Withered Rose

Labour: What Now?

I’ve always had an unnatural obsession with politics. I’m under no illusions that this puts me in a minority; bluntly, I’d rather I didn’t care. I envy those for whom politics is a background noise they only have to turn up when a General Election rolls around, an unwelcome thorn they can pull out and put back. I’ve never had that luxury. It’s with some hubris that I have to admit politics has always felt like a core part of my identity. As a kid I would sit up and watch the BBC Parliament channel of an evening, waiting for the division bell to ring and for MPs to file through the lobbies to vote on amendments neither of us really understood.

My earliest political memory is the 2010 general election, and especially that first leaders’ debate between Brown, Cameron, and Clegg. I sat with my grandad, working through a bag of Haribo Starmix, fixated on the three men and how differently they carried themselves. I believe, to this day, that I was among the youngest victims of Cleggmania. Not because I understood his policies. I just dug his vibe. I shrugged this off for years as childish naivety. Now I think I was actually onto something: in British politics, vibes are everything.

On the morning the results came in I was close to heartbreak that Clegg would not be our next prime minister. I ate my Special K, did up my green and white tie, and moped off for another day of Year 7.

I’ve never had much doubt about which party I felt closest to. My family had voted Labour for generations, probably since its founding. As a family of coal miners, we were working people, and the only party that ever promised to stand up for us was, apparently, the Labour Party. We stuck with them through it all. Through the 1980s and early 1990s, when Labour seemed determined to do everything it could to stay out of Number 10. That had real consequences: three election wins for Margaret Thatcher, the miners’ strike. Both of my grandads were striking miners, right to the end. Their families, their friends, their communities lived on the breadline in the name of principle. Labour was for us. The rest simply weren’t.

A hundred years ago this week the General Strike was in full swing. Workers across the country had walked out behind the miners. On Tyneside the docks went quiet as ordinary people pleaded for a fair shot. A decade later two hundred men walked from Jarrow to London asking for the right to work, to be respected, and were ignored. I think about my grandads whenever I think about those things. They came along later, 1984 not 1926, but the story was the same: working people asking for fairness, getting nothing. My family lived it. Labour was supposed to be the answer to that. For a long time, we believed it was.

On Thursday, Labour’s grip on Tyne and Wear collapsed. In Sunderland, Reform won 58 of the 75 council seats, also taking Gateshead and South Tyneside. In Newcastle, Labour was reduced to two councillors. A hundred years after the strike, ninety after Jarrow, the North East has just told the Labour Party it isn’t theirs any more.

Panic stations.

This is not uniquely British. In France, a quarter of voters aged eighteen to twenty-four backed Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in the first round of the 2024 legislative elections, more than double the figure from two years earlier. In America, Trump’s contempt for institutions, his sneering at expertise, found an audience because it mirrored what millions already felt. The message is simple: the system is broken, the people running it look down on you. It travels.

In the North East, it has a name. Reform. Speak to people in Blyth, in Ashington, and Reform comes up not with embarrassment but with enthusiasm. Not because anyone has carefully weighed its policies, but because it has mastered the art of reflecting anger back at those who feel it. In the 2024 general election, Reform came second in the vast majority of North East constituencies, with vote shares of nearly 30% in some of the region’s most deprived seats. That is not a protest vote. That is a structural shift.

The people at the top of Reform do not share the lived experience of the communities they are courting. They are not from Blyth. What they have done is identify a wound and press on it, channelling genuine anger away from the structures that caused it and toward those who are even more marginalised. It is a confidence trick. And it is working.

Labour’s response, today, was to appoint Gordon Brown as a special envoy on global finance. Brown, whose government lost the 2010 election. Brown, who has not held office in sixteen years. A former prime minister walked back through the door of Downing Street as a gesture, while Tyneside sent a message that could not be clearer. One Labour MP called it “pure gimmick vibe.” They were not wrong.

This is the problem in miniature. Labour keeps looking backwards for answers that only exist in the future. It reaches for familiar names rather than confront the uncomfortable question of why it is losing people it has always taken for granted.

The problem runs deeper than one appointment. Labour has a genuine talent deficit. The generation that should be coming through, the voices that should be defining what the party stands for in the 2030s, are largely absent from the conversation. The party is not producing them, and it is not making room for them. What it is producing is internal division, because a party that does not know what it stands for will always end up fighting with itself. That division is costing it on both flanks. On the right, to Reform, which at least offers certainty and anger. On the left, to the Greens, who at least offer a coherent idea of what they want the future to look like. Labour, caught between them, offers neither. It is being eaten from both sides by parties that know exactly what they are.

Starmer should go. Most people paying attention know it, and thirty Labour MPs have now said so publicly. The difficulty is that there is no obvious person waiting to take over. Andy Burnham’s name is being discussed, as are Angela Rayner’s and Wes Streeting’s. But the conversation itself reveals the problem. These are not new voices. They are not a generational break. They are the next tier of the same project, carrying the same uncertainties about what the party is actually for. Labour is not short of potential successors. It is short of a successor who can answer that question. And until it can answer it, Starmer stays, because removing him without knowing what comes next is a risk nobody is quite ready to take.

If it is serious about winning these places back, Labour needs to put its leaders on the ground. In Blyth, in Hartlepool, in Sunderland. Taking arguments to doorsteps, absorbing the anger, staying anyway. It needs to reclaim the spaces where community once lived: church halls, working men’s clubs, open forums where people can speak and be heard rather than managed. It needs to invest in vocational training, in apprenticeships, in clean industry. Real jobs, anchored in real communities, building the infrastructure of a future economy in the places that powered the last one. It needs to build homes. It needs a credible, visible plan on the cost of living that proves government is genuinely trying, rather than managing decline from a distance.

None of this may be enough to prevent a Reform government. That possibility is real, and anyone who dismisses it is not paying close enough attention. But the alternative, to shrug, to retreat, to decide that these communities are beyond reach, is not just a political failure. It is a moral one.

The people of Tyne and Wear are not a problem to be solved. They are people, with legitimate grievances, real talent, and lives that deserve more than they have been given. The question is whether anyone in the Labour Party is willing to listen. Not to manage these communities, not to dismiss them, but to change the conditions that made them so angry in the first place. That is the fight. And looking at the wreckage of Thursday night, and at Gordon Brown walking back into Downing Street this morning, Labour is currently losing it.