AS EXPECTED, the early results of the local council and Wales and Scotland regional elections yesterday morning showed a total wipeout of the Labour vote, the party losing hundreds of seats, and a surge in support for ReformUK, amassing several hundreds of new councillors, with the Tories losing nearly two hundred seats trailing in third place.
With votes for hundreds more seats to be counted, ReformUK has 537 seats, (up 535), Labour has 282 seats (369 seats lost), Tories 302 seats (down 237), Lib Dems 330 seats (up 27) and Greens 104 (up 61).
Labour is also predicted to lose councils in Widnes, Gateshead, and Humberside, as well as Hackney and Haringey in London.
The Labour Party is also expected to lose the Welsh government after ruling in Wales for 100 years.
This is a historic seismic shift against the Labour Party by the working class and has deepened the internal crisis of the Labour Party massively.
These results, when projected onto the next general election, will shatter the party beyond recovery with hundreds of its MPs losing their lucrative careers.
Backbench Labour MPs are feverishly plotting to remove PM Keir Starmer hoping it would placate an enraged working class, which has given its verdict on the betrayals of Starmer’s Labour government which cannot control the economic crisis engulfing a bankrupt Britain and whose austerity polices have cut social benefits, destroying and privatising the NHS, education and abandoning council housing.
Calls have been made already by Tory leader Kemi Badenoch for a general election and for Starmer’s resignation by Labour MPs.
However, no change of personnel in either local or central government can resolve the dire financial and economic crises of local authorities, 46 of which have declared bankruptcy in recent years.
Councils are bound by legal obligations to balance the books and are driven to cut services, jobs and staff wages, as well as selling off assets on the cheap and increasing council taxes to do this.
Labour-run Thurrock Council, already bankrupt, has raised its council tax charges by 30 per cent, not accounting for inflation since 2022.
Local authority finances are in dire straits across the country.
Councils may, for now, have stopped declaring themselves effectively bankrupt, because the government is quietly giving them permission to borrow or sell off assets at knock-down prices.
Reform councillor Alan Benson says: ‘The big concern is the council’s debt, which is around £841m.
‘Residents are the ones paying for that, and it wasn’t their debt,’ he said.
‘We’ve been making about £18m in cuts each year since intervention.
‘At the same time, We’ve been selling off assets – shop units and properties – which means losing future income as well.
‘People are very aware. They can see it: roads, maintenance, and grass cutting being reduced. It’s affecting daily life.
‘The big concern is the council’s debt,’ says Benson.
Between February 2018 and November 2023, no fewer than eight councils – in Northamptonshire, Croydon, Slough, Nottingham, Northumberland, Thurrock, Woking and Birmingham – effectively declared bankruptcy by issuing 12 Section 114 notices between them.
Analysts fear that this financial storm will worsen.
The Telegraph’s Jeremy Warner yesterday called on the government to cut welfare spending to rescue the UK from national bankruptcy. He added: ‘As virtually everyone now agrees, the axe needs to fall most heavily on welfare’. He concluded: ‘If Labour doesn’t do it voluntarily, then it will eventually be brutally imposed on the country by markets!’
The reality is that now is the time to overthrow this rotten and decaying capitalist system with a general strike to kick out Starmer’s regime, and to establish a workers’ government and socialism.
There is no other way forward!