A party system collapses: The 2026 local election results in England

Introduction: The end of the party system as we knew it

The 2026 local election results have been as impactful and significant in England as have the devolved assembly elections in Scotland and Wales (BBC News, n.d.). The parties that have dominated English politics for the past century—Labour and the Conservatives—have each suffered devastating losses. While the Tory defeats have almost all been at the hands of Reform UK, Labour has lost council seats in significant numbers both to Reform and to the insurgent Green Party led by youthful left populist, Zack Polanski. The Liberal Democrats largely held steady, while making some modest gains in places (such as Newcastle), where they have retained a local political identity as a progressive alternative to Labour since the days of the Iraq war.

Predictably, the Green surge has been experienced in the former heartlands of Corbynism—large, cosmopolitan cities and some university towns—where large populations of graduates, public-sector workers and renters have been voting for the most left-wing available option at every opportunity for years. Reform’s success has been almost a mirror-image of the Greens’, being concentrated in areas with low numbers of graduates, high numbers of Leave voters and without the levels of high asset wealth typical of the remaining Tory strongholds in Southern England. Worryingly for the left, Reform UK is no longer confined to traditional centres of petit-bourgeois conservatism (most notably small towns around the Southern and Eastern coasts) but is establishing itself in what were once centres of working-class industrial militancy, or at least solid support for Labour: Sunderland, Lancashire, the West Midlands.

In a first-past-the-post electoral system with multiple parties in contention, measuring exact changes in voter behaviour is notoriously difficult. A council or parliamentary seat might change hands without a single voter changing their party allegiance, simply because one party’s supporters were more motivated to turn out to vote; hence, only extensive post-electoral surveys tend to generate an authoritative picture of voter behaviour (The British Election Study, n.d.). Therefore, any claims we make about exactly what’s happening here must be tentative, partially anecdotal, and partly based on existing identifiable tendencies. Most commentary and analysis since the elections in May has focussed on evidence against significant flows of votes from Labour to Reform, stressing that even where Labour lost seats to the right-wing populist party, it may have done so more through losing a portion of its own votes to the Greens than because of any actual rightward-shift on the part of individual voters. That argument does not seem to fully explain the outcomes in places like Wigan, in the North-West, where Reform won more votes than Green and Labour combined, but these could be explained by habitual Labour voters simply not voting in these elections at all. There is no question that such voters were highly demoralised going into this election, switching votes to the Greens where a plausible challenge seemed to be underway, probably abstaining elsewhere.

Labour’s woes

The reasons for this demoralisation of Labour supporters are not had to discern. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s popularity had sunk to historic lows by the beginning of this year (as many leftist commentators had long predicted). Having begun his career as Labour leader 2020–2022 by openly reneging on almost all of the promises made to members during the 2020 leadership election, he alienated hundreds of thousands of party members (and so, presumably, millions of their friends, families, neighbours and social media contacts) by expelling many, including former leader Jeremy Corbyn, and explicitly inviting those who disliked this policy to leave (Perryman, 2025). Since 2024, Starmer has signally failed to convince the wider electorate that his government has any substantial analysis of Britain’s social and political problems or any serious intention of trying to address them. Over the past year, a series of journalistic revelations have widely publicised what was already well known to party activists (and former activists): Starmer’s entire leadership project had been driven by a secretive cabal of right-wing bureaucrats, determined to reverse all of the gains made by socialists within the labour movement since the 2010s (Holden, 2025). This publicity culminated earlier this year in the revelations that Peter Mandelson, a key figure in this network, had maintained a high level of contact with disgraced millionaire paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein, for many years.

Arguably the final straw for left-wing Labour supporters came in February 2026 when the popular mayor of Greater Manchester (and former cabinet minister), Andy Burnham, was blocked by Starmer and his supporters on Labour’s National Executive Committee from standing to be selected as Labour’s candidate in a parliamentary by-election in Greater Manchester. Burnham had come to be widely seen as the best possible candidate to replace Starmer as Labour leader (and hence as prime minister), mainly because of his staggering national popularity (compared to almost any other elected politician in the UK), and partly because he was seen as at least potentially open to a more genuinely social democratic policy programme than Starmer. In order to challenge Starmer for the Labour leadership, however, Burnham would have to become an MP. Imposing a new rule that sitting mayors could not be considered as parliamentary candidates without express permission from the National Executive Committee, then refusing that permission, was widely seen as a flagrant breach of democratic principles on the part of Starmer’s supporters on the NEC. Voters in the Manchester constituency of Gorton and Denton were very likely to have elected Burnham as their MP had he been allowed to stand; in his absence, they instead elected the Green candidate. This was a historic result for the Greens, who had only been led by Polanski for a few months at this point, and was widely interpreted as a vindication for his strategy of turning his party towards an explicitly left-populist agenda, informed as much by an explicit rejection of the legacy of Thatcher’s legacy as by any specific concern with climate change.

