Labour needs to learn from the collapse of the Tory party, and fast

Labour took a hammering at the local elections, but the Tories fared even worse. If Labour don't wake up to political reality soon, they're just as doomed

Labour took an absolute walloping at the local elections, setting a new record for the worst local election performance by a new party of government, with 65% of the seats they were defending lost.

Things were even worse for the Tories though. They lost an extraordinary 676 councillors, and every single one of the councils they were defending, eight to Reform, one to the Lib-Dems, and the rest to No Overall Control.

What makes this massacre of the Tories so remarkable is that this round of local elections was always the one that favoured the Tories the most, with lots of rural and wealthy suburban areas, and very few of the traditionally Labour-voting metropolitan areas.

To get a scale of the Tory wipe out, consider Kent County Council, where the Tories were always the biggest party since it was created in the 1973 local government reorganisation. They had a brief stint in opposition between 1993 and 1997 when Labour and the Lib-Dems joined forces to outnumber them, but for the two decades before and almost three decades since, they were the majority rulers.

In 2025 they lost all but five of their Kent County Council seats as Reform won majority control with 57 (up from 0)!

The Tories are being wiped off the local government map, and they were only saved from further losses because elections were delayed for a year in 9 local government areas, 6 of which are held by the Tories.

Labour should be heeding the warning of these unprecedented Tory defeats as proof of what happens when a political party represses wages; collapses living standards; annihilates local government funding; stagnates the economy with economically illiterate austerity measures; vandalises the social safety net; under-invests in infrastructure; allows privatisation profiteers to loot the country; oversees the decimation of high streets; does eff all to prevent greedy buy-to-let slumlords buying up all of the affordable housing; and spouts endless anti-immigration rhetoric to deflect blame from their own failings.

Instead of seeing the collapse of the Tory party as a prescient warning about what eventually happens to political parties that refuse to serve the interests of ordinary people, Labour somehow seem to consider David Cameron’s austerity government as a blueprint for good governance!

You look at Labour’s policy agenda, and swathes of it are identical to Cameron and Osborne’s failed and unpopular policies a decade and a half ago:

The same economically idiotic obsession with austerity and book-balancing exercises.

The same blaming of the previous government for the imposition of economy-strangling austerity measures.

The same refusal to properly invest in the drivers of future economic prosperity (education, infrastructure, public health, quality public services …).

The same anti-environment rhetoric as Cameron’s "cut the green crap" behind Labour’s utterly baseless assertions that environmental protections are holding up development.

The bone-headed refusal to abolish the diabolical two-child economic sanctions on families, or to restore local government funding to pre-austerity levels.

The same conscious cruelty of economically attacking disabled people, whilst letting corporations and the mega-rich keep all of their handouts and tax advantages.

And the same dangerous tactic of using and legitimising far-right anti-immigration rhetoric, whilst allowing huge scale immigration just like the Tories did.

Trashing living standards whilst riling people up with anti-immigration rhetoric did actually work for the Tories for a while, but largely thanks to the ineptitude of the Labour Party who handed them the 2015 election on a plate by pathetically imitating ruinous and unpopular Tory austerity policies, rather than pointing out the social and economic damage, the spectacularly missed targets, and proposing a better alternative.

Pandering to the extreme-right worked again for the Tories in 2017 and 2019 as they soaked up swathes of the far-right vote, largely thanks to the Faragists standing down candidates in Tory-held constituencies.

They were obviously playing with fire by veering off to the extreme-right like this, and then Boris Johnson purged most of the more sensible liberal-capitalist Tories in 2019 in a move that eventually sealed their fate.

People don’t want a government that systematically destroys our living standards and communities, and they don’t want a government that rabble-rouses against immigrants while they allow net immigration of hundreds of thousands per year.

It’s important to consider that under the current conditions, the UK economy needs immigration just to keep flatlining, because of the ageing population, and as a result of successive governments deterring prospective parents by crushing living standards and implementing diabolical legislation to impose economic sanctions on the parents of the next generation of workers.

Do people want the government to encourage parenthood enough to maintain the working population, or do they want immigration to make up the shortfall?

Because the only other option is severely declining living standards as the working age population shrinks dramatically in relation to the elderly non-working population.

Britain’s GDP is barely growing as it is, but if we look at it in relation to the population (GDP per capita) we’re actually getting poorer, and it’s only our reliance on immigration that creates the illusion that the economy hasn’t been completely knackered by a decade and a half of austerity ruination, and Boris Johnson’s unspeakably stupid Brexit shambles, which amounted to little more than imposing economic sanctions on ourselves.

However, it’s pointless going into the reality of Britain’s ageing demographics; GDP per capita; and the pros and cons of immigration, because it’s beyond obvious that nobody at all wants a government that covers for their own economic failings with a load of frothing anti-immigration rhetoric, whilst simultaneously allowing mass immigration, and relying on it to boost the country’s flagging GDP.

Which brings us to Labour’s knee-jerk post-elections announcement that they’re planning to clamp down on Britain’s lucrative overseas student population.

It reeks of desperation to announce anti-immigration measures in response to the far-right taking control of so many councils, and it’s beyond absurd to believe that the people who now refuse to accept it from the Tories, will suddenly believe it coming from Labour.

Labour desperately needs to abandon the idiotic austerity book-balancing exercises that have been strangling the economy for a decade and a half, and actually do things to improve the material conditions of ordinary people’s lives.

And they have to abandon the absolute fantasy that they’re going to attract far-right voters into voting Labour by rabble-rousing against immigration, whilst they rely on mass immigration to prevent UK GDP growth actually turning negative.

It’s incredible to see the Tories take such an absolute spanking from a public that has absolutely had enough of them, but it’s even more extraordinary to see Starmer’s Labour imitating the economic policies and propaganda tactics that eventually delivered the Tories such electoral ruination.