Latest Labour u-turn has them paying legal costs to Reform

In their latest in a long string of U-turns, Labour have announced that local elections will now go ahead as normal in May 2026.

The ruling party had previously called to postpone elections in 30 locations across England. This was ostensibly intended to allow time and capacity for a sweeping restructure of local government.

However, the parliamentary Labour party (PLP) reversed its decision after learning that it would likely lose against Nigel Farage’s legal challenge to the delay.

Labour: ‘doubled-up bureaucracy’

The government originally laid out plans to restructure local authorities back in 2024. This included proposals to merge some district and county councils into a single unitary authority, and to combine some adjacent councils into one.

In 2025, nine local authorities successfully applied to postpone elections whilst they carried out the reconfiguration.

However, in December 2025, Labour wrote to councils asking if they wished to delay the 2026 elections. 30 local authorities accepted the offer. These included 21 Labour-led councils, five Conservatives, two Lib Dems, and one each Green and Independent.

In January, Reed told the Commons:

We must move at pace to remove the confusion and waste of doubled-up bureaucracy. I have asked councils to tell me where holding elections this year to positions that will rapidly be abolished would slow down making these vital reforms, which will benefit local people, and I have listened to what councils told me.

However, that ‘doubled-up bureaucracy’ is now precisely what’s facing local authorities. Only now, Labour have made themselves look spineless and anti-democratic into the bargain.

‘Punishment voting’

The high proportion of Labour councils among those that chose to delay led many commentators to accuse the PLP of desperately clinging on to power in the face of what could otherwise be a major string of losses for the party.

Following this, Nigel Farage brought a legal challenge against the delays, which would have been heard on 19 and 20 February. The Reform UK leader was expected to argue that the plans violated democratic rights.

Sources close to the government have stated that Reed was warned back in January that the postponements would be vulnerable to legal review. However, it’s only in the last few days that lawyers informed the local government minister that Labour would likely lose against Farage’s challenge.

Farage clearly believes that the local election U-turn has played right into Reform’s hands. On 16 February, he gloated:

You can look at Norfolk, Suffolk, East Sussex and West Sussex, and you can say, well, these are the Tory heartlands. But I think there’s going to be a degree of punishment voting going on when these elections happen. So I fancy our chances there.

Labour now also find themselves facing down a £100,000 legal bill from Reform, for their trouble. And, they’ve just made things much harder for local councils anyway. Local government minister Steve Reed has promised £63m to the affected councils to help with the unexpected administrative costs. Council leaders will now have to rehire polling station venues, and scrabble to find returning officers – or even candidates – at short notice.

The Local Government Information Unit stated that:

This most recent announcement means that 30 councils will now have to run elections within an even more constrained timetable. This risks the successful delivery of elections in all of these places, not to mention the additional strain it will needlessly add to the workloads of dedicated staff.

U-turn after U-turn

The reversal of the plans to delay the local elections also comes as a humiliating blow for the embattled Kier Starmer. The PMs list of high-publicity policy U-turns now includes Personal Independence Payment cuts, the Universal Credit health element, winter fuel payments, audit reform, and ground rent abolition.

Faced with a similar list of his pathetic flip-flopping from the BBC’s Jeremy Vine, Starmer said:

I am a pragmatist. I am a common-sense merchant.

Personally, we at the Canary think that ‘spineless charlatan unfit for office’ would be more accurate. But then, the Labour leader never has said anything that accurate, has he?

Featured image via the Canary