It is amid this wreckage that Andy Burnham plots his next move. Long touted as a potential challenger for the Labour leadership, and after years biding his time in Manchester, Burnham and his followers sense that this is his moment to strike, and indeed perhaps his last chance to return to Westminster. 

The prospect of a Burnham coup has taken on new potency in recent months, discussed as a serious proposition not just by the usual suspects of the soft-Left, but also by his erstwhile factional foes. The party is loathed across the country — after the first 10 declared councils, Labour has lost around 83% the council seats it was defending, including in former Red Wall areas such as Hartlepool. This ratio is unlikely to be carried throughout the day, yet it speaks to a deep loss and anger in areas which were once deemed the party’s heartlands. In this context, Burnham remains one of the few national political figures with positive cut-through among the public. Survation polling suggested that had Burnham stood in the recent Gorton and Denton by-election, Labour would have taken 47% of the vote, with the Greens on 25% and Reform on 21%. 

The key to Burnham’s success has been his experience as Mayor of Greater Manchester. From buses and policing to homelessness and housing, this estranged child of Blairism has forged a new political identity, distinguishing him from the toxic trappings of Labour party loyalty. Burnham’s talents don’t lie so much in the technical detail of policy, as in his apparently effortless knack for strategic narrative, and his uncanny grasp of public mood. From nixing Ultra Low Emission Zones to backing investigations into grooming gangs, Burnham has resisted, at every stage, attempts to be pigeonholed as a daft Lefties caricature, one unconcerned with the issues which matter to Reform and its voters. 

The relentless logic of “Burnham or bust” has even begun to acquire force among the Mayor’s factional opponents. Yet his route to No. 10 will not be easy. To begin with, of course, Burnham needs to find a way to re-enter Parliament. While his team has briefed that several serving MPs are willing to step aside for the good of the party, that’s easier said than done with the added prospect of challenging a Labour NEC famed for making factional decisions against him. Then there’s the volatile electoral environment, which makes any by-election a roll of the dice — even for the King of the North. Take today’s results in Burnham’s own patch: in Tameside, a Greater Manchester borough, Labour has lost 16 seats, as Reform gained 18. Elsewhere in Greater Manchester, the news is grim too; though the party clings to power in Wigan, every Labour councilor up for election is now out of a job — and near clean sweeps for Reform in Salford too.

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There are other problems. Assuming that he does manage to both re-enter Parliament and outfox his rivals, today’s results hint that even as prime minister he could struggle at the next general election. Labour’s task now is split between recouping votes from Reform to their right, but also from the Greens to their left, illustrating the very different voting tribes Labour now caters to. In the Northern post-industrial towns of Wigan, Salford, and Hartlepool losses have primarily accrued to Reform. In Oxford, Exeter and Ealing, the Greens have made gains. The loss of the Senedd and Scottish Parliamentary presence also bakes in Labour’s decline in two former powerhouses: confirming the eradication of these former vote-farms for the party. Labour, in short, seems politically snookered, with an English voter-base so riven between Reform and Green, and with nationalists triumphant in Cardiff and Edinburgh, that the former party of the people seems to have no natural constituency left. 

No less important, this fractured political landscape shows the difficulties any potential leader will face on the policy front. For the first time in decades, Labour’s lost voters have alternatives, yet these alternatives disagree on everything except dismantling the hated status quo. The Greens have turned Labour’s moral wounds on Gaza, housing, and metropolitan neglect into a new political home, with a membership surpassing 200,000. Reform, meanwhile, has seized much of the narrative around nationhood, pride and belonging in many of Britain’s deprived post-industrial regions. 

If anyone can perform this balancing act, it’s Burnham. But unlike in Greater Manchester, Burnham in Parliament will be dependent on a large body of disparate MPs to carry through his vision. Years in the wilderness have weakened his connections and friendships, leaving him with little in the way of a truly loyal following among the PLP. The road to Parliament will also require him to make deals with many on the Labour Right, the same machine politicians responsible for the tone-deaf posturing and self-destructive factionalizing which has landed the party in such a mess. 

Not that it’s all bad news for Burnham. For one thing, both Reform and the Greens have serious weaknesses. Zack Polanski’s rapid rise has brought organizational strain, factional tension and intense scrutiny over allegations of antisemitism. No less important, mass activist membership is not simply new to the Greens, it also marks a departure philosophically from a party which has always traditionally seen itself as an electoral vehicle more than a social movement. 

Reform, too, has compromised its radical credentials. Defected Tory frontbenchers proffering fiscal conservatism obviously dilute Farage’s potent narrative of change. Revelations of huge undeclared donations from foreign entities and crypto-billionaires are scandalous, while the party’s previous electoral successes have ended badly too. From Kent to Stafford to Lancashire, Reform councils have been mired in fratricidal squabbling and operational chaos; they have failed to deliver on key promises such as cutting waste, lowering council tax and managing local services more effectively. 

As Reform picks up many more councils over the next 24 hours, not least after its triumph in erstwhile Labour strongholds like Newcastle-under-Lyme, expect more awkward questions over the months and years ahead. There is also a risk for Reform of too much success, too quickly. This organization with no real experience or history managing the complex organs of local government could easily flounder. In a sense, Farage finds himself caught in his own momentum, relying on the wave to carry on crashing through without breaking and receding.

As for Burnham, he may have other reasons for hope too. While it’s true that both Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are already in Parliament, and both purportedly sitting on the 81 MP nominations needed to trigger a leadership contest, the results today show that neither of them have the security to reinforce a leadership bid, facing the prospect of losing their thin majorities at the next general election. Think again to Tameside: not only has Labour been punished in the council, it’s also Rayner’s own seat. As for Streeting, he defends a slim majority in Ilford North. 

Yet if Burnham’s rivals may now be thinking of their own futures, whether in No. 10 or indeed Parliament generally, Burnham’s route to Westminster requires a delicate dance: one in which Starmer is defenestrated but not so quickly as to preclude his ability to participate in a future contest. Streeting, in particular, is all too aware of this. Facing certain annihilation in a run-off with Burnham, the Health Secretary’s allies are already briefing that they could precipitate the contest early, denying Burnham his chance. 

In this, the events of the next 24 hours may prove crucial. The pro-Burnham camp’s strategy to head off a pre-emptive challenge from Streeting is to pressure Starmer into a timetable for managed departure, providing breathing space to find a seat and allowing a dignified retreat for the beleaguered PM. Yet Starmer seems unlikely to enter such an agreement willingly, without tremendous pressure. Burnham’s best chance lies in the goldilocks zone between complete wipeout — increasing pressure for Starmer’s immediate departure — set against devastating, but not cataclysmic results which allow for a more measured and timely departure. Success, then, requires skillful and coordinated interventions from both parliamentary colleagues and timely presentations from Burnham himself.

For the moment, anyway, Labour’s sensible money seems to have little choice but to accept the Burnham wager. The time is nigh for the organization to decide if it values its survival more than it hates its most popular figurehead. The party will likely find answering that question harder than it should — regardless of how grim today proves.

