46% in favour of independence, the second-highest margin since the 2014 referendum.)

What happens to NI/NoI if the hubris of Labour and Conservatives results in a Reform UK government that antagonizes Scotland sufficiently to lead to its secession and the end of British identity? Reunificationists urgently need to craft a vision for the future of this island that truly cherishes all identities. The failure of separatist violence to achieve unity – and the immense suffering it has caused – must be addressed and acknowledged in a way that is genuinely cathartic for unity-desirous, unity-agnostic and unity-hostile voters. Is that possible? If it is not tried, what will we sleepwalk into?

Philip McGuinness taught at Dundalk Institute of Technology, plays mandolin with the Oriel Traditional Orchestra and loves to walk around and over the wee perfect hills of the Ring Of Gullion.

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1. ‘Wholly Unserious’

2. ‘By September’ Or ‘With September’?

3. Who Will Stand Aside For Burnham?

Even though they were held last Thursday, the local, Scottish and Welsh elections seem an age ago. Their reverberations are shaking the very foundations of British politics, and also undermining the future of the prime minister.

Mid term elections are always difficult for an incumbent government, so in that sense these were no different. But they really were. This was arguably the worst set of elections for a government ever. They lost just under 1500 seats, which admittedly was fewer than the 1850 some pollsters were predicting, but awful nonetheless. Combine that with coming third in Wales and a very poor second in Scotland, and the loss of several councils and mayoralties to the Greens and it is obvious that it cannot be business as usual. Something has to change. But what?

Keir Starmer is not a politician of the normal sort. He doesn’t have any ideological grounding. He doesn’t really know his own party. When he talks about it, there’s no passion of the sort you’d get from Neil Kinnock. That’s a real problem.

What is also a problem is that he doesn’t seem to have anyone left in Number 10 who can write him a decent speech or point out the obvious. For anyone to think that bringing back Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman was the first measure you should take to reenforce a message of change is just risible.

The speech this morning was more of the same. It had echoes of Harold Wilson’s famous proclamation back in the late 1960s when he was facing cabinet plotting. “I know what’s going on. I’m going on!” To say over the weekend that he wanted to be in Downing Street for ten years, was not just tin-eared, but had echoes of Margaret Thatcher’s equally tin-eared comment in 1989 of “going on and on and on”.

He mouthed the words of taking responsibility for the election results, but then offered more of the same. He said he would renationalise British Steel, which prompts the natural question: why did you not do that earlier, when you could have saved Port Talbot? He banged on again at Britain’s place is at the heart of Europe, yet could not articulate how that can possibly happen without crossing his red lines on the Single Market and Customs Union. He droned on about offering young people more opportunities in Europe, fully aware that his Europe Minister, Nick Thomas-Symonds, has failed to negotiate such a deal through no fault of his own. The demands the EU is making render it impossible.

This obsession with Europe isn’t surprising, but all over the country, Labour lost thousands of votes to Reform UK. OK, promoting closer ties with the EU may go down well with Green or LibDem voters, but it’s Reform UK that poses the biggest challenge to Labour. And yet again Starmer dismissed Reform as bigoted racists, and by doing so implicitly smeared those who voted for them. Another example of his tin earedness.

So what happens now? Catherine West’s challenge is unlikely to provoke an immediate leadership election. Angela Rayner can’t challenge until her tax affairs are resolved with HMRC. Andy Burnham has yet to find a seat where he could fight what would be a very tasty by-election. Ed Miliband protests he has no interest in becoming leader. And then there’s Wes Streeting. Many believe that he is best placed to replace Starmer, but that window may well close if he doesn’t act now. But if he does, there is no guarantee he would prevail, and a failed move could signal the end of his career. What to do…

So given the lack of a clear alternative, Starmer may live to fight another day, but he knows that he’s only ever one crisis away from further leadership speculation. The next crisis may well come very soon possibly next week, when the next batch of Mandelson documents are released.

I’ve spent the last couple of hours texting Labour MPs. Not all of them, but a fairly chunky representative sample. I’ve asked them whether the prime minister did enough in his speech to convince them and their colleagues that he should stay.

I will be talking about their replies on my LBC show at 7pm this evening.

Going back to the election results, I have found it amusing to read the delusional comments from some people who try to minimise the scale of the victory for Reform UK. Ah, they say, their vote share was down on last year, ignoring the fact that they gained more seats than any party ever has in a single local election in the past. They came from nothing to reach second place in Wales, and joint second in Scotland. Their vote share was down on last year because of the demographics of the seats that were up for grabs. The Left have always underestimated the appeal of Reform, and failed to even try to understand it. So long as that remains the case, they will never be able to combat Farage’s appeal. It was the same with Boris Johnson.

The LibDems and the Greens did roughly as well as expected, while the Conservatives did better than expected in London and one or two parts of the south, and they didn’t lose quite as many seats as many pundits had predicted. But in East Anglia, they were more or less wiped out, with Reform sweeping the board in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. Kemi Badenoch may be polling well personally, but there are few signs that the popularity of her party is moving quickly enough in the right direction. Her challenge now is to ensure that by this time next year, the Conservative Party vote share is markedly up on its current showing of 17-20 per cent.

Catherine West will canvass MPs for support this afternoon (Alamy)

3 min read4 hr

She insists to PoliticsHome that she does not have a particular successor in mind.

West said on Saturday that she would challenge the Prime Minister if a cabinet minister did not put themselves forward.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4, she said: “My preferred option is for the cabinet to do a reshuffle within itself, where there’s plenty of talent, and for Keir to be given a different role, which he might enjoy, perhaps an international role.”

West was understood to be waiting to make her final decision until after Starmer had finished giving his speech on Monday morning setting out a reset after Labour faced a devastating set of local elections. 

Speaking to PoliticsHome about the decision to not launch her leadership bid and instead canvass for a timetable for Starmer’s resignation, West said: “A lot of people might not have envisaged yours truly as walking into No 10 and I’m therefore happy to do something more vague.”

Asked if she had a particular leader in mind to take over from Starmer, West said: “No I genuinely want to keep it as open as possible. That’s why I have said by September [referring to her email], but that’s really not my job. My job was to get the ball rolling and test the temperature of the PLP. And so that is where we have got to. “

In an email to MPs seen by PoliticsHome sent after the speech concluded, West said: “I am hereby giving notice to No 10 that I am collecting names of Labour MPs to call on the Prime Minister to set a timetable for the election of a new leader in September.”

West said that while she welcomed “the renewed energy and ideas” in Starmer’s speech, she felt that it was “too little too late”.

“The results last Thursday show that the PM has failed to inspire hope. What is best for the party and country now is for an orderly transition.”

On the letter, West said there was no deadline for MPs to respond as such and while she had originally wanted to say by 10am on Tuesday, she felt that for some MPs who might be “a bit nervous that might be a bit pushy”.

West said that it would also allow MPs time to speak to their Constituency Labour Party.

She added that while she did not think anybody “dislikes” Starmer, “we are just in a different era now [from 2024] with Reform being like this.

“We need more of a street fighter, and I think people have stopped listening to us, and I think that is dangerous in politics.”