A BIG SET of local council by-elections last week has delivered a devastating verdict on the Labour government’s first 100 days in power.

The Tories won four seats and Labour lost four, while Lib Dems and the Greens won a seat each, as did Plaid Cymru.

Labour’s most spectacular loss was probably Leeds where the Greens won on a swing against Labour of 23 per cent. Labour just stayed ahead of Reform on 24 per cent.

Even more spectacular for the Greens was coming within a handful of votes of unseating the Tories in leafy Suffolk in Hoxne & Eye. Once again the Greens have shown they can win both affluent rural and working-class urban voters.

Labour’s drubbing was not universal.

In Ealing, west London, Labour held on, as they did in Scotland, indicating the two parts of Britain where Labour is still leading the pack, with the SNP still haemorrhaging votes as the bare threads of their years in government leave Scots increasingly dissatisfied.

The anti-Tory swing held firm in Ealing where the Lib Dems picked up one seat with a massive 24 per cent swing. 

London is of course a multiethnic city not much enamoured with the Tories’ very clear shift toward far-right populism — demonstrated at their conference with leadership front-runners Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch promising Trumpism UK-style and endless support for Israeli fascism. 

This culture war politics may pick up votes outside London but will turn off voters in the capital.

Outside of London and Scotland, Labour lost votes to the Tories, Lib Dems and Greens, indicating that Labour’s red wall-only election strategy has already collapsed as voters realise that Labour is continuing with austerity, privatisation and taking bribes from their new corporate masters. 

It seems beyond the ken of the incredibly cloth-eared Labour leadership to understand that the Tories lost the last election because they had systematically destroyed Britain’s public services, from the NHS to social care, mental health to the courts.

Yet Labour’s unmistakable signal since its election victory, by cutting the winter fuel allowance, is a massive slap in the face to millions of voters who expected that a Labour government would at least make some effort to ease the burden of the cost of living crisis. 

The Tories were never so stupid as to threaten the welfare of pensioners in such a blatant and self-destructive fashion. When Theresa May threatened to do so in 2017 over social care costs, she nearly lost the election to Jeremy Corbyn, and did lose her majority.

Labour’s refusal to adjust the burden of taxation towards the very wealthy is clear enough signal to voters that Labour is slave to the same corporate donors who they greedily accepted thousands of pounds’ worth of freebies from.

There are also hints from these local by-elections for the left if it can come together under a new peace and justice party platform (to borrow Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign brand name for a minute).  

In Coventry TUSC, the Socialist Party vehicle, stood with their veteran former Labour MP Dave Nellist, picking up an impressive 17.9 per cent. But alongside them a Workers Party candidate also stood, gaining 11 per cent. Had the socialist vote not been split, the challenge would have been more effective, although Labour still won comfortably in one of its strongholds.

In South Ribble, Lancashire, Labour held on but lost 21.6 per cent in a dramatic reversal. In North East Derbyshire Labour lost to the Tories, with a massive overall 31-point swing against Labour.

On the south coast, in Southampton, Labour lost to the Lib Dems with an overall 35-point swing, with Labour dropping by 15.5 per cent.

In low-turnout local elections, we can see the potential for the Tories, Lib Dems, Greens and potentially the left to take big chunks out of Labour, and potentially give them a terrible drubbing in the local elections that are scheduled for May. 

No seat is safe in this new volatile political atmosphere. This is promising and dangerous territory for insurgent parties.

Presumably Keir Starmer’s new chief of staff and election guru, Morgan McSweeney, must have something of a sweat on as his five-year campaign to crush the left and bring new Labour back to power has turned into a poisoned chalice and very probably a self-made disaster. 

The Starmerites’ belief that patriotism, Tory-lite policies and pro-war foreign policies are what the mainstream of voters want is being shown to be a complete fantasy. These policies suit the professional managerial class of maintaining the broken status quo of British capitalism and imperialism, but they offer nothing to the vast majority of ordinary Britons.

The response from this right-wing Labour government is to target the disabled, pensioners and benefit recipients — essentially the most vulnerable people in society — in a reactionary campaign to distract voters from Labour’s epic betrayal of the promise of “change.” It won’t wash. 

Unless they begin to signal actual improvements through major policy shifts, such as water nationalisation and investment in public services, they are toast.

The left needs to get its act together, under a unified leadership including Corbyn, the independent pro-Palestine MPs and the hundreds of thousands who have marched against genocide, alongside Labour’s suspended MPs, to offer a new alternative to Starmer. 

Otherwise a brutal far-right Tory Party and Reform will between them reap much of the backlash.

The Greens and the Lib Dems will continue to pick up voters who want real action on the climate and social care, among other issues. 

But there is a huge gulf where an unapologetic mainstream socialist and pro-peace left could challenge and even eclipse a Tory-lite Labour Party.