One forecast suggests Labour could lose almost 2,000 councilors this week, almost three-quarters of the local seats the party is defending. Translated to national politics, the vast majority of Labour MPs would lose their seats at the next general election. By the weekend, indeed, the Prime Minister may be so humiliated by a slew of town-hall debacles that he feels he has to resign — before his cabinet colleagues revolt.

The truth, of course, is far less dramatic. If Starmer is finally ejected from office, the locals will merely have been the straw that broke the Labour’s back. Even so, this intense springtime focus on councilors and wards really does matter, if not in the way Westminster thinks. By diverting resources away from the national crucible of government in London, as they frantically try to ensure a good performance in council polls, parties severely undermine the status and work of local government — harming everyone, whatever their politics.

That was clear enough last week, on the day the Commons voted on whether Starmer should be referred to the Privileges Committee. To guarantee victory, Labour whips summoned MPs back to Westminster from councils all over the kingdom — before dispatching them back to the campaign trail after marching through the Commons lobbies. To put it differently, then, many MPs, who are paid roughly £2,000 a week to be national figures, had been given permission by the Commons whips to skive off their normal Westminster work: to become foot-soldiers in council campaigns, and all at the state’s expense.

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If the Westminster system is partly to blame here, the media is too. Indeed, I confess I was often guilty of emphasizing the national dimension of local politics during my long years as a TV reporter. Even so, it does feel as if things are getting worse. To give one example, the Green leader Zack Polanski was recently interviewed for almost 20 minutes on ITV’s breakfast show.  Presenters Ed Balls and Susanna Reid asked Polanski at length about a whole string of national matters — drugs, speed limits, borders and immigration, fuel duty, and several other issues which have nothing to do with local councils. The Today program spent most of its local election interview with Nigel Farage asking him about his policies on welfare, again the opposite of a local authority matter.

In a sense, this nationalization of municipal elections is an inevitable consequence of how politics has changed. As councils face more and more regulations from Whitehall — over a dozen national bodies expect town halls to enforce hundreds of laws —  it’s unsurprising that national debates on education or social care muscle into local elections. That’s especially true when Treasury constraints give councilors ever-less room for maneuver, with social care alone taking up 65% of their budgets.

Equally important is the depressing decline of local media. Even 30 years ago, many communities boasted several newspapers, with the local press feeling it was their duty to report matters in town hall and its council chamber. But now, there is no local media to speak of across 37 local authority districts, and the gap isn’t adequately filled by social media, let alone council websites. It’s therefore now quite hard for voters to know how a local council is performing — beyond their own personal experience — or to discover what plans it has for the future.

Taken together, anyway, this national obsession is grossly unfair to the principles of local government — to say nothing of those hundreds of thousands of people who work in town halls.  British local government was developed over the centuries to promote accountability between governors and governed. Through regular votes at the ballot box, citizens would decide who should run their local services, with the power to eject them if they performed badly.

Increasingly, though, that process of accountability has broken down — and if national trends are largely responsible, voters hardly help themselves. After all, almost everyone now casts their ballots for national reasons, severing the vital link between the performance of local politicians and whether they deserve to stay in power.

There are exceptions, of course. The year-long bin strike in Birmingham, England’s largest local authority, may lose the ruling Labour group many votes, or anyway more than elsewhere. In general, though, Labour council leaders will be thrown out of office on Thursday not because they’ve run their plot badly, but because their electors are horrified by the performance of Keir Starmer and his colleagues in London. The same could apply to some Conservative council leaders, given the Tories’ equally low popularity under Kemi Badenoch.

And if this is bad for democracy in theory, it also discourages effective local governance in practice. Council leaders have little incentive to perform well, knowing their fate at the next local election will almost certainly depend on the ebbs and flows of their party’s national support. In some areas, meanwhile, voters will oust their councilors next week — even though they actually think the council’s doing a pretty good job. For them, giving Starmer or Badenoch a good kicking will take precedence.

What a sense of injustice that must create for councilors who have devoted years to public service. No wonder parties from Labour to Reform have so much trouble finding talented people to stand for council contests, even as the quality of those who do get elected invariably declines.

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What, then, of the future? One solution is surely to exclude political parties from local government, as effectively happens with most parish councils where candidates generally try to secure election on their own personal merits. And, to be fair, there are still some remote corners of Britain where independent councilors remain a powerful force. In Pembrokeshire, for example, independents have run the council for decades, with a similar situation in the Western Isles of Scotland.

Paradoxically, national politicians are always telling us how much they’re committed to devolution, to letting local people decide at the lowest level. In that case, party leaders should stop getting involved in any local elections other than those in their own constituencies. More than that, Westminster MPs should be much tougher in not taking on local casework from constituents when the problem is often the responsibility of the local council. Their centralizing instincts aside, that might actually help MPs, shielding them from the public’s wrath when the pothole down the street isn’t filled in. Nor would this be anything new. Well into the postwar period, parliamentarians saw the Commons, not the town hall, as their place, understanding that their role was to represent their constituency — and not be distracted by every local challenge.

That, of course, would require a shift among voters. For while electors seem happy to see the locals as a great national opinion poll, they increasingly also seem to want their Westminster MPs to be local. Many electors equally insist their national representatives should be born and bred in the constituency, and preferably live there too. Until that changes, expect this country’s politics to struggle, wherever its representatives are based.

Growing up in the city, I remember my mother speaking about the Royal with a sense of pride. Not the pride, mind, of someone who could afford to stay there — but of someone who wanted her city to have places like it. You could walk in through the front doors and out through the back, right onto the platform at the train station. As for the building itself, it hosted weddings and conferences, and the occasional wake. The Royal, in short, was as much a part of Hull as its cream phone boxes: visible, familiar, unavoidable.

Yet by the time of Hull’s disorder — and as Hobman’s comment so vividly implies — the Royal had become something different, darker. In part, certainly, it was targeted because of who stayed there now: not tipsy aunts and mourners, but asylum seekers. Yet if the perhaps 200 people huddling inside the hotel were one of the targets, they were ultimately mere ciphers for a much broader malaise. 

Speaking with several of those present that day, alongside others from across Hull, it’s clear that what largely underpinned the violence was not a coherent ideological project, still less organized extremism. Rather, it represented a belief that electoral promises were no longer translating into policy reality. That resulting anger was often messy, contradictory — and shameful. Some perpetrators were undoubtedly racist. But beyond the fires and the bricks lay something more structural: a sense that democratic accountability had thinned, and that decisions taken in Westminster were drifting beyond the reach of those dealing with the consequences.

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Opened in 1849 as the Station Hotel, right beside Hull’s main rail terminus, the Royal stood at the literal gateway to the city. Given its current name in 1854, after a stay from Queen Victoria, it’s a regal endorsement that’s endured war, fire, rebuilding and reinvention. In its heyday, the hotel was a statement of Victorian confidence, with its imposing Italianate façade in warm stone, facing right onto Paragon Square. Things were just as impressive inside, all sweeping staircases and chandeliers. Not that everyone was charmed. Philip Larkin, who for years worked at Hull’s university library, and never one for romanticizing his surroundings, found the Royal rather gloomy. Yet that note of austerity only reinforced its presence: a grand, slightly worn institution that anchored the city, whether you stayed there or not.