This context is important to understand, because there can be little doubt that it shaped the perceptions and behaviour of voters that Labour lost to the Greens at the local elections 3 months later. The outcome has been a wave of Green victories, most notably seeing them take control of key London borough councils from Labour. Ironically, but not accidentally, this has happened most notably in parts of London such as Lewisham, Hackney and Waltham Forest, where the same right-wing factional networks that had supported Starmer’s leadership had, since 2020, entirely seen off the Corbynite challenge to their control of the party and councils that they administered. In many such cases, the newly elected Green councillors are actually the same former Corbynite Labour activists that this right-wing network had pushed out of the party just a couple of years previously.

Green limits, Your Party implosion

Despite these successes for the Greens, the May local election results have also arguably disproved the theory that the Green Party might be able to mirror the success of Reform on the right, pushing its national poll rating into the upper 20s, displacing Labour as the dominant left-of-centre political force. This seemed like a plausible scenario following the Gorton and Denton by-election, as the Greens’ national poll ratings outstripped Labour’s. But outside of localities with high levels of very socially liberal, highly educated, downwardly mobile graduates, Green gains have been modest to negligible, and certainly do not suggest that they are likely to become the main political opposition to Reform in places where that party is strong.

Sixth months previously, it had been widely hoped that opposition to Reform in more ‘traditionally’ working-class parts of England might be led by a new party of the left, Your Party, led most prominently by Jeremy Corbyn. This is not the place to tell the sorry tale of Your Party’s failure. Suffice to say that there was a period of a couple of months in 2025 when it looked plausible that it could become a new mass party with over 500,000 members, explicitly committed to socialism and anti-imperialism; it now looks unlikely to retain more than 20,000 members by the end of 2026, or to make any significant impact whatsoever on local or national elections (Novara Media, n.d.). In many localities, Your Party activists have stood not as Your Party candidates but as members of local networks of ‘independents’. But even in this form, their successes have been few and scattered, clearly not amounting to any kind of effective national movement.

This is significant because it has created a widespread perception that the possibility of challenging Reform from a position to the left of Labour, outside the new Green heartlands, has been tested, and decisively disproven. In the short to medium term, those working against Reform’s rise in areas that the Green cannot win now seem to have little choice but to work to try to push Labour (nationally and locally) back to the left and into a position of relatively restored popularity. This situation presents enormous challenges for both the radical left and for more moderate progressive forces. As the next general election comes into view, there is a significant likelihood that Reform will cooperate with the Tories, as did its predecessor the Brexit Party in 2019. Even if this does not happen, given the UK’s farcical electoral system, there is every chance of Reform winning hundreds of parliamentary seats with under 30% of the national vote, simply by virtue of winning a plurality in each of those constituencies, where non-Reform votes are divided too evenly between other parties. Under these circumstances, forming some kind of popular front is the obvious rational response for parties on the left and centre-left. But any such project would probably require Labour to accept permanent losses to the Greens in parts of the country that it has dominated politically for a century. Unless forced into such a position by coordinated tactical voting campaigns, there seems little chance of this.

Politics of class, politics of nation

What does all this tell us about the politics of class, and the politics of nationality, in England today? Sociologists and political scientists have expended enormous energy on trying to segment the voting population into discrete groups based on clusters of values and occupations, typically paying little attention to how these map onto issues like employment sector or asset wealth, implicitly reproducing a right-wing model according to which social class in Britian is almost entirely a function of educational attainment, or can be directly equated to the occupational status hierarchies of the 1950s (Savage, 2015). Obviously the relationship between these factors is complex and resistant to easy generalisation. One of the most persuasive accounts is that offered by Clarke (2023) in his book The Battle for Britain, that identifies a ‘Brexit Bloc’ organised around English nationalism, led by an extreme fraction of capital and incorporating: (1) affluent asset-holders; (2) retired homeowners; (3) low-income, low-education workers, easily captured by reactionary forces in the absence of organisations with any capacity to counter them in their communities and networks. While this bloc voted solidly Conservative in 2019, the local elections have confirmed that its fracturing at the 2024 General Election has persisted, with Reform securing most of the support of groups (2) and (3) along with a significant petit-bourgeois component of group (1). Worryingly, a recent survey for the Times (1June 2026) showed high levels of support for Reform among members of the two largest unions representing private-sector manual workers: Unite and GMB.

