November 2, 2024 - 8:00am
It’s easy for Westminster politicians to ignore council by-elections. But Keir Starmer — and the next Tory leader, for that matter — should pay attention to Bilston North, a ward in the West Midlands.
Local residents have just elected their first Reform UK councillor. The Right-wing party came from nowhere to win 35% of the vote, snatching the seat from Labour — which crashed from 63% of the vote to just 25%.
Local MP — and Government minister — Pat McFadden ought to be worried that a ward right in the middle of his constituency has swung so decisively against his party. Until this week, Bilston North was solidly Labour. The same goes for the whole constituency: unlike the two other Wolverhampton seats, which were won by the Conservatives in 2019, Wolverhampton South East was immune to Boris Johnson’s charms. In fact, it’s returned a Labour MP at every general election since 1974. This is therefore not a typical Red Wall constituency, but instead a part of Labour’s heartland — or what one might call the Red Keep.
For Labour, an especially worrying feature of the Bilston North result is that the party was simultaneously squeezed by the Greens, which almost doubled their vote share from 12% to 23%. In this case the Left-Right pincer movement delivered the ward to Reform, but with only slightly different dynamics a Left-wing party might win instead.
Far from just being a local council result, Bilston North provides a microcosm of the bigger picture: multi-party politics under a first-past-the-post electoral system. When the main parties struggle to exceed 30% in the polls, let alone 40%, we should expect the unexpected — even in safe seats.
The general election provided several examples of what might go wrong for Labour in a rapidly changing electoral landscape. On 4 July, the Greens won Bristol Central. Muslim Independents — plus Jeremy Corbyn — elbowed out Labour in five further seats. George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain came within a whisker of defeating a string of high-profile Labour candidates. The five Reform MPs won in previously Conservative-held seats, but the party came very close in Labour-held seats such as Llanelli. Indeed, Reform came second in 98 seats, of which 89 are Labour-held.
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