How is Starmer still alive?

Good question easily answered. Let’s just take it for read that Keir has demonstrated clearly to all that he is incompetent, agenda-less, buffeted by events, the definition of ‘in office but not in power’. Even his ‘toolmaker’ dad – did you know his dad was a toolmaker? – would probably be saying to him: ‘son, step down, it’s becoming embarrassing’. So how is he still clinging on? Simples. For two reasons:

• First, a couple of weeks ago Labour MPs stared over the precipice and realised: I’m probably going to lose my seat at the next election, and if we do anything too crazy, I might lose it sooner than that. So Labour MPs blinked

• Second, none of the contenders want to own the catastrophic Gorton or 7 May local election losses. They’re on Keir. So bide one’s time and strike once he’s taken the pain

But, but, but…there’s another problem. None of the contenders look very certain to win. Here’s why:

Andy Burnham – Obvs. Not in the game. As Starmer blocked him from trying to win the Gorton by-election, Labour’s only real hope and a thin one at that.

Shabana Mahmood – In Labour terms so far to the Right she is probably unelectable for both the party membership and the unions, two of the three crucial bloc votes which decide the Labour leadership, the third being Labour MPs and peers.

Wes ‘let me through I’m a future PM’ Streeting – No one likes someone who is nakedly too keen, and no one likes a plotter. Now probably irreparably tarnished by his historically close relationship with Lord Voldemort (aka Peter Mandelson), and probably also too Right for the membership and unions anyway.

Lucy Powell – Not even Lucy’s mum thinks she has a chance of winning any elections although her ego has not yet caught up. But then she is a politician, so her ego is inevitably adrift from reality.

Angela Rayner – Although unbelievable for most sentient earth beings, Big Ange is actually a serious candidate. But could Labour possibly elect someone under live investigation for tax fraud? She is desperately praying that HMRC and Knacker of the Yard cease their enquiries prior to 7 May, so she could have a run at it, but that does seem like a stretch.

And this is why dear reader, we have MP newbies like Al Cairns – yes, who is he, we’re with you – constantly promoting their chances. It may well be that if all the above fail, a compromise, ‘steady the ship’, caretaker leader is needed. John Healey, anyone?

Property industry implications of the Gorton by-election

Mostly by-elections can be pretty meaningless in the long-term; feverish media speculation in hyperdrive, the sitting government gets a protest vote kicking, depressed government-supporting voters stay at home, a minor party secures a ‘surprise’ win claiming it as a pivotal moment in human history (it never is!), and a low turnout deceives everyone into thinking this one might change things. And then, at the next election, normal order is quietly restored which no one notices having totally forgotten about the previous by-election upset some time before. 

The REC team are thus going out on a limb here: this time, this one, at this moment looks different. And potentially has significant implications for us in the property industry. Here are our ten takeaways that you won’t read in the established media:

1. Journalists have ceased to be independent analysts worth listening to – The standard media drumbeat in the run up to the by-election and in the early days was that Reform was going to breakthrough. They became obsessed with Matt Goodwin, the Reform candidate. But here’s the thing: at the 2024 General Election, Labour won more than 50% of the vote in Gorton. The election before, even more than that. The REC team were totally perplexed by the childish pack-like media narrative. How would a very solidly Left voting seat, with a large immigrant population, suddenly switch to voting quite hard Right. It just wasn’t plausible. The problem is that for the most part journalists have switched from ‘independent analysts’ to ‘party political activists with a press pass’. So lesson number one, dear reader, is please stop listening to the media; they do not know what they are talking about. 

2. Another epic polling industry fail – Our increasingly inaccurate polling industry, that these days seems to lurch from one polling fail to another, got it wrong again. All the pollsters had been increasingly saying during the campaign ‘it’s too close to call’. Eve of poll predictions had the Greens, Labour and Reform bunched around 27-28% each. In reality, the Greens thumped out a very clear win with 40% of the vote. Granted that (a) individual by-elections are trickier to forecast, (b) the Greens and Reform are newer kids on the block so it’s harder to use past electoral performances as future predicters, and (c) constituencies with large ethnic minority populations are harder to politically profile. But if as a pollster your collective brain power, expert modelling and deep analysis cannot spot a party going to win with 40% of the vote and a wide winning margin, frankly you’re in the wrong business. Your granny’s tealeaves might be just as accurate! So lesson number two, dear reader, is stop putting much faith in the pollsters; their current online polling business model doesn’t work very well in the current political climate.

