“We must see a restoration of Labour Party democracy so that members have a genuine democratic choice in any Leadership election with candidates from across Labour’s broad church.”
By Rachel Garnham
The May 2026 election results are absolutely devastating for Labour. These results were absolutely avoidable if the current Leadership had made any effort to listen to grassroots and affiliated members who have long warned of the risks of unpopular policies and bad decisions haemorrhaging support.
Labour’s total number of councillors decreased by 1,496; we lost control of 38 councils; and had a predicted national vote share of 17%, the same as the Conservatives, and trailing the Green Party on 18% and Reform UK on 26%. According to Professor John Curtice, Labour particularly lost support in areas where the party was previously strongest and in wards where many people identify as Muslim. Labour votes largely went to the Greens, Plaid Cymru and the Lib Dems or stayed at home. In Wales, Labour dropped 25% since the last Senedd election to 11% of the vote, down to just 9 seats of the 96-member Senedd. In Scotland, Labour dropped 4 seats and is now joint second in the parliament alongside Reform – a result that could have been far worse had Scottish Labour not made efforts to distance itself from Labour in Westminster.
With Starmer’s Labour pandering to a racist, anti-immigration agenda, pursuing neo-liberal economic policies which prioritise military spending increases over public services, and prolonging the failed privatisation agenda, and failing to genuinely stand up to the US and Israel’s war drive, it is no surprise that so many voters from across the broad coalition that has often voted Labour have now turned elsewhere.
Labour has spent the last six years moving further and further to the right on immigration and civil liberties – to the point where hundreds of mainly older people are arrested for holding up signs, the right to protest is being continually severely undermined, and thousands of core supporters from migrant backgrounds now feel demonised and in many cases fear for their future, with changes to indefinite leave to remain. As has been warned so often by many in the Party, “you can’t out-Reform Reform,” and so it has come to pass – stoking anti-immigration rhetoric has helped Reform to win an additional nearly 1,500 councillors, take control of 14 councils and comfortably become the second party in Wales with 34 seats.
Meanwhile, Labour’s failure to seriously address the under-funding of public services and the cost of living crisis because of its adherence to the economics of austerity has led to traditional Labour voters turning away in droves. Unlike the false claims of the Labour right, Labour is mainly losing its voters not to the far right, but to parties such as Plaid Cymru and the Green Party, who under Zack Polanski’s leadership have embraced a programme closer to traditional Labour policies, like those that Corbyn’s Labour stood on in 2017 which won 40% of the vote – such as defending, not cutting, the welfare state, and promoting peace and justice internationally, including support for Palestinian human rights.
Labour is losing voters who value our public services and hoped for some real investment under a Labour government. Instead, the NHS remains chronically under-funded, with workers daring to take strike action demonised and a Health Secretary refusing to reverse creeping privatisation. It is deeply concerning that in April 2025, the Good Law Project revealed that Wes Streeting received donations from private health companies or individuals with interests in private healthcare at a rate of £10,000 per month. Education, likewise, is in financial dire straits, with teaching staff to be balloted for strike action over pay and a broken system of student and university funding leaving too many students with not enough to live on but ever-growing debt, and hundreds of job losses in tertiary education. Yet Labour fails to distribute wealth and instead continues to target welfare cuts, taking from those who can least afford it.
Ordinary grassroots members, alongside left MPs, Labour’s affiliated unions and socialist societies such as the Socialist Health Association, Socialist Education Association and Disability Labour, have raised these issues that have led to Labour’s loss of support over and over again. Sadly, they have been ignored. Instead, I heard John Healy, on the radio the day after the 7 May 7 elections, advocating that a lesson to learn was to increase military spending – an utterly ludicrous conclusion to draw from conversations on the doorstep, which illustrates how out of touch Labour’s current leadership truly is. The other conclusion mooted is to “go faster”. No! If you’re going in the wrong direction, you have to change course, not go faster into oblivion.
Obviously, Starmer must go. His policies have opened up a path towards a possible far-right victory at the next general election – which would be a catastrophe for the country and, of course, for our Party and trade unions. Starmer’s policies are hurting people in Britain and around the world, and his attacks on internal Party democracy have gutted our Party. But a change of Leader will not be sufficient for revival. The lessons from the election are clear – the whole Labour Together/Starmer project, which has hollowed out the Party and undermined our democratic structures, driving out thousands of members and activists, is a disaster.
We must see a restoration of Labour Party democracy so that members have a genuine democratic choice in any Leadership election with candidates from across Labour’s broad church. And Starmer’s replacement must represent a clean break – to rebuild our Party and its support base, we need policies to genuinely create economic growth, invest in public services, tackle not stoke racism, support peace and justice internationally, not follow Trump’s war drive, and above all, we need to listen to members and trade unions.
- Rachel Garnham is Chair of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy. You can follow her on Twitter/X, and CLPD on Facebook and Twitter/X.
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What the people actually want is a general election.
We all know the majority of Labour MPs do not have confidence in their leader. He must go.
We all know the majority of voters do not have confidence in Labour.
There must be a general election.