Politics Home Article | “Beyond A Shit Show”: Labour MPs In London Push For Comms Change

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“The public despise him,” one London Labour MP told PoliticsHome, when reflecting on the Prime Minister’s role in this week’s losses.

On Friday, Labour suffered a day of heavy losses across the country and in Wales, haemorrhaging voters to both the left and right. By Saturday, the number of Labour MPs publicly calling for the PM to go was steadily rising.

In London, multiple Labour MPs told PoliticsHome that the current status quo is not working and that everything comes back to Labour not being able to communicate with the public.

The London PLP is set to meet in the coming week to discuss the results in the capital and next steps, PoliticsHome understands. The caucus is just one group that is set to meet under a similar guise. PoliticsHome reported on Saturday that Mainstream, the soft group with links to Andy Burnham, is due to hold a call on Monday to discuss next steps, with the Red Wall caucus to hold its own meeting on Wednesday.

Labour-controlled councils fall from 21 to 9

A YouGov MRP last month predicted that Labour would lose six councils to the Greens and Reform. On Thursday, the party controlled 21 councils. As of Saturday afternoon, they have just nine. The party also lost a number of mayoral contests across the capital.

With three councils still to be counted, Labour has lost control of 11 councils, turning what was a city painted red into a multi-coloured patchwork quilt within the space of 24 hours.

Labour has so far lost control of Barnet, Brent, Enfield, Ealing, Hackney, Waltham Forest, Wandsworth, Westminster, Southwark, Newham, Haringey, and Lambeth.

The losses in London will also hit right at the heart of government, with four members of the cabinet serving as MPs in the capital, including Health Secretary Wes Streeting and Starmer himself.

The losses in Lambeth and Southwark will be particularly bruising for Labour and reflect a loss of support in Labour’s so-called heartlands, much like was seen in the Red Wall areas of the North in places like Sunderland and Thurrock. 

London Mayor Sadiq Khan weighed in on Friday afternoon, calling the party’s election results in London “bitterly disappointing” and warning that the party faces an “existential” threat nationwide.

In some boroughs, it was painfully close. Labour won 31 seats in Barnet, equal to the Conservatives. The one seat won by the Greens would have given either party a council majority.

In Westminster and Wandsworth, Labour lost control of the council, with Kemi Badenoch celebrating gains. Nationally, however, the story for the Conservatives was far from satisfactory. In Essex, Reform easily took the council from the Tories after 25 years. 

There were some success stories— Reform’s performance across the rest of the country was not replicated in London. The party, which had made the capital a focus, had hoped to take the boroughs of Bromley and Barking and Dagenham. In the end, the former was held by the Tories, while Labour held the latter.

London was also arguably a success story for Labour compared to the rest of the country in places like Birmingham and Manchester. “Against that backdrop, they’ve done relatively well,” local government expert Professor Tony Travers told PoliticsHome.

“This is a very, very, very bad election for Labour, and yet in London, Labour will be the biggest party. They’ll have lost councillors and activists, and therefore, fighting strength. But come the next election, almost certainly, Labour will be the leading party on the centre left in Britain, and then people who live in Green councils or voted Green on Thursday will have to decide sharply whether they want to vote Green, possibly contribute to a small number of Green MPs, or vote Labour to keep Reform out nationally.”

Travers argued that the Greens’ success in London also means that the spotlight will now be on the party: “Greens will now be subject to future scrutiny in the same way Reform has been in the last 10 months.”

London “beyond a shit show”

But in the capital, the mood among Labour MPs on the ground is far from positive, reflecting a souring mood even among those most loyal in the party. Regardless of what the experts think, Labour MPs on the ground feel the outcome was even worse than expected.

Emotions were heightened on Friday when a tense conversation between London MP Catherine West and fellow Londoner and Housing Secretary Steve Reed was leaked to The Times.

Since then, the Hornsey and Friern Barnet MP has joined a growing number of MPs, both the usual suspects and those outside that categorisation, who have gone over the top and asked for Starmer’s resignation. Fellow London MP and former whip Vicky Foxcroft said on Friday that “the status quo is not sustainable”, as Lewisham elected a Green mayor.

West told PoliticsHome that things were a lot worse in London than expected. “We need to do much, much better,” she said.

Speaking more generally, West said that she understood other MPs were waiting for a “perfect” candidate for leadership, but that was not realistic, adding that if no one else had put themselves forward for the bid on Monday, she would be seeking support from others and putting herself forward. She would later tell the BBC she was “confident” a contest would be triggered.

“It’s been catastrophic in London, it’s been beyond a shit show,” one London Labour MP told PoliticsHome. On the London PLP, the same MP added: “It’s not a happy place.”

“London’s awful. I’ve never known anything like it, if I’m honest,” the London-based Labour MP cited above told PoliticsHome.

“People are trying to use the line: Blair lost in [19] 99. No, he didn’t lose all these councils in 99 and we did not lose Wales,” they added.

“That comparison is just weak and lazy,” the MP said, adding that Starmer came up time and again on the doorstep during the campaign, and not in a positive way.

“You think you know it’s going to be bad, but you don’t realise just how bad it was going to be. That’s the issue.”

Neil Coyle, Labour London MP for Bermondsey and Old Southwark, whose council Southwark was lost unexpectedly to no overall control, told PoliticsHome that Starmer needs to “allow” those around him to “do more”.

Of the cabinet, he said: “Allow them to be seen more, be more of an Attlee,” referring to the former Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee.

Coyle also suggested the use of media such as YouTube to reach voters, which would allow the party to advertise by postcode, localising the Labour message.

On what went wrong in Southwark, where Labour walked away with 29 councillors, losing 23, Coyle said the party had suffered “a targeting issue”.

The message from the national party to run “the most localised campaign” to contrast with the national picture did not work in some places, Coyle claimed, because “people were unable to identify those local issues and didn’t have the track record of connectivity”.

“We thought the Greens would do well. They’ve done better than we expected,” Coyle said, reflecting on the 22 seats the party gained.

Coyle also called for performance management of councillors and candidates in the future: “We need better measurements and metrics for campaign activity, for casework activity, for local surgeries, advice sessions. We’ve got to measure that, you know, it’s performance management in effect, but we’ve got to do it better, because through those systems, we show that we represent and we reflect the community.”

Despite concerns, Coyle was still positive: “We are still the biggest party in London. And this is nowhere near the catastrophic estimates of some of the polling.” And on the Tories, Coyle added, “they’re toasting their own funeral.”

Loss of councillors could hit Labour’s campaigning force

While targeting of campaign power was an issue for many London boroughs, some worry it could get even worse.

A Labour MP agreed with the assertion that every time you lose a councillor, you lose a bit of your campaign force.

“This is the problem for London,” they said, adding that councillors are “there at the coal face…leading that change at that hyper local level.”

“If we’ve hollowed that out, then who’s there to do it?”

Another London-based Labour MP who wished to remain anonymous also pointed to a loss of membership straining the campaigning capacity.

PoliticsHome reported last year that Labour organisers were warning of a disconnect between the Labour government and party members, causing a fall in the number of activists willing to campaign.

While last year, the Labour party failed to grasp the true threat of Reform, some feel that history has been repeated with the Greens this year.

“We knew about it, but the Prime Minister and No 10 weren’t interested in the threat from the Greens. All they focused on was Reform,” the MP cited earlier argued.

While Labour will remain the largest party in the capital, the fragmentation of the multi-party system will hit its campaigns. One MP said that the Greens will now have a foothold in many councils from which to launch their attacks.

Starmer is set to make a speech on Monday to set out more of the Labour government’s policy agenda for the next few years. With many Labour MPs seeing the party’s poor results in London as part of a wider failure to communicate with the public, they will be watching and waiting to see if the prime minister’s intervention goes far enough.