3. First past the post isn’t working – As a voting system, FPTP is designed for elections dominated by two political parties. In a now eight party system, it simply doesn’t work. We saw that at the 2024 General Election, when the Lib Dems, with the same share of the vote as 2019, went from 12 to 72 MPs and Reform, despite winning 600,000 more votes, only won 5 Westminster seats. So lesson number three is that voting reform is likely again to become a very live issue in UK political debate. There will inevitably be a push for some version of proportional representation which, if it comes about, could change the face of UK elections for all time.

4. UK politics is going through a major realignment – When around 70% of the votes cast are going to the Greens and Reform, and only around 29% of votes are going to Labour, the Tories and Lib Dems, something major is afoot. And we are seeing this all over the western world. With a consistent track record of overpromising and underdelivering, voters have had enough of Establishment parties. They are taking the view: ‘you clowns have failed, so let’s try some other muppets as they can’t be any worse’. Lesson number four is be careful what you vote for; different may well actually mean worse.

5. Politico-religious sectarianism is now baked into UK politics – Decades of multiculturalism and the more recent historic rise in immigration has meant that we have imported international politics into even Parliamentary by-elections and local council elections. In a constituency where 30% are Muslim voters, the Greens ran a nakedly pro- Gaza and anti-Israel campaign. As if Middle East politics has any relevance to the gritty issues facing day to day life on the streets of south east Manchester or the newly elected backbench MP for Gorton in a political party with only five MPs has any influence or standing on international affairs. Really, it’s ridiculous. So lesson number five is that the ethnic minority make-up of local electorates now greatly influences which politicians win elections. Think that through: there are around 40 Parliamentary constituencies with large Muslim populations. We have numerous constituencies with large Hindu populations. British politics is going to get trickier.

6. In the medium term, Reform may benefit from this result – Sounds counterintuitive, no? Not least because, whilst still far ahead in national polls, Reform’s lead peaked some months ago and has been very gently slipping over the last few months. But this result and the Greens’ deeply unattractive sectarian campaign could act as an ugly recruiting sergeant for Reform at forthcoming elections. Red wall traditional Labour voters and Tory ones giving up on the Conservatives, may well say to themselves: ‘Farage has a point. Immigration is out of control. Only Reform can change that.’ Unappealing though this may be, it is perfectly logical for those voters. Lesson number six is this result may not mean Reform has peaked after all; they could rise still further.

7. Tactical voting is a huge factor now – For many years in French presidential elections we are used to a populist nationalist member of the Le Pen family doing well in the first round then every other party ganging up on them in the second round in order to defeat them. This is the problem for Reform. All manner of unlikely alliances between Labour, Lib Dems, Greens, SNP and Plaid Cymru Left of centre voters will increasingly band together to thwart Reform candidates. There are so many tactical voting campaigns on social media these days, the REC team has rather lost count of them. So whilst national polls make happy reading for the Farargistes, can these actually be translated into seats won? Lesson number seven is that just because our wonky polls say Reform will win doesn’t mean at all that they will.

8. Labour is screwed – In by-elections, it is often quite normal for government-supporting voters to stay at home but return to the fold for the following General Election. This time turnout was almost the same as in 2024. For sure, some Labour voters will have stayed at home, while Reform and the Greens picked up some new voters. But the lion’s share of Labour’s 9000 lost votes did not stay away: they switched to other parties. And Gorton was Labour’s sixth safest seat. Let that sink in. Sixth safest. Begs the question, right now is there such a thing as a safe Labour seat? In many recent polls (should you believe them anymore!), if anything close to their predictions come true at the next General Election, the entire Labour cabinet would lose their seats! This is mass wipeout territory. And for a party that won a landslide around 18 months ago. Bear in mind that in the 200 or so council by-elections since May last year, not one has been won by Labour. Which gives us lesson number eight: all those Labour MPs and councils our clients are used to dealing with, think again. Get busy understanding the background local politics of every property asset you own. Things may change big time!

9. Conservatives are screwed too – At the 2024 General Election, Reform stole around 20% of the Tories’ votes which just snuffed out any meagre chances the Tories had. In the Gorton by-election, they buried the Tories (and stole a chunk of the traditional red wall Labour vote to boot). Reform is essentially killing the Tory party one election at a time; the more the Tories look weak, the more Reform grows strong. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that we might be re-experiencing the equivalent of the Liberals being usurped by Labour in the early 20^th century. As much as Kemi Badenoch is receiving better reviews in the media each week at PMQs, her party is at best flatlining along the bottom. So Lesson number nine is: see lesson number eight above, delete Labour and insert Conservative. Again, all our clients need to review the politics of their property assets in Tory councils and constituencies; they may very soon be under new management.