Support for Reform is very closely correlated with opposition to mass immigration. Arguably, anti-immigration sentiment in England exists along a continuum, ranging from explicit white supremacism through a range of nationalist stances (characterised by varying degrees of exclusivity) to a purely economic perspective that blames high levels of immigration for suppressing wage levels and restricting access to public resources. Unlike in Scotland and Wales, no form of civic nationalism currently exists that can directly challenge the ideological articulation of economic defensiveness with exclusionary ethnocentrism. As such, the Green Party’s support base can be characterised as much as anything as by its shared commitment to a set of positions on issues such as immigration and national security that are normally characterised as ‘socially liberal’, but which might just as well be understood in terms of a positive commitment to a cosmopolitan egalitarianism and a lack of ideological investment in any form of nationalism. These are the things that Green voters from diverse backgrounds tend have in common, and also constitute the significant points of differentiation from most Labour or Reform voters, all of whom do share the Greens’ desire for a radical break with Britain’s post-Thatcherite economic model. The stereotype of the Green voter as a liberal graduate in the professions or creative sectors is not inaccurate, but their successes at the local elections would not have been possible without significant support from the multicultural urban working class, particularly immigrants, Muslims and public-sector employees. It is tempting to suggest that, in the most classically Marxist terms, support for the Greens in England, like much of the support for progressive nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales, is simply an expression of a highly developed class consciousness among sections of workers (broadly conceived) with high levels of education, information and political engagement. But any such analysis is complicated by understanding that the apparent social conservatism of many voters for other parties is an expression of justified antipathy towards a neoliberal political class, and the corporate interests that they have served for decades, that have embraced liberal cosmopolitanism as a legitimating ideology for the project of globalisation and international financial deregulation (Gilbert, 2017).

Fractures on the right

The May 2026 local elections marked the emergence onto the English electoral scene of Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain party: a right-wing, effectively white nationalist split from Reform UK, that achieved significant success in Lowe’s Great Yarmouth area, and seems to have already made considerable impact online, particularly among young white nationalists radicalised by American-inspired far-right media content. At the same time, the Conservative Party, led by the first Black leader of a UK national political party, Kemi Badenoch, continues to command around 16%–20% of the national vote, representing a bloc of voters most of whom supported Brexit, but whose chief common characteristic is probably access to high levels of wealth, representing the 6%–7% of families whose children are privately educated, and the 10% of the rest of population whose interests and lifestyles are closest to those of that group.

Will the parties of the right overcome this fracture with some kind of coordination? This is arguably the most important and least answerable question about UK politics in the near future. If they do, then the chances of a national government of the extreme right are very high; a challenge that could only be neutralised, as already discussed, by a popular front on an unprecedented scale for the UK. Frankly, it seems easy enough to see these forces effectively re-composing the ‘Brexit Bloc’ as described by Clarke, given that the alignment between their interests that brought that bloc into being is no more difficult to sustain now than it was then. What could change this situation would be the working section of that bloc being presented with a social offer from the left (in terms of wages, services and democratic reforms) that could genuinely transform their lives. The current Labour leadership, and most of the plausible possible replacements for it, seem unlikely to make any such offer.

What will the results mean for local government?

Finally, what will these election results actually mean for local government? The first answer to this question is always: ‘not much’. English municipalities have notoriously little freedom of movement, with their autonomous tax-raising powers being highly limited, and various statutory responsibilities imposed on them by central government, including most of their budgets. Nonetheless, some important local authorities will undergo a dramatic culture shift, and some significant shifts in policy orientation.

On the right, Reform have already begun to earn a reputation for abject administrative incompetence at council level, while pursuing explicitly reactionary cultural agendas, such as attempting to terminate institutional diversity and equality policies and cancelling municipal support for LGBTQ pride events. They have also pursued more classically reactionary programmes such as threatening to close care homes for the elderly in Lancashire. More of the same can be expected at the 14 councils which Reform won control of this year. Conversely, the Green Party won control of five new councils (three in London, the other two in Hastings and Norwich) and has plans to cap private rents and execute community wealth building policies, designed to bring service provision in-house and to encourage the local cooperative economy. Whether Green-led councils can actually achieve most of this and, perhaps more importantly, whether central government will let them, remain to be seen.

Burnham’s return: the triumph of civic regionalism

Ultimately, what the 2026 local election results demonstrate is an English polity and party system that is considerably more fragmented that at any time since the institution of mass suffrage. In Wales and Scotland, a social-democratic tinged civic nationalism has demonstrated the capacity to hegemonise the political sphere by articulating a range of different groups, all with material interests in progressive policy agendas, into relatively coherent blocs capable of forming governments. In England, however the nationalist imaginary is entirely captured by the political Right, while only the Green Party has so far tried to deploy a radical populist strategy in order to counter the rise of right-wing nationalism. Unless some way can be found to use the remaining institutional and geographical reach of the Labour Party (which dwarfs that of the Greens) to contribute to this project, or even lead it, rather than compete with it, then a far-right national government may not be far away. Fortunately, the latest twist in the Andy Burnham story makes such an outcome seem at least marginally more probable than it did previously.

