Labour’s Death March to the Right

How many voters is Labour willing to lose chasing people who will never vote for them anyway?

Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante on Unsplash

Good Saturday-morning, All.

I’m writing this column two days after the local elections, once the dust has settled and the final counts are in. It’s a part of the slow-down I’ve been imposing myself to be less reactive, and just a bit more reflective once the facts actually arrive - and now that they have, the message is rather easy to decipher:

The local and national elections in Scotland and Wales are an unmitigated fuck up for Labour.

What happened in Wales is historic. Not “disappointing” or “a setback” as I’m sure a Labour PR guy sweating through his suit wants us to believe.

His-bloody-storic.

Plaid Cymru is now the largest party in Wales. Read that sentence again, please.. In Wales - Labour’s heartland, the absolute bedrock of their support for generation upon generation - they have been comprehensively, decisively and forcefully rejected. Anyone attempting to spin this as anything but an utterly catastrophic failure is either deluding themselves or lying to you.

And Scotland? Ag, Labour might as well not have bothered turning up. They were practically invisible, a non-entity in a contest that should have seen them making serious inroads. Instead, they’ve confirmed what many of us already suspected: outside of England, Labour is becoming totally irrelevant.

It’s in England, however, where the real story seems to be happening, and it’s a story that should terrify Labour strategists.

We’ve witnessed a massive surge in Reform-held council seats. Now, anyone who’s been paying attention to the councils Reform already controls knows what this means: incompetence, chaos, and a litany of fuck-ups that would be comedic if they weren’t so damaging to real communities.

The thing, though, that matters far more than Reform’s inevitable administrative disasters: this surge proves, beyond any shadow of doubt, that Labour’s strategy is simply not working.

Yes, I will be the first to acknowledge that the media has been brutal. Yes, Keir Starmer has faced relentless criticism, some of it arguably unfair. Even accounting for media hostility, however, even being as generous as possible in our assessment, the conclusion is inescapable:

Labour is failing. Catastrophically.

I say this as someone who genuinely believed in Keir Starmer. I voted for Labour in 2024. I did so not reluctantly, or while holding my nose, but with the actual hope that they might get some things right. And to be fair, on paper, some of their policies are genuinely good ideas.

The workers’ rights reforms? Desperately needed.

Planning and housing reform? Long overdue.

Green energy and industrial policy? Absolutely essential.

House of Lords reform? About bloody time.

Even the breakfast clubs - a small thing, perhaps, but meaningful for families struggling to make ends meet.

None of these are bad policies, and taken in isolation, they’re the exact policies that a progressive government should be doing. But here’s the problem - good individual policies cannot redeem a fundamentally broken overall strategy.

I want to stress that this piece isn’t ideological criticism from someone who was never going to be satisfied. This is disappointment from someone who genuinely wanted them to succeed, who gave them a chance, who defended them many times over the years and who has watched them squander it spectacularly. That makes the betrayal hurt even deeper, if I’m honest.

The Labour party is now in a position where it is haemorrhaging votes on both flanks, losing seats to the left and to the right, and while the media obsesses over Red Wall constituencies falling to Reform - and yes, of course, that is significant - the real story, the one Labour should be losing every minute of possible sleep over, is the collapse of their left-wing support.

Which, in my honest opinion, is well bloody deserved, because Labour’s immigration policies, orchestrated and championed by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, have been utterly, comprehensively, inexcusably disastrous.

Let me take you back fifteen, sixteen years - back then, if you had shown me Labour’s current immigration policy, I would have had to assume it came from UKIP. From the fringes, the sort of hard-right parties we dismissed as extremist and cruel. The idea that a Labour government - a Labour government - would implement such punitive, hardline, right-wing immigration policies would have seemed completely absurd. A fever dream. The sort of thing you’d laugh about down the pub before ordering another round and forgetting the whole ridiculous notion.

Yet here we find ourselves, in 2026, where Labour’s approach to immigration has become indistinguishable from the rhetoric that once defined the far right. The outright punishment of migrants coming to this country is not just bad policy - it is completely morally bankrupt. It is blatantly and banally cruel.

It is the antithesis of everything Labour once claimed to stand for, and Shabana Mahmood, the architect of this catastrofuckup, needs to go. Not eventually, or after a bit of face-saving reshuffling. She needs to go immediately.

She is the completely wrong person in the totally wrong job at the absolutely wrong time. Her constant, ridiculous posturing and prostrating to the right-wing, her apparent belief that she can out-Reform Reform, is not just strategically incompetent - it’s embarrassing, damaging and is going down across this country like a cup of cold vomit.

Watching a Labour Home Secretary try to prove her hardline credentials by implementing ever-more punitive measures against migrants is like watching someone try to win a race by running in the wrong direction. Yes, you’re moving, certainly. Yes, you’re expending energy - but you’re getting further from the finish line with every step and you’re pissing off the people who are meant to support you with every backward move you make.

Which really brings us to the central strategic failure that these election results have laid bare: Labour’s courtship of right-wing voters has been an unmitigated catastrophe. They have, in their wisdom, calculated that by being tough on immigration, by adopting hardline positions on trans rights, by triangulating ever more rightward, they can peel off Reform voters and shore up support in traditional Labour areas.