10. The Lib Dems are no longer the ‘go to’ Left protest vote – And that could be existential for them. The Lib Dems have historically used by-elections as their recruiting growth engine, knowing full well that they will be squeezed back down to normality at the next General Election. But that entire strategy relied upon them being the default Left protest vote. And that ship is sailing fast right now. If the Greens keep doing well, the Lefty protest voter most likely will just move on. We are already now regularly seeing media commentary asking ‘what is the point of the Lib Dems’? Their differentiation from Labour has for some time been all but invisible. Who needs Ed Davey anymore? And thus we come to lesson number ten: long term, unless the Lib Dems can come up with a new USP soon, they are staring down the possibility of the Greens stealing their Left and Labour peeling off their Right. Extinction zone.

So, in stark terms what does all this mean for the UK property industry?

• Keir Starmer is obviously a dead man walking. With such a ragbag selection of C teamers lining up for the job, when the coup comes – the money being on 8 May onwards – the replacement may well be worse not better. Between now and then, Starmer will likely tack to the Left in the hope of delaying a challenge. And that trend may accelerate once the Labour Party is under new management

• Pro-development politicians, the Tories of old or New Labour more recently, are a thing of the past. How do we do development when most councils are anti-development and then national government is too?

  
  

• Increasing political chaos beckons, election by election, including at local council level. Be smart. Understand this and plan ahead. Different political scenarios need to be gamed for every property asset

  
  

• The next General Election – right now most likely in summer 2029 – looks especially messy. We could be in hung parliament territory, a weak coalition government possible, a quick second General Election not out of the question. From that vantage point, 2025-2028 may look like it was a golden era for achieving local plan allocations and planning consents. The REC team’s view is ‘make hay while the sun shines’; tomorrow may have very inclement weather

Elections May 25 – What next?

Now the results have been confirmed and the commentariat has delivered its hyperbole, we need to analyse three issues: what actually happened, why did it happen and what will happen next?

What actually happened?

Not to be smug, but the REC team correctly predicted exactly what occurred. In brief summary:

• Labour were largely an irrelevance as they had few councillors and councils in play but in comparative terms they did very badly indeed. Rather under noticed by the brains trust that is our commentariat is that Labour lost seats to Reform at much the same rate as the Conservatives, a pattern that cost Labour control of the one council they were defending, Doncaster

• The Tories performed at the upper end of the dire predictions, losing all their 19 majority and minority controlled councils and 674 council seats in the process, a truly awful result

• The Lib Dems and Greens did well, inevitably, but their numbers are relatively modest in the big picture, albeit the Lib Dems did win three councils

• But the protest vote, which all by-elections and local elections are these days, delivered an absolutely massive result for Reform, also giving them two mayoralties and another Parliamentary seat

• Although talked about much less by the commentariat these days, Brexit is still an important fault line in UK politics. Reform's appeal is significantly concentrated among those who believe Brexit was right; likewise, the Lib Dems only did really well in previously Remain-voting areas

• In what should be a wake up call for Labour and the Tories, usually the two main parties hoover up comfortably well north of 50% of vote share; this time they only scraped 37%. Ouch!

To put some overall perspective on the results, this was (a) the worst election outcome for any newly elected government in UK political history, (b) the worst result ever in any elections for the Tories and, for Reform, (c) the best election tally ever for any minor party. In graphical terms:

We have of course had these "breaking the mould” moments before. Whether it was the SDP in the 1980s, the Lib Dems under Paddy Ashdown in the 1990s or brief minor party moments with the BNP and Greens in recent times past, smaller parties’ electoral peaks have come and gone with regular monotony.

This time seems different. Future history will tell us whether Reform has finally broken through to the big time but it would seem that they are not a ‘here today gone tomorrow’ new force in politics. Through their various iterations – UKIP, then the Brexit Party and now Reform – they have slowly been building for more than 20 years. And they have just made history. So as things stand, we probably need to get used to the expression ‘the three main political parties’, uncomfortable though that may be for many.

Why did it happen?