Perhaps that’s why, when asylum seekers were housed there under Home Office contracts in 2019, Hull was always going to react. What was initially described as contingency accommodation turned into something more permanent. There was no local vote, no real consultation, only a visible change imposed in the symbolic heart of the city. As for residents, many saw the transformation as further evidence that Hull’s future was being shaped elsewhere, by people who neither knew the town nor cared what happened next.

By the end of September 2025, official Home Office data showed that 777 asylum seekers were receiving state support in Kingston upon Hull. A city of 275,401, that’s about 28 per 10,000. Of these, 257 were in what was called hotel-based contingency housing — in other words places like the Royal. These figures may appear modest on paper. But to understand why they mattered, you must also grasp what Hull had already lost: and what came afterwards.

Almost everyone I spoke to in the city could trace their family stories back to the docks. Hull is a port city with a long memory. From the Fifties to the mid-Seventies, its fishing fleet ranged as far as the freezing North Atlantic, with trawlers away for weeks at a time. Some never returned — fishing was and is one of the most dangerous professions on Earth — but at the industry’s peak the dangers somehow felt worth it. Home to some 350 ships, Hull’s docks were crowded, its fortunes tied to waters thousands of miles away. That reach translated into something tangible at home: steady wages, full pubs, busy streets, and a sense that Hull mattered. Places like the Royal reflected that confidence.

Then it all unraveled — the Cod Wars, geopolitical shocks, rising costs and economic mismanagement are all to blame. By the early 2000s, Hull had one of the weakest local economies in the country, with large areas ranking among the most deprived in England. In 2001, around 38% of working-age adults had no formal qualifications, and earnings lagged well behind the British average. Yet this collapse was about more than unemployment; it eroded the pride that came from Hull’s place in a global industry. Boarded-up shops, low-paid work and a growing drugs trade reshaped the city’s texture. Regeneration did come, slowly and unevenly. But amid the retail developments and public investment, the push into renewables and, in 2017, the UK City of Culture, what was lost never truly returned. 

Mass immigration arrived later. By the 2021 census, 13.1% of Hull’s population was born outside the UK, an increase of 4.6 percentage points since 2011. This demographic change soon became visible. New shops and services appeared, which some long-standing residents felt weren’t built with them in mind. Eastern European supermarkets; Asian takeaways; Turkish barbers — all these became more common, while many older fixtures of working-class life, from pubs to cafés, continued to vanish. Some of that loss merely reflected economic decline and changing habits. But set alongside immigration, the effect felt sharper.

Little wonder that Hull went heavily for Brexit, with many hoping their votes would help regain control over Britain’s borders. We know what happened next: the Boriswave, and more mistrust in the powers-that-be. That was especially true in a tight-knit, working-class city like Hull. Higher arrivals, legal and illegal alike, translated into pressure on housing and local services. Stories circulated of local families spending years on waiting lists, while newly arrived migrants were seen to be housed more quickly. Some, no doubt, were mere rumors. But it’s also true that council housing is governed by a points-based system putting need over nationality. In practice, that often reinforced a deep sense of unfairness among long-time residents.

Change, then, was not encountered in spreadsheets. It was encountered in kitchens, at school gates, in the way public spaces were used — and in how secure people felt in their own city. Several women tell me that young girls no longer feel safe walking past the Royal, day or night. “Nobody even wants to go anywhere near it,” is how one puts it, a woman in her forties with tied-back hair and a steady manner. Others speak of groups of men congregating outside, approaching young girls, and creating an atmosphere they describe as intimidating. Nothing, they say, was ever done about it.

Those fears did not appear in a vacuum. Hull had already been shadowed by longstanding claims grooming gangs operated in the city. Earlier this month, Humberside Police closed their investigation without charges, disappointing some alleged victims. Meanwhile, concerns about women’s safety in the city center were embedded in the local conversation. Once again, many of these assertions were hard to verify. But they circulated persistently, reinforcing a sense of warnings ignored.

So when disorder came, it didn’t emerge from nothing. The Southport murders were merely the spark — even if online rumors and disinformation doubtless spread the flames. As riots erupted across England, a group of protesters gathered at Victoria Square, roughly 500 yards from the Royal. One of the organizers was John Francis, a broad-shouldered middle-aged man with a cockney accent who walks with the aid of a crutch. He says he moved to Hull in 1989, “and I’ve been here ever since”. 

Francis is blunt, emotionally invested in his patch, and unafraid to say what he thinks. Through a Facebook group called Hull Patriotic Protesters, Francis had planned what he calls a “flash demo” focused on “winter fuel payments, illegal immigration, pensioners being shafted”. The group frames itself as patriotic, explicitly rejecting racism and extremism. Yet its rhetoric, particularly around illegal immigration, is often blunt and sometimes inflammatory. Francis, for his part, also acknowledged in a Sky News interview that he was once a member of the now-defunct English Defence League.

That history matters, placing Francis in a harder-edged tradition of street mobilization. Yet nor does it fully explain the composition or mood of the crowd that August day. Watching violence unfold elsewhere, even Francis seems to have been cautious, claiming he tried to turn the march into a vigil, asking people to “bring flowers and teddy bears”. 

Hobman, who saw a Facebook post advertising the protest, was among those who turned up. “People that love the country, basically,” he says, “we’re going to pay our respects.” He arranged childcare for his son and went into town. “Someone needs to do something.” At Victoria Square, a broad pedestrian space centered on a statue of the eponymous monarch, where protests are traditionally held, both John and Francis recall a heavy police presence and a small counter-protest. The interaction seemed to harden the mood. Then, as Hobman puts it, “everybody went there” — by which he means the Royal Hotel. By the time the crowd arrived, there were “about 3,000 people” outside.

What followed resembled scenes elsewhere: widespread disorder involving criminal damage and looting. Violence spread across much of Hull’s city center and continued on into the evening. Hobman, who had been drinking, threw a beer can at a police shield. Three weeks later, he was arrested and sentenced to eight months in jail. “If I could turn back time,” he says, “I wouldn’t go.”

In the days that followed, the Prime Minister described the riots as “far-Right thuggery”. The phrase stuck, and to an extent for good reason. Some rioters in Hull and beyond directed hostility at “foreigners”, real or perceived, with reports of anti-immigrant and, at times, racist chanting. At one point in Hull, a breakaway group surrounded a car of Romanians, kicking and striking the vehicle and punching one of the occupants through a window. 

But to describe the entire crowd as “far-Right” was rhetorically effective but analytically unhelpful, blurring the distinction between thugs and bystanders, racists and concerned citizens, extremists and criminal opportunists. When I ask Hobman what he understood by the phrase “far Right”, his answer is more nuanced than you might expect. “I don’t care if you’re black, blue, orange. I don’t want illegal immigrants here.” Francis, who says he left as events escalated and wasn’t involved in the disorder, draws a similar line, emphasizing the importance of legality and integration. Both men, like everyone I speak to, invoke less the language of racial hierarchy than that of grievance — about borders, consent and perceived unfairness. 

