Where do Labour go from here?

On polling day I was out knocking on doors in two very different places, Basildon and Bermondsey. In Basildon, Labour were hammered by Reform. In Bermondsey the ward I was in returned one Labour councillors and two Greens despite being a target. What is happening to Labour, and what should we do about it? That's the question the whole party is grappling with at the time of writing. It's a hard one to definitively answer. Losses in Bermondsey and Basildon sit alongside losses is Birmingham and Barnsley. Councils and wards of different profiles, with different issues, don't seem to think Labour is the answer to what ails them. We know that local campaigns are crucial. Where there were bright spots for Labour – and there were a few – they were founded in strong local campaigns and good candidates. But often where the results were very bad we had both of these things also. Lumping people and places into broad categories often hides more than it reveals but it should be reasonably clear to everyone that the policy, and perhaps more importantly the style, the rhetoric, and the messaging that will appeal young, diverse, middle class urbanites and older, rooted, working class, people living in towns are not the same. Inevitably then the conversation has become more about the national direction of the party. The question of where it might go in response has to be seen through the lens of these results, and the kinds of people and places that are moving away from us. On one hand ‘traditional Labour' communities continue to pull away from the party apace. These are, very reductively, white working-class towns. They have been moving away from the party for some time, accelerated in 2019 when Boris Johnson broke the ‘Red Wall' for the Tories. Reform now seem best placed to take advantage. But Labour has other kinds of traditional power bases and these too seem to be moving away. Wards and whole councils in the centre of cities, like London, Manchester, and Newcastle, are going Green for the first time ever. This phenomenon is much newer. It has taken the leadership of self-defined ‘eco-populist' Zak Polanski to break the Greens out of the progressive strongholds of Brighton and Bristol and take Labour's progressive heartlands in Hackney, Lewisham, and Waltham Forest. Lumping people and places into broad categories often hides more than it reveals but it should be reasonably clear to everyone that the policy, and perhaps more importantly the style, the rhetoric, and the messaging that will appeal young, diverse, middle class urbanites and older, rooted, working class, people living in towns are not the same. So, from these two poles, three options for the national party emerge. Focus more on one or try to find common ground between the two. The leadership speculation we have seen is an expression of these three potential futures. Those on the left of the party have an agenda and vibe that is probably more aligned with urbanites. They feel that the government has gone too far in its ‘control migration' rhetoric, and has been unwilling to spend enough on ‘Labour things' due to what some of them see as a slavish adherence to the fiscal rules. Andy Burnham seems to be their preferred candidate to carry this message, though Angela Rayner and even Ed Miliband are similar-ish and have the advantage of being in parliament already. Then there are those for whom the kind of arguments that might work better in the places where we lost to Reform are the way to go. This would look like strong rhetoric on migration, a return of welfare reform, focusing on defence spending and the like. Names like Shabana Mahmood and Wes Streeting probably exemplify this tendency, though each would also want to lay claim to the achievements of the government they are part of also. And that government, led by Keir Starmer, represents the attempt to manage both directions simultaneously. It has many achievements on areas that matter to each camp. We have falling migration, are nationalising rail, and the renters and workers rights Bill will have big impacts on both urban professionals and working people up and down the country. But its critics would say even if the policy is good, trying messaging to these two different audiences ends up with lines cancelling each other out. All these camps have quite sharp things to say about each other, but it is less clear how different they would be on policy. The Government has acknowledged it must be more radical, but recent events indicate it is struggling to convince people. The ‘Manchesterism' offered by the left of the party with its focus on place, public-private partnership, and where appropriate public ownership feels quite similar to Labour's '24 manifesto. And, generally bound by being in government, detailed ideas from the right of the party have yet to emerge – though big figures in it are recently free of that burden. What is common across the places I have listed in this piece is that people have real problems. They have problems with housing, they have problems with transport, with the local high-street. Knotty difficult problems which require coordination between local and national leaders. Whoever wins out, and whatever direction they take the party in, the style must change but the imperative to deliver on these bread-and-butter issues will not. Tom Collinge is deputy director of Progress

Title

POLICY AND POLITICS

Where do Labour go from here?

By Tom Collinge | 18 May 2026

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