"A different type of change please"
Local elections took place on Thursday across 6 Combined Authority and Metro Mayors, as well as 24 of England's 317 local councils in the Labour Government's first major test with voters since the July 2024 General Election. Labour also faced a head-to-head challenge with Nigel Farage's Reform party at the Runcorn and Helsby by-election, with Reform narrowly taking the seat. Our Global Public Affairs team shares their insight on what the results mean for the future direction of the Labour Government, and how the parties might navigate a new era of multi-party politics:
The 2025 Local Elections
These elections show that the Labour Government’s most compelling electoral challenge remains to its populist right. Labour has lost the lead that carried the party to power in 2024, with that vote splintering away to the left and right, with Reform the clear beneficiaries today.
This poses a major question for the Government about whether the approach pursued by the PM’s Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney – to try to outflank Reform – is the right one. Can the Government feasibly beat Reform on the politics of ‘patriotism’ or immigration, or should it be more confident in taking on Farage where he is weaker and pushing a different agenda?
On the economy, the results could feasibly challenge Rachel Reeves’ fiscal orthodoxy, as it becomes less clear that re-fighting the 2010-15 fiscal battle with the Conservatives is especially relevant to winning Reform-Labour marginals.
We now appear to be living in a period of genuine multi-party politics in the UK, and our electoral system is not set up to deal with this. This means British elections will continue to produce erratic results that are increasingly hard to predict in the coming years.
The voting public in England is increasingly splintered and fractious. These results reflect widespread frustration and dissatisfaction both with the Government and Conservative Opposition and will have to the spur the Government to action in pursuing faster and more aggressive policy decisions to deliver the “Change” the Labour Party promised in 2024. But voters now appear to be asking for a different type of change.
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