But when those two positions are treated as indistinguishable, political language loses precision. This dynamic isn’t new: recall, again, the way Brexiteers were too often equated with ignorance or worse. The political risk for Labour is now similar, even among those totally uninvolved in the violence. One woman I interview, who attended the initial protest, “absolutely hated” what happened outside the Royal. The vandalism, she says, was “stupid and self-defeating”. Yet she still thinks immigration policy has been handled recklessly — and there’s not much evidence the Government is doing much about it.

After all, though the current plan is to end hotel use by 2029, redistribution is hardly resolution, with migrants likely to end up scattered across HMOs or disused army barracks. That, of course, leaves the underlying questions of consent and mandate unanswered, to say nothing of the wider system that allowed migrants to enter Britain to start with. 

Even so, and despite believing that promises made at the ballot box haven’t translated into policy, no one I speak to proposes dumping politics altogether. “They may not listen to me,” says one Hull mother with two young children, “but they’ll see my vote on the ballot.” Hobman is more blunt: “I will vote Reform.” Francis, who is standing as an independent in the May local elections, says that if he were not running himself, he too would back a Reform candidate. 

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Either way, this is hardly the language of anti-democratic withdrawal, reflecting instead a hard-headed electoral repositioning on the part of Hull and its people. The city’s recent political shifts reflect that turn. Luke Campbell, a local former Olympic boxer, won the mayoralty under the Reform banner last year, while the party is contesting all 19 seats in the upcoming local elections. With Nigel Farage recently visiting to drum up support, Reform will be hoping to convert that momentum into tangible gains.

None of this guarantees a lasting political realignment, but it does point to a growing willingness among voters to look past Labour. In this, Hull’s politics have long been more fluid than its industrial past might imply. While Labour dominated for decades, the city equally sustains a strong Liberal Democrat presence, one framed by a decent ground game and a focus on things like potholes. To that extent, Reform’s rise feels more radical, especially as it centers not on local gripes, but on immigration and indeed the direction of the country at large.

Nor is Hull exceptional. Across England and Wales, post-industrial communities are facing vast rapid demographic change without commensurate investment. And when locals are then told that concerns about pace or scale are morally suspect, the effect is combustible. All the same, Hull’s story also shows that migration is merely the razor edge of discontent. Even if Reform gains support on stopping the boats, say, it’ll ultimately be judged on something deeper: whether it can offer a credible economic settlement for Hull and places like it. Beyond border control, that’ll require sustained investment in jobs, skills and infrastructure; a housing system that feels fair; and a model of growth that restores a sense of stability. Without that, the underlying conditions that produced the riots will remain. As for the Royal, it may yet return to what it once was, a place for tipsy aunts and mourners. But Hull has a long memory.

Up by the station, there’s a day-tripping exodus in search of a different kind of salvation. They’re heading to Woodbridge, officially Britain’s happiest town, just 10 minutes away on the train. “They’re building an Anglo-Saxon longship,” announces a 60-year-old American Air Force veteran as the train moves from the torpid Ipswich sprawl to rolling Suffolk green. “Today I just feel like I need to touch its wood and feel its magic.”

Down by the riverside, droves of bewildered Ipswich families waddle through this arcadian dream. The 7th-century ship is being rebuilt there, carefully watched over by Georgian houses shrouded in blossom and stern solitude. The last time this idyll was disturbed was in 1915, when a lost German Zeppelin dropped an incendiary bomb on an old lady. “I hope you’re not going to write more nice things about us,” snaps an unnervingly well-preserved woman in her 70s, when I ask for the secrets to the town’s happiness. “We don’t want everyone moving here.”

Thirty miles south of here, Matthew Parris once decried Clacton-on-Sea as a festering boil of resentment on England’s eastern hinterlands — whose reactionary politics would hold back the inevitable progress of 21st-century England. But 30 miles up the coast, in Woodbridge, the columnist ignored an equally retrograde mirror to English modernity. It hosts barely 8,000 people, but Woodbridge is the platonic form of a burgeoning middle-class dream. Forged in the popular consciousness during the so-called “posh turn” of the 2010s, it envisages a new aesthetic for national legitimacy, one now luring a wave of professionals desperate for a glimmer of old England — or indeed escape from a new one. Welcome, then, to a retrograde revolution, one that could upend politics as fundamentally as Reform’s march on England’s post-industrial towns.

While the demographic story of the decade has been about immigration into Britain’s cities, an overlooked trend is this steady scale of internal migration towards rural areas. Countryside semis are now the strongest performing property type, as house price growth in rural areas has started to outstrip Britain’s towns and cities. No wonder. People living in the countryside live longer, are more economically active, happier and less lonely than those in Britain’s cities. It’s a flourishing Woodbridge flaunts: Santa Monica packs of women in lycra power walk past crooked Elizabethan shopfronts. A red phone box has been converted into a Happiness Hub.

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But this is more than just an escape to the country. Speak to the locals, rather, and it feels almost atavistic — a kind of broadband-powered Merrie England, dovetailed by three-day working weeks and evening saunters through the churchyard to yoga. People here explain their world via euphemisms from Sunday Times property supplements. Nice community, good schools, good walks. “Classic Britain, how it should be,” says Greg, rather more pointedly, standing in overalls next to a shipping yard full of forgotten boats. “It’s hard to imagine that’s over there, and that this is here,” he says, pointing beyond the shimmering haze of Sutton Hoo, the Anglo-Saxon burial site on the River Deben, and out towards Ipswich.

Greg’s life before Woodbridge, in the England he left behind, is recalled as one long regret: a purgatory of drabness. Stuck in lorries and delivery vans orbiting Birmingham, Leicester, Newcastle. A life punctuated by motorway stations, Wetherspoons and random acts of extreme violence. In Sparkhill, his delivery van was attacked by a gang of ski-masked youths. Two years ago, he broke down outside Woodbridge, “the safe haven” as he calls it. He hasn’t left since.

The town council here reflects a mix of Greens and Liberal Democrats who dominate local politics in the area. It’s a progressive ascendency that has coincided with an influx from London, dramatically reshaping the standard fare of provincial politics. Out have gone the stuffy cabal of port-colored county solicitors, replaced by middle-aged Gore-Tex progressives. One disgruntled local describes it as nothing less than a “woke coup”. Overnight came climate emergency declarations, bee cafes in rewilded fields, and a Black Lives Matter banner hung on the 16th-century shire hall (the latter lasted just two days before being torn down by assailants in a white van).

Yet as Greg’s eagerness for a safe haven implies, Woodbridge is no less reactionary against the state of modern England than the Reform vote set to dominate the headlines. The New Middle England Ed Davey has said he wants to win over — one formed of Lib Dems and Tory turncoats — share the same concerns around the scale of immigration as the rest of the country. The local party machine, built around Nimbyism, is the scourge of Labour radicals set to arm themselves with new planning powers. But it’s also an effective expression of mistrust and paranoia over further encroachment of what increasingly feels like a different polity altogether, squatting in Ipswich and the growing London swell.

