There was one saving grace about last week’s local election results for Labour: the poor performance of the Tories. Labour may have just lost its 16th safest seat, but one BBC model projected that a national vote on the basis of these elections would give the Tories just a dozen Westminster constituencies. If Kemi Badenoch survives another 12 months, it will be an unlikely triumph.

At that point, the spotlight will instead settle on Labour’s wilting rose, as the Government is forced to confront decimation across the Union. In elections to the Welsh Senedd, Labour will likely shed seats to both Plaid Cymru and Reform UK. Meanwhile in Scotland, the SNP and Scottish Greens could reassert nationalist primacy. In England, major cities, from Manchester to Birmingham, might reject Labour as the shires just spurned the Tories. South Wales could turn turquoise and a few London boroughs a tint of green. Across Yorkshire, Lancashire and the West Midlands, meanwhile, we can expect a mosaic of independents.

It is no surprise, then, that several Labour backbenchers have tried to shape the debate in the aftermath of last week’s results. Writing for the Telegraph at the weekend, Jonathan Hinder, the MP for Pendle and Clitheroe, declared that Labour had morphed into a “hyper-liberal party rather than a socialist one”. Defeating Reform, he insisted, meant outflanking Nigel Farage on migration policy — specifically, through pursuing a “one in, one out” scenario by the end of this parliament.

Hinder’s proposal is more radical than anything emanating from Farage’s party. For Reform, the emphasis is on economic value as much as numbers, hence the preference for a points-based system. Implicit there is the recognition that the NHS, and Britain’s elderly care sector, would collapse without migrant labour — at least in the short term. So perhaps Hinder’s provocation is designed to catalyse a debate with the London leadership, rather than be the final word. More cynically, it may be designed as something he can personally relay on the doorstep to constituents.

Elsewhere, Louise Haigh, Labour MP for Sheffield Heeley, has demanded an “economic reset”. This would entail “ripping up” the fiscal rules, as well as embarking on a programme of “investment and reindustrialisation”. While for Hinder Labour’s problem is vacating a space to its Right, for Haigh the major vulnerability is to the party’s Left. Here, Rachel Reeves and the Treasury are the problem, not stubbornly high migration numbers or small boats.

What should trouble Number 10 is that both Hinder and Haigh are broadly correct, though the most reliable polling indicates Labour is losing more votes to the Greens and Liberal Democrats than Reform. In Scotland, the party could be reduced to just a handful of seats. It’s hard to believe the appropriate response is to dance to Farage’s tune. Yet it’s also true that migration is a huge issue in large parts of the country, with net migration surpassing 900,000 in 2023. Clearly, we are no longer in the 2000s.

Most significant of all is how no senior figure dares enter this conversation. The modus operandi of Starmer’s Labour for the entirety of his leadership has involved a level of discipline that would make the Bolsheviks blush. But if crushing dissent served to make party management all the easier, it also led to poor and unpopular policy-making. Who could imagine the withdrawal of the winter fuel allowance from 10 million pensioners would go well? Indeed, Health Secretary Wes Streeting acknowledged on Tuesday that the issue particularly harmed Labour at the local elections, and hinted that the party may ease the cut.

So far, the strict discipline imposed on the parliamentary Labour Party has been an advantage. Yet one suspects that, in a crisis, it will mean the party quickly spirals, with any shared capacity for course-correction withered on the vine. If that happens, the media may not even have time to turn on Starmer — voters will have beaten them to it.

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