Guess what? It hasn’t worked. It will never work. It was never going to work - and these election results are the wake-up call that proves it.

You cannot out-Reform Reform. Whatever hardline position Labour adopts, Reform simply goes further.

Labour says they’ll be tough on immigration? Reform says they’ll be tougher.

Labour implements punitive measures? Reform promises to be more punitive still.

Labour tries to reassure the right on welfare spending? Reform responds by demanding even harsher cuts.

It’s a race to the bottom that Labour simply cannot win, because Reform has no floor. They have, can and will always go lower, always be crueller, always promise more draconian measures.

Meanwhile - and this is the part that should truly terrify Labour strategists - they’re losing their left-wing base - and they’re losing them for the best possible reason: because those voters have principles, they remember what Labour is supposed to stand for and they flat-out refuse to support a party that has abandoned its values in pursuit of votes it will never win.

Harriet Harman, Labour’s ex-deputy party leader, has called for a change of direction, and she’s absolutely right - the real question though is whether anyone’s listening.

This discussion would also be incomplete without discussing leadership, because the rot starts at the top.

Keir Starmer has surrounded himself with the wrong people and made catastrophically poor decisions. The Mandelson scandal alone should have been disqualifying. His apparent disconnection from the country, his inability to read the room, his tin ear for public sentiment - these aren’t minor flaws - they are fundamental failures of political leadership.

Look at his Health Secretary, Wes Streeting - a numbers guy presiding over an NHS that’s falling apart. I left the NHS in February this year, and when I walked out of those doors for the last time, I left behind a service in crisis.

Community services, despite all the rhetoric about focusing on them, remain an absolute mess.

The abolition of NHS England was, in principle, a good idea. In practice? Badly implemented, poorly communicated, and ultimately ineffective.

That’s the Starmer government in microcosm: either good ideas executed incompetently by the wrong people, or bad ideas put forward with misplaced gusto by the worst people possible.

It is, however, immigration where the political becomes personal for me, where policy stops being abstract and starts affecting real lives. My life. My friends’ lives. The lives of my sorts who are just trying to build something here.

I am a naturalised British citizen. I went through the process, paid the fees, jumped through the hoops, and eventually received that precious confirmation of my status. I have friends, however - good people, hardworking people, people who contribute to this country every single day - who are still navigating that labyrinthine system

And they are terrified.

Some of them are due to reach their indefinite leave to remain next year. Under the old system, that would have been a five-year wait. Now, they’re facing the prospect of a ten-year wait instead.

Do you understand what that means? Not just the additional five years of uncertainty, of temporary status, of never quite knowing if you truly belong. It’s the money. Thousands upon thousands of pounds in additional visa and IHS fees. Money that could go towards a house deposit, towards their children’s education, towards building a life. Instead, it goes to the Home Office, extracted as punishment for the crime of wanting to make Britain their home.

We are good friends with a family of South Africans who this year, all things going well, will be paying close to twenty thousand pounds to get Indefinite Leave to Remain for them all. That is not an insignificant amount of money - and there is the prospect that there are families in the near future who will need to pay even more for even longer.

This is what Labour’s immigration policy looks like in practice - not in punchy press releases put out by the Home Office that read like they’ve been written by Racist Ralph down the pub, or policy documents meant to reinforce the idea of strong and stable leadership, but merely make the Home Secretary look like the worst kind of bully, but in the lives of real people.

People who work in our NHS, who teach our children, who run our businesses, who are our neighbours and friends. People who are being told, through policy if not in words, that they are not welcome. That they must be punished. That their desire to build a life here must be made as difficult, as expensive, as soul-destroying as possible. That they are second class citizens for having the audacity, the sheer temerity for choosing to live in this country.

And for what? To chase votes that will never materialise? To prove Labour can be just as cruel as Reform? To sacrifice principles on the altar of political expediency?

I did not vote for Labour in these elections. I couldn’t. As an immigrant - even a naturalised one - I could not in good conscience support a party that has made the punishment of people like me, like my friends, a central pillar of their policy platform. And I will not vote for them again unless there is fundamental, radical change.

This isn’t about being precious or ideologically pure or any of the other shut downs I know will be waiting for me once I hit publish, rather it’s about recognising that politics is personal.

It always has been. Every policy decision affects real people, real lives, real futures. When Labour implements punitive immigration policies, they’re not just moving pieces on a political chessboard. They’re telling my friends that their presence here is conditional, temporary, unwelcome. They’re extracting thousands of pounds from people who can ill afford it. They’re creating uncertainty and fear where there should be security and hope.

These election results must be a wake-up call. The rightward lurch on immigration must be reversed. The strategy of chasing Reform voters whilst abandoning Labour’s base must be recognised for the catastrophic failure it is.

Change is not just needed it is essential, urgent and, quite honestly, the only path forward that doesn’t lead to complete electoral annihilation.

Based on the election results that we’ve just seen, it would appear that I am far from alone.

The question now is whether Labour will listen to voters like me, or whether they’ll continue their death march to the right, haemorrhaging support with every step, until there’s nothing left but the hollow shell of what was once a great party.