Labour’s proposed devolution changes — the reason elections here are delayed — would see councillors overshadowed by a beefed-up mayoral authority. Locals fear this centralization of devolved power is a ruse to help Starmer build his New Jerusalem of 1.5 million homes and net-zero infrastructure.

The area has already had a taste of this New England. A suburbanizing march from Ipswich has already started to take shape. The city, one of Britain’s fastest growing, has reached its boundaries, and a planned 82% rise in the housing stock conjures visions of the daytrippers staying for good. So too Labour’s plans to triple Britain’s solar capacity, already reshaping hundreds of acres of surrounding countryside. Then there’s Sizewell C, the new nuclear power station, a symbol in concrete of the upheaval reshaping the area.

“People have committed suicide in Leiston [near Sizewell C] because of how their village is changing,” says the Lib Dem county councillor Ruth Leach, still wearing her name badge as she tucks into a bacon roll by the riverfront. It’s a Saturday morning, and the road from Ipswich is already heaving with a fleet of polished vintage cars, battered vans, and 4x4s, the latter reverberating with Kurdish pop. Robin Sanders, the jovial mayor, full of bon mots and local anecdotes, takes a darker turn when forced to consider the town’s future. “We are a frontline on the cusp of huge change,” he says. “My concern is, in 20 years time, we will just become part of Ipswich.”

Harnessing this anxiety was the Lib Dem strategy behind yesterday’s elections — a prelude to the inevitable upheavals of 2029.  Theirs is a populism of the village hall, with gains promised from Devon and Gloucester to the Surrey Downs. The formula of this new politics is Reform with an Aga, a reactionary localism hostile to Westminster’s desperate attempts at nation building, leavened by deep contempt for the political establishment and fired by fears over England’s future. Tellingly, Ed Davey bears a striking resemblance to those reassuring busybodies who’ve mounted a civic defense of Woodbridge against New England.

Yet where people like Eamonn O’Nolan differ from the Right is in their vision for the future: less Anglofuturist dynamism, more the Sunday Times property supplement taken to its logical extreme, mixed with a heavy dose of climate apocalypticism. The former mayor was immortalized in 2019, after being arrested in full mayoral robes alongside George Monbiot during an Extinction Rebellion protest, an action he insists was supported by the town. “People have no imagination for how bad things will get,” he says from the Cherry Tree Pub, reflecting on the threat of climate change with the same wistful owl-sad eyes as on that famous day in Whitehall. “People are going to die, they’re already dying,” he tells me, as farmers and teenagers gather by the bar, oblivious to their fate.

O’Nolan’s solution? A provincial autarky of “living within our postcode”. Services to be fully localized, food confined to Suffolk farms, energy secured via micro grids. Cars would be discouraged, the rivers would run clean and the refitted cottages would once again wallow in pre-industrial arcadia. Is this realistic? Perhaps not, but it’s preferable to what O’Nolan sees as being tethered to modern England’s “growth obsessed” 21st century, with Woodbridge dragged into a homogenized “masterplan to overpopulate the area” — all without any consideration for the local way of life.

O’Nolan says this steady descent into overpopulation, civic indifference and a “growth-obsessed” model of living is already overshadowing his town. He says I should travel to the housing estates slowly mushrooming into the soulless torpor characteristic of new-build Britain. Heading east, deeper into Suffolk, I find Rendlesham, where Anglo Saxon Kings first encountered Christianity. Over the last two decades, it’s expanded into a generous housing estate. Georgian pastiches dress themselves up in garden center attire. Retirement flats look like conference stays in a motorway inn. “It has the atmosphere of a town built in the desert to test a nuclear weapon,” says a resident of one nearby village.

Once upon a time, Rendlesham’s developers imagined a “self-sustaining settlement for the 21st century” replete with theatres, sports facilities and bustling community spaces — in other words, a second Woodbridge. But this vision has gone the way of another archetype: Northstowe, Britain’s newest town, recently singled out by Labour as an example of a flailing developer-driven model in need of “kickstarting”. Rendelsham’s latest development plan, ahead of a new wave of building, quietly laments “a lack of community cohesion and infrastructure”.

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On the edge of the village is the vanguard of England’s house-building march, a new Persimmon estate and a desperate pastiche of Surrey serenity. Fathers power-hose their brand new Mazdas, their tidy lawns bordering an ancient forest where scholars believe Beowulf was first performed, and where UFOs have apparently been spotted.

Steve is one the new buyers. He’s a retired ambulance driver from near Chelmsford, an Essex emigre. “It’s not a nice place these days,” he says of his old home. “They want to fight you, stab you, sell you drugs or all three.” He and his wife are the oldest on the estate and love it. Houses — according to the estate agent — are not being bought with mortgages but inheritance and relocation money. A bored policeman stops by and they talk about chaffinches and woodcocks. Anything that evokes the old home before it became part of the London spread. “Eventually,” Steve jokes, “all the property in these parts will run out, and if you want to get away, you’ll have to move out into the sea.”

Back in Woodbridge, the evening dawns. By the river, locals fantasize about the day the 7th-century replica ship will carry them off across the Deben to the National Trust Valhalla of Sutton Hoo. For the rest of us, it’s time to go home. From the magic dusk of Woodbridge, we emerge to a feral night in Ipswich.

Apocalyptic preachers spar with homeless drug addicts (“Demons bro,” explains one of the evangelizers). Boozy farmers out on the piss peacock past packs of Kurdish teenagers. Recently arrived young migrants from Africa stand in doorways of dead retail, looking bored and disappointed. “What the fuck is going on up there?” mumbles an old bloke catching the bus out of town, as a strangled howl echoes past the faded Victoriana of the Corn Exchange.

Leaving Clacton-on-Sea, Matthew Parris lamented it as a symbol of a “Britain going nowhere”. The future, he claimed, lay in turning your back on the “nostalgic and fearful” of the periphery, places alien to the buzz and potential of Britain’s cosmopolitan, glass-towered hubs, gazing out into the 21st century. But now, Britain’s middle classes have taken up that forbidden mood, carrying it into the market towns and villages. Here, politics is a matter of being left alone, to dream of another England.

The finesse of how to govern well can wait — for now, Reform can simply ride the wave, propelled by the euphoric high of political momentum. Realism and political temperance comes second to whether “The Establishment” is running scared. The old playbook is simple: identify ruling power structures that feel distant and aloof, be they parties or institutions, and campaign against them in an uncompromising, boisterous fashion — all washed down with an (imperial) pint of blokish bonhomie.

But Farage’s script, refined over a political career spanning more than a decade, is changing: “I’m not mucking about — I’ve got one goal, and that is that Reform wins the next general election,” Farage told assembled party members at the launch of Reform’s local election campaign in late March. That’s quite a shift in political aim: from outsider revolutionary to governor. Thursday’s local elections are being spoken of as a mere staging post, before the march onwards to No.10. If we are to take Farage’s stated ambition seriously — and we need to, with a recent gold-standard MRP poll putting reform ahead of Labour and the Tories in seats — then we need to ask what a detail-light party might look to actually implement in power. Policy is harder than it looks.

