The local elections will be brutal for Labour – and they deserve it

We’re heading into 7 May elections — local councils across England, the Scottish Parliament, and the Senedd in Wales — and the whole thing feels a bit like watching a slow betrayal unfold in real time.

I obviously didn’t vote Labour in 2024. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Not after the purges, the endless capitulations, and the transformation of the party into a vehicle for cautious centrism dressed up as competence.

Keir Starmer’s government has now had nearly two years to show what it’s made of, and the verdict from where I sit under my gazebo on a beautifully sunny day in North Wiltshire is pretty fucking damning.

This is not a left-wing government. It’s barely even a social democratic one on its most lefty of days. Keir Starmer’s cabal is a government of spreadsheets, focus groups, foreign lobbyists, and quiet surrender to the treasury’s narrow worldview.

Keir Starmer didn’t win because he offered a bold, progressive vision. He won because the Tories had spent fourteen years running the country into the ground with incompetence, cronyism, and ideological vandalism.

Spreadsheet socialism

Brexit chaos, pandemic profiteering, Liz Truss’s mini-budget madness — the Tories made themselves unelectable. Labour’s landslide was less a ringing endorsement and more a collective anyone but them, win by default.

I want you to ask yourself a few things before you head out to vote on Thursday in the local, Holyrood, and Senedd elections.

Where is the serious plan for mass council house building? Where are the wealth taxes on billionaires to properly fund the NHS, social care, and a genuine green transition that creates unionised jobs? What about the repeal of anti-union laws that keep workers weak? Where is the dignity for poor, older, and disabled people? Where is the “change” that you have been promised from one lectern to the next?

Instead, Labour has offered process. Managerialism. A fear of bold redistribution that borders on ideological cowardice.

This isn’t nostalgia for the Corbyn era and its chaotic romanticism. That project had its flaws and a difficult relationship with the British electorate.

But at least it dared to dream bigger than not upsetting the City of London. Starmer’s Labour seems defined by what it’s against — Tory chaos — rather than what it’s for. The result is a party that hammers corporate greed far less effectively than it should, while sounding embarrassingly apologetic whenever it tries to defend something like basic welfare provisions for our most vulnerable people.

A local elections wipeout well deserved

The local elections are going to be brutally painful for Labour, and they absolutely deserve it.

The old two-party dominance is fracturing, and the left outside of Labour has every right to feel angry that this once-in-a-generation golden opportunity for real progressive politics has been unforgivably squandered on caution and compromise.

People are angry. I absolutely get that. But anger without clarity is useless. We cannot keep hoping Labour will magically shift leftward under pressure from within.

The party has been captured by a centrist machine that prioritises appearing responsible over delivering material change for working people. That machine fears the markets more than it fears poverty, homelessness, or climate breakdown.

Keir Starmer’s government is not delivering for the left because it is not of the left.

7 May’s local elections probably won’t be the end of Starmer because the Parliamentary Labour Party is almost as gutless as their leader. But a particularly bad result will sharpen the contradictions and the broader left may finally stop pretending this government represents them.

Zack Polanski’s Green Party speaks unapologetically to class, inequality, and the need for structural change. There is no personality contest or recycled New Labour tactics, but a movement rooted in courage rather than fear. They will get the votes from our household.

Vote Green on 7 May

Britain doesn’t need more beige competence or spreadsheet socialism. It needs fire — the willingness to tax the rich properly, to confront greed and corporate power, to build a society that puts people before profit, and to face the twin crises of inequality and climate with honesty, ambition and real purpose.

Labour has failed that test spectacularly. The Greens are the only ones even attempting to pass it.

If you’re truly on the left and care about both class justice and planetary survival, join me by backing the Greens on 7 May wherever they have a chance – in local elections, in Holyrood, or in the Senedd.

Pour your energy into them and independent left campaigns. Build pressure that hurts. Starmer’s government isn’t going to be saved by another polite petition. They need to feel the pain of lost seats and collapsing support so the entire political landscape is forced to shift.

The centre is hollowing out. The hard-right is offering deadly poison dressed as medicine. It’s long past time the last remaining fragments of the left stopped hoping for Labour to change and threw its entire weight behind the one party that still dares to talk about system change.

Because if we don’t, we’ll deserve every defeat that follows. And poor, vulnerable and working class people — and the burning world — who need genuine change most, will pay the heaviest price of all.

Vote Green, wherever you can on 7 May .

Featured image via the Canary