Britain’s political class divide has found a new address: Reform

The voters who once made Labour’s majority now form Reform UK’s core. On 7 May, Reform gained 1,453 council seats and control of 14 councils. Labour lost 1,496 councillors and 38 councils. Keir Starmer is fighting for his political survival. This is the thirty-year story behind those numbers.

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What the results show

With all 136 English councils declared, the scale of what happened on 7 May is now clear.

Reform UK elected 1,453 councillors, an increase of 1,451 from a near-zero base, and took control of 14 councils. They won Sunderland from Labour, the council containing Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson’s Westminster constituency and took Essex County Council from the Conservatives, the local authority of Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. They gained control of Havering, their first London borough, and Suffolk. Nigel Farage described the results from Havering as a “truly historic shift in British politics.”

Labour lost 1,496 councillors and 38 councils. The party lost Lambeth and Lewisham to the Greens. It lost Southwark to the Greens. In Birmingham, the council leader lost his seat. In Tameside, Labour’s majority collapsed after 47 years of uninterrupted control, the area that contains the parliamentary constituency of former deputy party leader Angela Rayner. The Bolton council leader lost his seat to Reform. Additionally, the Greens gained 411 seats and five councils, including their first elected mayors, in Hackney and Bristol. Lastly, the Liberal Democrats gained 155 seats and three councils, taking Stockport and Portsmouth.

The impact

By 9 May, approximately 30 Labour MPs had publicly called for Keir Starmer to resign or set a timetable for his departure. Labour MP Catherine West, a former junior minister, announced on 12 May that she was collecting signatures to formally trigger a leadership election if Starmer did not set a timetable. Echoing Catherine’s view, Labour MP Paulette Hamilton told Channel 5 that the party “may as well hand in the keys to No 10 now if we don’t change our leader soon.”

There is a constituency in County Durham called Bishop Auckland. For most of the twentieth century it returned Labour MPs as reliably as a British summer returns grey skies. Also, it was coal mining country, then manufacturing country, then service sector country, but throughout all of it, Labour country.

Bishop Auckland elected its first Conservative MP in 2019. In the 2025 local elections it returned Reform UK councillors. On 7 May 2026, the Reform surge deepened. These are not isolated events. They are the expression of a political realignment that has been building for thirty years.

The construction of working-class Labour identity

Working-class Labour identity was not primordial, it was constructed over several decades from the late nineteenth century. The trade union movement, the cooperative movement, council housing, the NHS, the welfare state, these institutions did not just reflect working-class Labour identity, they created and sustained it. Solidarity was not an abstract value. It was a lived experience of collective action producing collective benefit.

That architecture began to fracture in the 1980s. Basically, the destruction of the mining industry eliminated not just jobs but the institutional skeleton around which working-class community life in large parts of England and Wales was organised. The pit, the miners’ welfare, the union lodge, these were not incidental features of a community. They were the community’s structure. What replaced them was a different economy, logistics, care work, delivery driving, and call centres, but not one with the same institutional structures, collective bargaining traditions, or embedded sense of solidarity. The new working class of post-industrial Britain was more atomised, more financially precarious, more likely to be on a zero-hours contract, and less likely to be a union member.

New Labour’s accommodation and its cost

Tony Blair’s insight that Labour had to win aspirational suburban homeowners was politically correct in 1997. The price paid was a gradual disinvestment from the cultural language of working-class solidarity. New Labour delivered real material improvements such as tax credits, the minimum wage, Sure Start and others but it did so through the language of technocracy and management, not class. The governing assumption was that working-class voters had nowhere else to go. For a long time, this was correct. Brexit changed it.

Brexit as the accelerant

The 2016 referendum vote in Labour’s traditional heartlands was seismic. Sunderland, Stoke, Doncaster, Barnsley voted Leave by margins of 60 per cent and above. Labour’s metropolitan leadership voted and campaigned for Remain. This was not simply about the European Union. It was about identity, agency, and the sense of being governed by people who did not understand your life. “Taking back control” resonated in post-industrial communities not primarily because of its EU-specific content but because of what it implied about who had control and who did not.

Labour spent five years after 2016 failing to resolve the contradiction between its pro-Remain metropolitan base and its Leave-voting heartland communities. The result was a comprehensive defeat in 2019 that delivered Boris Johnson’s 80-seat majority.

The 2024 landslide that masked the realignment

Labour’s 2024 general election victory, 412 seats, a majority of 174, appeared to resolve the question. The data told a different story. Labour’s vote share was 34 per cent, lower than Corbyn’s 40 per cent in 2017. The landslide was produced by a collapse in the Conservative vote, not by a mass return of working-class voters to Labour.

Among voters without a university degree, broadly the pre-internet definition of working class, Reform UK outpolled Labour in 2024. Equally, the return of working-class voters to Labour was shallower and more conditional than the headline majority implied. However, eighteen months later, those conditional voters have moved. Reform’s gains on 7 May were concentrated in exactly the communities that had given Labour its northern, Midlands, and eastern English strength, Sunderland, Hartlepool, Tameside, parts of Essex and Suffolk that were Labour marginals a decade ago. These are not primarily Conservative voters switching to Reform. They are people who voted Labour in 2024, conditionally and without great conviction, and have now moved on.

What Reform actually is

Reform UK is not a traditional right-wing party, its tax-cutting rhetoric appeals to a strand of libertarian Conservatism, but that is not its primary offer to working-class support. Its offer is about identity, recognition, and resentment.

The party says: your community was destroyed, your concerns were dismissed, the people who did it to you are still in charge under different names, and they still think you are wrong about everything. That message, in Sunderland and Tameside and Essex, produced council majorities on 7 May.

Whether Reform can govern, whether running 14 councils will demonstrate competence that translates into general election support, or expose the gap between anti-establishment rhetoric and the unglamorous work of bin collection and social care, is the question the next four years will answer.

The early evidence from the ten councils Reform won in 2025 was mixed. Scrapping net zero strategies and cutting EDI programmes produced headlines. Managing planning obligations, housing targets, and social care budgets proved more difficult to redirect through political will alone.

But that question is almost beside the point as an explanation for Reform’s 7 May surge. The working-class vote for Reform on 7 May was not primarily a vote for Reform’s programme. It was a vote against the accumulated disappointments of every alternative.

The address changed. The politics did not.