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One of most effective tools in Farage’s arsenal has been his tight, clear messaging. But, as recent history tells us, marrying rhetoric with reality is a challenging business. It wasn’t so long ago that “stop the boats” was launched as a short, simple and seductive slogan. Stopping the boats in practice? Well, just ask Rishi Sunak for just how challenging three short words can be to put into effect. Recognizing the challenge of governing actually requiring policy, senior Reform operatives are working to set up a politically aligned think tank to support policy development, modeled on the US think tanks that serve as ideological outriders to the Trump presidency, the FT has reported. It cited an internal document that declared the planned organization would “support Reform with policy development, briefing and rebuttal” and seek to “change opinion around key issues and provide technocratic competence”.

But the very act of defining a policy platform will reveal tensions simmering beneath the surface. The prevalence of foreign money in British think tanks is quite limited — especially when compared with equivalent American outfits and their vast endowments, payrolls and genuinely global influence. But the FT reported that Reform’s proposed think tank would seek funding from “US donors from MAGA, tech [and] religious conservatives”, in addition to more regular UK sources of funding. No wonder Farage is looking abroad — the sheer scale of US political money embarrasses our own campaign and political research spending. Looking for dollars from the United States, the new Right certainly fits the pattern of Farage’s regular cross-Atlantic visits — and his genuine star appeal at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a jamboree of American Right-wing politicians, broadcasters and influencers.

But Reform are seeking inspiration and funding from a country which has an entirely different political culture could become their undoing. Reform’s online activists too are steeped daily in the disputatious politics of the American Right. Emboldened and energized by a fresh Trump-MAGA victory, the American new Right might look like a winning template for populist-Right parties worldwide. But Reform should exercise caution in the lessons it draws from abroad. There is a discordance between a more pedestrian party of suburban, coastal England, and the radical libertarian-conservative ideology of Silicon Valley tech elites like Peter Thiel and Musk that leads the American new Right. They may align on attitudes to immigration and share the culture war skepticism of anything “woke”, but it doesn’t take long to find grit in the oyster between the two movements.

Reform’s existing voters, and those it is most likely to attract in the future, are predominantly older — just under two-thirds are over 50. The upside of donations from wealthy US Right benefactors is clear, but what about a wider ideological alignment — taking on the political approach and talking points of a foreign political movement? In the UK, voters look upon MAGA’s mercurial radicalism — typified by the tech elite’s “move fast and break things” approach in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — with bemusement. Whether you consider it a national fault or not, Brits are simply less culturally or ideologically invested than the average American in radical, sweeping changes in the scope of the state.

Unlike the United States’ robust recovery from the financial crisis, Britain remains stuck in nearly two decades of economic stagnation, meaning the headroom for change, as Rachel Reeves has found out, is limited. What little remains in most council budgets, which bore the brunt of the austerity period, is now overwhelmingly dedicated to adult social care — something Reform’s older voter base would certainly notice if fiddled with. But, taking the US Right as his inspiration, Farage said he is looking to bring DOGE to local government regardless.

At his local election campaign launch, Farage said Reform had submitted 3,000 Freedom of Information requests aimed at identifying and rooting out wasteful government spending. “When we win these county councils, we’ll send in the auditors, we’ll get rid of the fraudulent contracts, we’ll cut spending and we’ll do our utmost to fulfill all of our promises,” he added. It’s a glimpse behind the curtains at his personal Thatcherite past. But this is politics, not policy. Unless he’s proposing cutting adult social care, this is all talk. And while Farage and his followers may occasionally lean and speak libertarian, repeated history tells us that whatever pleases populist conservatives will come first in any party he leads.

A nod to this tendency — later denied by an insider to Politics Home — was the floating of an anti-housebuilding campaign in the launch documents for the proposed think tank — a caveat emptor for any young Reform activists with aspirations to own a home of their own. Farage, like many of his populist Right contemporaries, might be very good at courting a young audience on TikTok. But just as with the Conservative Party, the middle-to-late age, home-owning voter base will dictate the direction of Reform policy, not the well-intentioned frustrations of young activists.

Countering house building might make sense if you view housing as a subset of immigration policy, with each newcomer making the housing shortage even more acute — even if cutting net migration to zero tomorrow would still leave one of the most acute housing shortages in the world entirely unresolved. But the suggestion not immediately being thrown out demonstrates a real cultural difference between Reform, and the ideology behind any money sourced from the more libertarian and radical US Right.

The Siren call of American money will be welcome to a movement without established labor union or business funding routes, but Reform will have to watch itself, and avoid trying to push radical American libertarianism on its more staid, less provocative voters. Labour will be watching like a hawk for any more attackable comments in this space, having finally found an argument capable of taking the wind out of Reform’s sails. It’s not the only foreign policy risk of cosying up to the US New Right — the Trump team’s open disgust for Europe, and its politics and values, is becoming clearer by the day.

Trump’s economic policies, in the wake of the tariff announcements, are a stormcloud on the horizon too. “10% tariffs from the USA are bad news, but better than 20% for EU members,” Farage said — looking to play down his visceral, Thatcherite disapproval of the huge, sweeping changes to global trade policy of his political ally. He increasingly resembles a contortionist, stealthily adapting his message for a skeptical British audience, while desperately trying to appear loyal to Trump.

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The undeniable strength of the Reform and Farage brands can paper over a lot of these contradictions on the way up in the polls. When you don’t fill the policy space, voters imagine what they like, and project it onto parties they culturally identify with. But as Reform professionalizes, media scrutiny intensifies, and the general election draws nearer, policy positions, influenced by think tanks, will have to start crystallizing, exposing the ideological cracks in the party coalition. Farage will need to decide soon if he wants to continue to be the revolutionary leader and terrorizer of institutions, or start to work out a framework for actually steering them as a leader. If he doesn’t decide on the latter before long, experience will soon find him out in Downing Street.

Ideological tensions between the donors, membership, voters and leadership of parties are nothing new. But if Farage is serious about preparing for power, then British politics will have to come before American money and ideology. It’s the same question Farage needs to face as leader — making the choice between raging against the machine, or grasping the levers to control it. If these tensions aren’t addressed, expect a bumpier ride in the near future. The Rupert Lowe row and expulsion is evidence enough that ambitious senior Reform operatives will inevitably seek to push their vision into any available policy vacuum.

At their core, Reform–supporting Britons are voting against the radical, disorienting pace of social and economic change experienced in recent decades. Society has moved too fast for them, and they don’t understand it. But unlike their American equivalents, they want to ease off the accelerator, not stamp hard on the brakes. Farage the impressionist can paint feeling but a government needs blueprints, budgets and hard choices. With the local elections near and expectations set sky high, it’s Reform’s first big test to see if they can actually solve the litany of problems that face the British state, when given the opportunity to do so. It’s hard to resist the wealth of American money, but Reform should never forget that even if we share a language, we do not share a culture — and there has rarely been a time more in need of solutions over vibes.

The writing is almost on the wall in Blakenall Heath. Only the K and N of Blakenall remain on the sign that marks the entrance to this small suburb of Walsall in the West Midlands. “It’s about right,” says one local man with a hearty laugh. “Now it says: ‘Welcome to ***k*n Heath.’”

