Labour loses Barnsley for first time in 50 years

Reform UK has won Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council. This means Labour has lost control of the council for the first time since its formation in 1974.

🚨Break: Reform WIN control of Barnsley council. Huge loss for Lab – first time since its creation in 1974 it’s not Labour.

— Ali Fortescue (@AliFortescue) May 8, 2026

Reform won 41 seats, giving the party the majority it needs to take control of the council.

All 63 seats were up for grabs, with voters electing three councillors in each of the 21 wards.

The current Labour leader of the council, Sir Stephen Houghton, managed to hold onto his seat by just 23 votes. He has led Barnsley Council for 30 years and is one of the longest-serving Labour councillors in the country.

This is the moment Sir Stephen Houghton (leader of Barnsley Council for 30yrs) found out he had JUST retained his seat

He’s elected for Cudworth Ward alongside another Labour candidate and one Reform candidate with a majority of 45 pic.twitter.com/XEqDGILC8H

— Harry Harrison (@hharrisonjourno) May 8, 2026

Overall, there were 41 Reform, 11 Labour, two independent and six Liberal Democrat seats.

The Conservatives lost their only seat in Penistone East. Meanwhile, the Green Party failed to win any seats.

Importantly, Barnsley has long been considered a Labour stronghold. Essentially, meaning that the former ‘Red Wall’ is over.

Across the country, we have seen Reform UK win huge numbers of seats in majority-white areas.

Barnsley is no different. A huge 95.5% of people in the district are white.

As the Canary’s Steve Topple wrote:

It’s 2026. The majority of the population has access to social media and/or to broadcast or print news. Nearly all Reform voters will have seen Zia Yusuf’s Nazi-esque threat to the public to put refugee detention centres in Green-voting areas and deport 600,000 mostly Black and Brown people. They’ll know one of Reform’s councillors is a racist rape-celebrator. People knew all this, and still voted for the party in droves.

What does that tell us?

Again, it tells us that Reform voters are just fucking racist.

He added:

We cannot afford to keep looking away. Nor can we afford to let racism go unchallenged. Otherwise, we’ll be in exactly the same position in 2029, saying the exact same thing. We all have choices to make every single day between now and the next general election: will you quietly and willingly allow Nigel Farage’s party full of incompetent grifters and racists to run the country, or will you challenge their hatred and build an alternative to their white supremacist fever dream?

Feature image via ITV News In Full/YouTube