Starmer urged to change course after Reform’s success in local elections

A Labour MP has suggested that voters shunned her party in local elections because it has failed to live up to the values the public expects from a Labour government.

Sir Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch are facing pressure to reverse their parties’ fortunes after the local elections saw Reform UK make major gains across England.

Nigel Farage hailed the results as “the end of two-party politics” and “the death of the Conservative Party” as Reform picked up 10 councils and more than 600 seats in Thursday’s poll.

As the Tories faced a Reform UK surge in the North and parts of the Midlands, the Lib Dems put the squeeze on their vote further south, gaining more than 100 councillors.

Labour MP Rachael Maskell said her party has “special responsibilities” to serve the needs of people and should scrap winter fuel and welfare policies that she said are pushing voters away.

When Labour does not meet the “sweet spot” of offering support and protection in public services, voters look to “less favourable places”, she said.

The York Central MP echoed Doncaster’s Labour mayor Ros Jones, who criticised cuts to winter fuel allowance, hiking employers’ national insurance contributions and squeezing welfare after she was narrowly re-elected.

But the Prime Minister showed no sign of changing course, instead saying he would go “further and faster” with his plans.

Conservative figures have meanwhile sought to deny that the results were “existential” for the party.

Squeezed between Reform and the Liberal Democrats, the Tories lost more than 600 councillors and all 15 of the councils it controlled going into the election, among the worst results in the party’s history.

Mrs Badenoch apologised to defeated Conservative councillors and pledged to get the party back to being viewed as the “credible alternative to Labour”.

A senior Tory MP said she would “of course” still be leading the party in a year’s time and ruled out a possible pact with Reform UK on a national level to get Sir Keir out at the next general election.

“There won’t be pacts. Nigel Farage has been very clear that he wants to destroy the Conservative Party,” shadow chief Treasury secretary Richard Fuller told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

He said Reform UK would soon find out there are “no simple answers” to local public finances and have to make “difficult choices”.

“Reform will find out, I think, that there are no simple answers locally to public finances at local government level, they’ll have to make some difficult choices and the local public will … hold them to account for the decisions they make,” he told GB News.

Mr Farage has warned council staff working on diversity or climate change initiatives to seek “alternative careers”.

A newly elected Reform UK councillor said Durham County Council would be “getting the auditors in” right away to slash spending in areas like net zero and green initiatives.

“We’re getting the auditors in to see … actually what those jobs are, and if they’re good value for money, and if they’re not, well, the answer is, ‘Yeah, goodbye’,” Darren Grimes, a Durham councillor and former GB News presenter told the Today programme.

Cash spent on such programmes is “vanishingly small” and discretionary spending for councils is mostly spent on social care, libraries and filling in potholes, Tony Travers, a professor of public policy at the LSE, told the programme.

Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey said the Tories were on their “last innings” as he visited Wiltshire, where his party has become the largest, on Saturday.

“The Conservatives are on their last innings and we’re on track to overtake them at the next general election.

“Middle England put its faith in us because they are appalled by Kemi Badenoch’s lurch to the right and pandering to Farage.”

The Prime Minister is under pressure after Reform won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election by six votes and took control of the previously Labour-run Doncaster Council.

Ms Maskell told BBC Breakfast that Labour is not “any other political party”.

“We were created to serve the needs of people across working areas of our country so that people had a real voice of the kind of change that they wanted to see.

“I think it’s now time, if Labour are going to go further faster, to pick up that voice, to put our fingers on the pulse and to understand that that responsibility that the 1945 government set out, putting that safety net in place at the welfare state, is on our watch and is our responsibility.”

She said Labour needs to be driven by “a framework of values, which is about protecting people”.

“I believe that when Labour does not meet that sweet spot, that expectation that people have of a Labour government, then they start to look in less favourable places for where that help comes from.

“Yesterday, many people were searching for that response, to find that protection, to get that support.

“That’s why Labour have got to learn from the results yesterday and ensure that we do meet the needs of people in this country in very, very trying times.”

Backbench MP Emma Lewell, who has represented South Shields since 2013, said a “change of plan” is needed and said it is “tone deaf” to repeat that Labour will keep moving “further and faster”.

Brian Leishman, the MP for Alloa and Grangemouth, said the Government’s first 10 months “haven’t been good enough or what the people want” and warned that the next government will be “an extreme right-wing one” if people’s living standards are not improved.

But writing in The Times, the Prime Minister insisted there was “tangible proof that things are finally beginning to go in the right direction”, although he said he was not satisfied with where the country was.

He said: “I am acutely aware that people aren’t yet feeling the benefits. That’s what they told us last night.

“Until they do, I will wake up every morning determined to go further and faster.”

The Prime Minister signalled his priorities as he pledged to deliver “more money in your pocket, lower NHS waiting lists, lower immigration numbers”.