The only time this part of the world attracts national attention outside of the electoral cycle is when it receives the accolades no town wants. “‘Hell hole’ Walsall named in top 50 worst places to live in England,” reported the Birmingham Mail in January. Walsall has the worst community spirit of anywhere in the country, according to a 2016 poll. Giles Fraser once ministered to the folk of Blakenall Heath and wrote afterwards that the area “seethed with the anger of the unheard”.

When I visit, a sense of despair hangs in the air. The ground, meanwhile, is littered with the detritus of an area that has lost the respect of its own residents: fly-tipped waste, general litter and dog mess.

Blakenall abandoned its traditional loyalty to Labour, in the local elections this month, electing a Tory councillor for the first time in at least half a century (certainly as far back as records at The Elections Centre go). It was a remarkable victory for a party at a low ebb nationally, in one of the poorest areas of Britain during the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. Blakenall is the most deprived ward in Walsall, which is itself within the most deprived 10% of districts in the country. On average, its residents are more likely to be economically inactive, be victims of crime and have no formal qualifications.

The recent electoral coup was either a vote of confidence in the local Tories, who actually managed to increase their majority on Walsall Council, or a last-resort howl of disaffection from voters sick at being taken for granted. Not that most here cared either way. After walking around its centre for 90 minutes, I can only find two people who voted. The rest look almost taken aback to be asked the question. Turnout was 22%.

“I never vote,” says a retired lorry driver in the local butcher’s. “It doesn’t matter who you vote for.” A 13-year-old is asked by the shopkeeper: “You understand voting? You know, when you’re 18 and you get the vote?” The boy gives a blank expression and walks off with his sausages.

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“A lot of the people were surprised that somebody knocked on their door to canvass during the campaign,” Izzy Hussain, the newly minted Tory councillor, tells me. “They said that they’ve never had anyone call and ask questions about the area. I think that was a real plus point for us.” Hussain admits Partygate came up on the doorstep, but he resolutely focused on local issues, from rubbish to potholes. “I have seen what the Conservatives have done in the area,” he says. “They are in power [on the council] — they have done good work.”

But the Conservatives’ top buzzword gets short shrift on the streets of Blakenall. “It don’t want levelling-up!” exclaims a 71-year-old man. “It needs flattening and starting again.”

A 53-year-old woman who doesn’t “do any voting” and has lived here for 15 years sums up the village in a single word: “Depressing. There’s anti-social behaviour. Everywhere you go, you just see kids with kids. There’s no work ethic. They don’t look after their houses. It breaks my heart. I don’t think it will ever change, no matter how much money you put into it.”

Would you move if you could, I try to ask. She interrupts before I can finish. “I’ve got my own house and it’s lovely,” she says, lowering her voice and looking around nervously to check passers-by can’t hear. “But if I could pick it up and put it somewhere else, I’d be over the moon. Because I hate it around here.”

The mother-of-two earns the minimum wage working in a home for children with learning difficulties, but often feels she would be better off on benefits. She says: “I do my job because I care and I want to make a difference. I look like a tramp today. But I’m a hard-working tramp. It doesn’t pay me to be hard-working. But I don’t want to have that attitude. I’ve brought up the kids not to have that attitude.” Like many here, she is unmoved by rule-breaking in Downing Street. That would necessitate locals believing in the integrity of politicians in the first place — a fanciful luxury when the most fundamental needs of everyday life are left unmet.

Round the corner, a 20-year-old barber, who has also never voted, says: “Blakenall has its bumpy rides. So it was proper shit. Then it was all right, which is about as good as it gets.” What’s it like now, I ask. “Shit,” he says with a shrug. “You get 11-year-olds walking along the road smoking weed and getting mad at you.” He doesn’t even go out to the pub anymore, for fear of being glassed or stabbed at the end of the night. “It’s dangerous, way too dangerous. My generation is fucked. I just want to move to the countryside. I want to move to a farm.”

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One shop owner says her neighbour shut up for good after boys kept hurling stones at the window. “When you call the police, they don’t really come.” A shopper says: “They need to do something for the kids. It’s no wonder they’re terrorising the shops, throwing eggs at them. Everything’s been taken off them.”

There doesn’t seem to be much on offer. Walsall Council has closed nine of its 16 libraries since 2016, including both in Blakenall. Walsall’s Civic Centre hasn’t reopened to the public since Covid. A sign reads: “WALSALL COUNCIL IS CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.”

***

Dave Taylor initially tried to stand as a Labour candidate in Blakenall, but ultimately chose to be an independent, branding the local party “an utter shambles”. With 621 votes to Labour’s 692, he split the electorate, allowing the Tories in with 809. He says it is something that gives him no pleasure: “I’m a socialist at heart and I think Walsall should be Red.” But he adds: “There’s no firm leadership there at a local level and the Tory Party are running rings around Labour at every turn. It hurts me to see it.

“This is why I think it turned Tory — the Conservatives have got a model called Resilient Communities and when the pandemic came, they did a really good job. During that time, when people most needed them, they looked to Labour and saw absolutely nothing.”

He co-manages the Ryecroft Community Hub, a charity that gives social enterprises reduced rents, which in turn are used to fund a community centre where locals can receive financial and mental health support, plus advice on how to reduce their energy usage. (Almost a third of Blakenall’s households are in fuel poverty — unable to afford to adequately heat their homes — compared with an average in England of 13%.)

He says he came across one man at home sitting on a beanbag after selling all his possessions to make ends meet. Another, who fell ill during the pandemic, had no option but to flog his children’s beds. And he fears what is to come: “I’ve never known it this bad. After this October, when the next energy rise is coming, you’re going to see people dead in their homes. I’m convinced of it. It will have nothing to do with Covid. It will be because they’ve made the choice between eating and heating. Eating has won and so the heating has gone off.”

Neither Labour’s unsuccessful candidate in Blakenall nor its one remaining councillor responded to a request for an interview. Perhaps that’s unsurprising: the result came at the end of a torrid time for the local party. In March, former Labour Walsall Council leader Sean Coughlan was given an 18-month community order, after he admitted attempting to persuade what he thought was a 14-year-old girl to engage in a sexual activity.

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Blakenall’s third councillor is independent Pete Smith, who first represented the ward in 1988 and who also abandoned Labour. Of his old party, the former Walsall mayor says: “At national level, I don’t think people know what they stand for and at branch level, they’re non-existent. They’ve shown no competence at council level. The Conservatives, led by Councillor Mike Bird, are very effective locally. He’s a lot more competent, it hurts me to say, than the Labour leader.”

I have a particularly spiky exchange with a woman who has been wheeling her shopping trolley aimlessly around the village — a lifelong Labour voter and a Boris Johnson admirer who stayed at home this month for the first time. She says she deduces I’m from a “good family”, concludes witheringly that I vote Tory because “Mummy and Daddy do, I suppose”, and wants to know where I went to university, before replying with a hard stare: “This isn’t Bristol. This is a working-class area that has debilitated.”