Put simply, there are two underlying issues that delivered this result, both of which are national and not local:

1. Normally in UK politics, one of the two main parties is up and the other is down, which has kept a simple equilibrium to UK elections for many decades. We are right now at an arguably unique moment in British political history where the two historically dominant political parties are both simultaneously at their lowest ebb in popularity; the Labour government because of its incompetent performance and unpopular policies, the Tory opposition because the electorate still blame them for the chaos of the three Bs – Brexit, Boris and Bogging It (on almost every single policy area in their latter days in government)

   
   

2. At the same time, Reform is seen to be strong on the two zeitgeist issues of our time: immigration and the anti-woke culture wars. (Whether they actually have any practical and deliverable solutions on these two issues remains to be seen. But throwing those two stones at both main parties is working well for them)

   
   

And in truth this is a not dissimilar pattern being witnessed across the rest of the western world: the established dominant political parties being upended by insurgent newcomers from the Right, mostly on those same two issues. We have seen this in Italy, Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands. It is happening right now in Germany, France and Romania, and with Trump arguably in the USA as well. The only two recent off-trend moves in the opposite direction have been the very recent elections in Canada and Australia, which can both be read very much as an anti-Trump response but for slightly different reasons.

What will happen next?

So let’s rub the REC crystal ball.

For Labour, whilst the flip flopping Starmerbot has said he “gets it” the siren voices on the Left are already trying to flip him to their ideological default setting. The main electoral threat to Labour right now is in fact Reform as after last year’s General Election they are in second place in 89 Labour seats. And after last week’s elections a majority of these Labour seats should now be classed as vulnerable. Thus we have already seen Starmer’s team trying to tiptoe to the Right on topical issues: cutting the cost of government, the oft announced but never delivered ‘bonfire of quangos’, talking up a tougher stance on illegal immigration, unequivocal acceptance of the Supreme Court ruling on trans rights etc. But the top three voter challenges Labour face are clear:

• Economy – deliver growth

• Immigration – noisily reduce it

• NHS – make it work better

And the cold hard truth is, despite much endless spin, all three areas are heading in the wrong direction so far on Labour’s watch. And perhaps Labour is almost uniquely unsuited to tackle these three issues because history has shown, time and again, the only way you can solve them is through tried and tested tactics which are ideological anathemas to them: cutting taxes, deregulation, being nastier to foreigners and facing down the public sector unions. It is thus difficult to see how Labour can chart a course to improve their situation. They are trapped by their own ideology and their Left supporters.

For the Tories, life is in some ways simpler: they just have to kill Reform. That’s it. Period. If they do that, they reunite the Right as Boris did in 2019 and can win handsomely. If they don’t, they may be usurped as the natural party of the centre Right. The slight problem here is that they moved so far to the Left in government – high taxes, big government, net zero etc – Reform have stolen their centre Right credentials. Is it even actually possible for the Tories to out-Reform Reform? Their second problem is that Badenoch looks like a dud and their backbench MPs will only give it so long before their natural dedication to their favourite blood sport recommences.

But for all the positivity of the last few days, in Reform-land things are not much easier. The central fact is that to date Reform has been more a personality cult than a mature political party; this will need to change urgently if they are to realistically prosper. One unfortunate accident for Big Nigel and the whole party could nosedive in the polls quickly. But they have three other very significant challenges:

• First, having now won 10 councils, the easy opposition stone throwing is over and the much tougher gig of being held to account begins. They will quickly learn that being in power is much harder than it seems as you get blamed for everything that goes wrong, whether you are responsible or not

• Second, they have a track record of poor candidate vetting and thus historically more than their fair share of bad apples and eccentrics. The tricky task here is to quickly find some talented leaders and organisers who can actually deliver on their popular rhetoric and not get bounced from one scandal drenched councillor problem to the next

• But these two challenges are in their control and the third one is a more existential problem. They have a liberal Left establishment media and every other political party baying for their blood, willing them to fail and actively searching 24/7 for any mud they can throw to aid that process. Add to that the public sector unions which in every council they control will become the belligerent and shortly on strike enemy within. It is fair to say they will likely have an unhappy and frustrating time as council leaders

So for all three main parties after this election, there is some serious soul searching to do. All of them face significant challenges with everything to play for in very febrile political times, and with a General Election most likely not until 2029. It is a marathon not a sprint and, to continue that analogy, marathons are usually won by someone in the leading pack but the lead runner often changes several times during the race.