The saga that began with Burnham’s blocked bid to become an MP in February reached an extraordinary climax in June of this year, directly in the aftermath of the May local elections. It was widely understood that the Labour NEC’s decision had set off a chain reaction, the consequence of which had been Labour’s electoral implosion. As calls for Starmer to resign the party leadership grew louder from across the political spectrum, ambitious young Labour MP Josh Simons shocked commentators by announcing his decision to step down from representing his constituency in Wigan, Greater Manchester (very close to Burnham’s home) so that the Manchester mayor could stand for the seat. ¹ Starmer and the National Executive Committee did not have the nerve to try to block Burnham again and were under considerable pressure from MPs and union leaders not to do so. The constituency, Ashton-in-Makerfield was a typical example of a post-industrial community that had voted solidly Labour for over a century until the May local elections had seen every council seat that was being contested lost to Reform. Burnham seemed confident that his extraordinary local popularity, and the sense that he was effectively running against Starmer, would be enough to propel him to victory, despite national polls suggesting that this was 1 of the 40 seats in the entire country most likely to fall to Reform.

The Makerfield by-election became the most fiercely fought, and widely covered, in British political history. Polls showed both the far-right parties picking up support, and each of them mobilised activists from around the country. Labour volunteers poured into the constituency, motivated equally by the desires to fend off the far right and to see Burnham become eligible to challenge Starmer. Media reports stressed the unprecedented level of political activity in the area, focussing on the annoyance and inconvenience supposedly being inflicted on citizens (Elgot, 2026). Burnham was always predicted to win, but no poll or party canvass return had accurately anticipated the scale of his victory. He and his supporters crushed the right, winning more votes than Reform, Restore and the Conservatives combined, massively improving on Labour’s result at the 2024 General Election (partly, of course, because of anti-Reform tactical voting by liberals and Greens).

How did they achieve this and what does it demonstrate? Burnham’s local and national popularity derives from his implicit and explicit positioning of his political project as Manchester Mayor and potential Prime Minister in opposition to two key phenomena of recent British politics. One is the domination of local regions with strong historic identities by the centralising, London-based state-corporate nexus. The other is the perceived continuity of Thatcher’s legacy in the neoliberalism of New Labour and the austerity pursued by all governments since 2008 (McTague, 2025). This effectively mirrors the precise ideological dynamics of contemporary Welsh and Scottish nationalism, arguably bearing out the hypothesis that constitutional reformers in the UK have argued for decades: that English regions can and should be encouraged to become self-governing entities with defined local identities.

Burnham’s victory seems to have demonstrated the political potential of a mildly social democratic regional populism to play a comparable role to Welsh and Scottish nationalism, at least in areas (like the North-West of England) with long histories of both regional pride and grassroots industrial socialism. This civic regionalism might yet provide the basis for an effective progressive coalition, if Labour can maintain a political identity in key localities that enables it to articulate both class and place-based grievances with a relatively inclusive project of national identity and social democratic renewal. If it can, then a Burnham-led Labour Party may well be able to accept the permanent loss of 50–60 of the most left-wing constituencies in England to the Greens, as the prices for a relatively stable coalition against the revanchist English nationalism of Reform and Restore.

For such a strategy to prove lastingly effective, however, will require Labour to commit to a programme that materialises the decisive break with Thatcherism to which Burnham has rhetorically appealed (Gilbert, 2025; Jacobs, 2026). Many forces will conspire against such an outcome. Centrist elements of the Parliamentary Labour Party have already begun gravitating towards him, while publicly arguing against any interpretation of his goals that would imply a radical economic programme. The City of London, the Treasury, the civil service, the BBC and the corporate media will all act with varying degrees of coordination to shut down or punish any policy that threatens the power of finance or asset-holders, or risks meaningfully empowering workers or local communities.

If Burnham chooses to take on these forces, then he will not be without potentially allies: currently, the country’s two largest unions (Unison and Unite) are each led by a figure from the radical left, for the first time in decades. Your Party failed as a party project but arguably demonstrated the potential public enthusiasm and mobilisation that an explicitly socialist programme could generate. A number of relatively new organisations on the British left (Momentum, Mainstream, Compass) are all committed to at least a robustly social-democratic policy agenda. Most impressively, Polanski’s left-populist turn has inspired hundreds of thousands to join a party that could be crucial ally to any Labour government that was actually willing to confront the forces of capital (as could the SNP and Plaid Cymru, were the separatist elements of their programmes to be deferred).

Whether a Burnham-led Labour government will be willing to do remains to be seen. Ultimately, there is little in Burnham’s record to suggest any such inclination. As is widely observed, his main consistent characteristic seems to be a desire for popularity. But that might be interpreted not as mere opportunism, but as an authentically democratic political vocation. Faced with a choice between the humiliation and calumny that Starmer has endured, and a leap into popular radicalism, Burnham could yet decide to jump.