Her assumptions may be wrong, but who could blame her for resenting a London hack who’s only turned up after a headline-grabbing poll, and for being mystified by my interest in her voting habits and hopes for the future under a new political representative? It is, after all, between elections when the alienated of Blakenall find it impossible to be heard, returning to the obscurity where so many other communities are also wilting from national neglect.

The people here have just completed their hat-trick of electoral revolts (with 74%, Walsall North was the constituency with the second-highest Leave vote in the EU referendum, and in 2017 it kicked out its Labour MP of 38 years for a Tory Brexiteer). It’s no wonder, as they await the arrival of the next gas bill with dread, that most have no faith in the possibility of life improving.

Had the 2022 local elections been held across the entire country then Labour would have a national equivalent vote of 35% compared with the Conservative’s 32%. Were this replicated at a general election, it would likely deliver a hung parliament and make Keir Starmer the first Labour Prime Minister since Gordon Brown. For all of these reasons, in recent days MPs, columnists and pollsters have been writing Johnson’s political obituary, urging him to go before he ruins the Conservative brand forever. The only way forward is to change course — and to do so quickly.

Only, not so fast. Look more closely at what just unfolded and there are good reasons why Team Johnson — after everything — should be feeling quietly confident about the next general election. For a start, many people are exaggerating the predictive power of local elections: in reality, they are a poor guide to what will happen at general elections.

People tend to forget this today, but Labour similarly won the national equivalent vote at the local elections in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and then again in 2016, before drawing even with the Conservatives in 2018 and 2019. Ed Miliband’s Labour Party made striking gains at local elections between 2011 and 2014, winning an impressive 857 seats and gaining 26 councils in 2011, before winning another 823 seats and 42 councils in 2012. Yet Miliband never saw Number 10.

At all three of the general elections held during this period — in 2015, 2017, and 2019 — it was the Conservatives, not Labour, who won majorities or were returned to power as the largest party. Turn the clock even further back and you will find other warnings from history. Even under the radical Left-winger Michael Foot, Labour consistently outperformed Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party at the local elections between 1980 and 1982, including when Thatcher lost more than 1,100 seats in 1981, shortly before she won her second landslide.

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And five years later, in 1986, Thatcher again lost around 1,000 council seats before winning her third and final landslide the following year. So too did John Major, in 1991, shortly before he won his surprising majority in 1992. And while the Conservatives routinely finished ahead of New Labour at local elections in the early 2000s, their share of the vote in 2005 lagged well behind their national equivalent vote at the local elections. In short, local elections are like the weatherman: worth listening to but they do not always give us an accurate forecast.

Even if you do view them as a useful indicator it is also worth remembering that, historically, opposition parties that have gone on to win the next general election attract a national equivalent vote share of around 40% and enjoy double digit leads over the governing party.

This is what Tony Blair achieved in 1996, when his 14-point lead over John Major at the local elections cleared the path for his massive majority. It is also what David Cameron achieved in 2009, when he fell just short of the 40% mark but still led Brown by 15-points before emerging as the leader of the largest party in 2010. In fact, at no point between 1979 and 2022 has an opposition party managed to overturn an incumbent government after attracting a national equivalent vote of less than 40%. Labour, for the record, just polled 35% — the same share that Jeremy Corbyn achieved in 2018.

This should be a cause for concern in Team Starmer. After everything — after the Covid-19 pandemic, Partygate, Cummingsgate, Rishigate, scandals, inflation, and a rapidly escalating cost-of-living crisis — Labour attracted just a five-point lead over the Conservatives. A five-point lead. Those who compare politics today with the Nineties, arguing that a string of Tory scandals will propel Labour into office, miss a crucial point. At the local elections between 1993 and 1996, Blair and Labour averaged a 14-point lead over the Conservatives.

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These points are especially important given that, historically, incumbent parties tend to better their local election performance at the following general election — as Cameron did in 2015, Theresa May did in 2017, and Johnson did in 2019. Meanwhile, opposition parties tend to underperform. In other words, if you take the lessons of political history seriously, then all of this gives us a message: while the Labour Party has stabilised, it is still a long way from winning the next general election.

And this is especially true when you look at Labour’s performance in one part of the country that will play a major role in determining the outcome of that election: England. While Labour is moving in the right direction in London, Scotland and Wales, stacking up votes in lots of areas where it already has support, across a large swathe of non-London England, which was the engine behind populism, Brexit and Boris Johnson, it is an entirely different story.

Labour only advanced modestly in southern England, while falling back by three-points in the north and failing to demonstrate serious progress elsewhere. Of the four local councils Labour took from the Conservatives, three were in London and all were in the south. Despite all the talk over the last two years about Labour “winning back the Red Wall”, Labour recorded net losses in the North and Midlands. Remarkably, the Greens (+63) and Luftur Rahman’s Aspire Party (+23) gained more councillors in England than Labour (+22) — a damning indictment of a party that hopes to return to Number 10 less than two years from now.

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These shifts point to what I suspect will be Team Johnson’s strategy between now and the next election — throw absolutely everything at mobilising non-London England against what they will argue is the looming “threat” of an economically chaotic Labour-SNP alliance. You can already see elements of it in the Queen’s Speech — the strong focus on making more of the Brexit Dividend, the Levelling-Up and Regeneration Bill, a British Bill of Rights, tougher action on illegal immigration and the Channel Crossings, and the focus on law and order.

All this is geared toward mobilising pro-Brexit English identifiers who have been trending from Left to Right for 20 years. Labour, remember, have still not won the popular vote in England since 2001. This strategy has been used before, of course. It was in 2015 when, despite a similarly difficult economic environment and bleak numbers in the polls, Cameron won a majority mainly by capturing 60% of seats in England and 41% of the vote — his party’s highest share since the rise of New Labour in 1997.

It was then implicitly used again four years later, in 2019, when Johnson won 47% among the English and 65% of seats in England, cementing a much stronger relationship with English Leavers. Now, he may be hoping that a similar strategy will not only retain the Red Wall but expand it even further, offsetting losses in the southeast by targeting the nearly three dozen seats in the Red Wall 2.0. With both Brexit and Boris having alienated liberal graduates in Remainia, some around the Prime Minister might well conclude that this is now the only viable strategy — to lean into the realignment.

Only, this time around, Johnson is unlikely to have a Ukip or a Brexit Party breathing down his neck, with the latter estimated to have cost the Conservative Party 50 seats in 2019. Will the one in four 2019 Conservative voters who are currently telling pollsters they plan to sit out the next election really do this? Put the prospect of a Labour-SNP coalition in front of them and watch what happens.

There is no doubt this is incredibly high risk. If levelling-up fails to deliver, if the government fails to show it can control illegal immigration, if the cost of living escalates to such a point that the Conservatives are no longer considered more economically competent than Labour, and if Starmer wins his gamble over Beergate and proceeds to exploit the recession, inflation, rising unemployment, and a sharp economic downturn that looms on the horizon, then it is not hard to see how Johnson’s entire coalition could fall apart in one fell swoop.

But looking at these results and the direction of British politics, with less than two years to go until the next general election, both the Prime Minister and the people around him may well conclude that there is no alternative — that their path to retaining power no longer lies in being a one-nation party but rather a party for forgotten England.