Let this be the final nail in Labour’s coffin

A bloodbath. A wipeout. A rout. Call it what you want, there is no understating the catastrophe that has befallen the Labour Party in yesterday’s local elections. These results are not just a bruising defeat for an unpopular incumbent – they signal the beginning of the end for the so-called people’s party.

On the seats declared so far, Labour is having the worst results for a governing party since the Tories in 1995, before they were cast out of power for a generation. Labour’s vote share has plummeted by an astonishing 19 points since its General Election win in 2024. As results continue to come in, Keir Starmer’s party is losing half of the seats it’s defending. Not quite the worst-ever rate of loss for a governing party. That dishonour belongs to, er, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party in May 2025.

The bloodbath for Labour is even gorier in its traditional, northern, working-class heartlands. In Hartlepool – once synonymous with Labour – all 12 seats that were up for election flipped from Labour to Reform UK. In Wigan, dominated by Labour for half a century, Labour has lost 24 out of 25 seats to Reform. In Tameside, Greater Manchester, 14 of the 15 seats defended went to Reform. The so-called red wall has been smashed by the teal tide.

So far, only in London has Labour managed to stem some of the losses, performing poorly rather than catastrophically. Even here, it is losing ground in all directions, ceding Westminster and Wandsworth to the Tories, and the Hackney mayoralty to the Green Party.

The conversation has, understandably, turned to questions about the prime minister’s future. As Dan Hodges notes in the Daily Mail, all that unites our fractured nation is a ‘deep, abiding, visceral hatred for Keir Starmer’. Certainly, no self-respecting leader would try to cling on to power after this. Starmer’s response, that while the results are ‘tough’, they won’t ‘weaken my resolve to deliver the change that I promised’, sounds arrogant, tin-eared and deluded.

Yet just as deluded are those in Labour who think a change of captain will be enough to rescue the sinking ship. Can Angela Rayner really turn things around when voters in her own backyard in Tameside have just so roundly rejected the Labour Party? Can Andy Burnham waltz into parliament to take the crown? Leigh, his constituency as an MP from 2001 to 2017, has just turned teal. There is no longer such a thing as a Labour safe seat.

As the Telegraph’s Sherelle Jacobs puts it, Labour is losing in places that stuck with the party through some of its lowest ebbs of recent decades: ‘through Iraq, the financial crisis, the Corbyn years’ – to which I’d also add the Brexit betrayal, when Starmer himself campaigned to re-run the referendum, to shove millions of votes into the shredder. Labour turned its back on these voters, and they are now turning their backs on Labour.

Besides, even if the next Labour leader has more charisma or personality than the hollow, robotic Starmer, it is what they plan to do that matters most. Many Labour MPs are spinning the emphatic swing from Labour to Reform as a demand for Labour to tack leftwards – to further open the borders, to go for broke on woke, to stuff more money into the bloated welfare state. They are already discussing openly how they will use the next few years to sell out the working classes to appease the ‘progressive’ middle classes like themselves. There is no wing of the Labour Party that isn’t contemptuous of the electorate.

The long-overdue death of Labour has finally arrived. Don’t mourn.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers