After the May Day Massacre

A bad night for Labour. A terrible night for the Conservatives. A parliamentary by-election that should have been routine for the government lost to Reform by six votes. 16 councils held by the Conservatives, all gone. 186 Labour and 676 Tory councillors looking for new ways to spend their evenings, May Day will rightly go down as a massacre. Nigel Farage's extreme right insurgency blew through council halls up and down the country and, with little effort, swept aside the established parties. The polls pointed to such an outcome, and these losses are the consquences of the strategies Labour and the Tories have chosen to pursue.

Reform did well, but no triumph is ever unqualified. The only party that benefits from hyping the result is Farage himself. In a reverse of last July's election result, in many council seats Reform won where Labour and Tory votes splintered and, like that election, turnout was low - though not historically so in local government terms. The second point is the character of Reform's vote. As has been argued here since time immemorial, over the last 15 years local elections and by-election have had an inbuilt Tory advantage. I.e. As a party heavily dependent on elderly voters, it has benefited from their disproportionate commitment to turn out and vote. Pollsters' data tables repeatedly demonstrates how Reform has a very similar voter profile, though with a tendency to appeal a bit more to older working age people than the Tories managed. Farage's success is dependent on a certain amount of clout the party has among these cohorts, and that it would be diluted in a general election where greater turnout, to a degree, depresses the influence older/retired voters exercise. Thirdly, how deep is Reform's support? In a conjuncture where Labour has made itself repulsive to older people, and the shambles the Tories have become speaks for itself, how much of this is driven by middle finger/burn-the-house-down nihilism? Immigration has always been a stand-in for a bucketful of grievances and is a condenser of concern. Therefore, if there are improvements in living standards and services and are seen to be improvements and are felt as such by the constituencies disposed toward Reform, Farage's support could prove temporary. At least that's what the data suggests.

But are we going to see movement in this direction? Labour, I suppose, are in a better position because they have the levers of government to hand and can pull on them to make the necessary differences. Unfortunately, while you even have awful right wingers like Jo White of the self-proclaimed Red Wall group dubbing the scrapping winter fuel payments Labour's "poll tax", Morgan McSweeney and Labour's big strategy brains are likelier to take notice on her call to get tough with grooming gangs. There are idiotic MPs punting for a watering down of Net Zero, and Keir Starmer himself says "he gets it" (gets what?) and that he'll go "further and faster" on his policy agenda. A politician acting in good faith and genuinely concerned about the results would have paused to think that perhaps it's those priorities that are the problem.

For the beleagured Kemi Badenoch, the task of turning it around for the Tories is much harder. How can she demonstrate change when the means for doing so are much more limited? Dave and Osborne had their fights over the Tory logo, and the superficial rebranding of the Conservatives as a socially liberal, pro-environment party. Badenoch and her stalking horse are boxed into a strategy where the Tories are trying to be more credible than Reform on the issues that Reform voters care about. It does make some sort of sense that they'd want to consolidate their base after a shattering defeat and an unprecedented challenge to their right, but going hard on immigration and anti-woke posturing cannot work because they have few means of demonstrating their efficacy. And while they do the Liberal Democrats carry on making inroads, turning what were their rural heartlands across England into new bases for a more moderate, inclusive centre right politics that the Lib Dems could well embrace. However, on Sunday's Laura Kuenssberg Badenoch said that, yes, people are angry with the Tories for their 14 years in office, but politically nothing needs to change. She even said twice that Britons needed to be having more children, referencing another social media obsession of the very online right.

While politics has changed, for both parties nothing has. Every election victory and defeat over the last five years has been interpreted as either vindication of a rightward turn or the outcome of not being right wing enough. Until their strategies are informed differently, more pain lies ahead for Labour and the Tories.

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