We need a new mass workers’ party

The results of the May 2025 elections show a deepening of the profound alienation from the two main establishment parties of British capitalism, the Tories and Labour, and of the need for the working class to build a political voice that defends our interests. The success of Reform UK needs a working-class answer.

On 1 May, the first scheduled votes since the general election took place with 1,641 seats across 23 county council and unitary authorities contested, as well as the borough of Doncaster, six mayoral elections and the Runcorn and Helsby parliamentary by-election.

Yet again the Tories were smashed but this time, ten months since Labour formed a government, voters were also punishing them. Only just over a third of the electorate voted. The average winner’s vote share was just 40.7%, so three in five people who voted did not vote for the party who won. Ten of the new administrations elected have no party in overall control, up from three.

The Tories’ losses were described as “apocalyptic” by the now former Tory leader of Kent County Council. When these seats were last up in 2021, Boris Johnson was riding high on vaccine roll-out. They lost 676 seats and control of all 19 councils and unitary authorities they led. Labour lost 187 seats including control of Doncaster, the only Labour-led administration with a vote this year. Labour’s losses were limited by the fact they held fewer seats going into this election.

Reform UK

This time the main beneficiary of the protest against the establishment parties was Farage’s current electoral vehicle, Reform UK. Reform won 677 seats across every council, taking them up to 805 councillors, and control of ten councils and authorities. For the people of Derbyshire, Kent, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire, Doncaster, County Durham, North Northamptonshire, and West Northamptonshire, Reform control will not mean the change from austerity they hope for. Farage has made his anti-working class stance clear when he announced his plans to unleash his own ‘DOGE’ modelled on his erstwhile pal Elon Musk’s attempts to slash public spending and jobs under Trump’s second presidency.

County councils have broad powers covering a wide range of services, including education, social care, transport, waste disposal, and more. Council workers and service users are forced to fight cuts in these areas in the context of the council funding crisis. In Reform, workers now have another party to fight, not an ally in challenging Labour austerity.

Reform’s divisive rhetoric on immigration will not stop desperate people fleeing war, climate change and poverty, but it will embolden racists and needs to be countered. Labour’s candidate in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election launched a petition to close a local hotel used for asylum seekers. Reform’s approach is given legitimacy by Starmer whipping up nationalism in an attempt to direct anger over jobs, homes and services towards immigrants instead of his continuation of Tory austerity. Some voices within Labour demand more of this to counter Reform – which will strengthen not weaken it.

It is therefore very welcome that Usdaw, the shopworkers’ union, has just passed unanimously at its conference a motion initiated by Socialist Party members saying that “trade unions should take the lead in combating the divisive policies of the far right along the lines of the ‘Jobs and Homes, not racism’ campaign agreed by the TUC Congress in 2018” and “that where the far right call protests in localities, trade unions should take the lead in organising counter-protests linking up with any targeted communities […] including insuring that such demonstrations are well stewarded by trade union representatives.”

Trade unions

Trade unions are key to defending working-class interests which must include challenging all attempts to divide us, weakening our collective strength to defend our jobs, public services, rights, and living standards.

The trade union Unite has been to the fore in fighting Labour’s Winter Fuel Payment cut hitting ten million pensioners. It has been identified as the best-known Labour policy – and the main reason for voters switching from Labour. But Unite had no voice in these elections. That allowed Reform UK to make an appeal to many of those angry with the winter fuel cut and all the other vicious attacks on working-class people by Labour and the Tories, without offering the united working-class struggle needed to oppose fuel poverty, such as public ownership of the energy companies.

In some areas, Reform was not the means of protest that voters reached for this time. The Lib Dems won 163 seats and control of Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire and Shropshire. The Lib Dems are still the same capitalist party that betrayed students in 2010 by pledging to not raise student fees and then trebling them to £9,000.

The Greens won 45 seats. They now have 55 more councillors than Reform across 181 councils. But the Greens have not used their position to mobilise a mass struggle against Labour and Tory council cuts. In Bristol where they run the council they have actually proposed £50 million of cuts – in other words accepting the capitalist logic that the working class must pay while the billionaires pile up wealth.

Much of the commentary on the results has focused on the end of the ‘duopoly’, the historic dominance of the Tories and Labour. The estimated combined national equivalent vote share of Labour and the Conservatives was just 37%, the previous lowest being 55% in 2013. So, while it is not a new phenomenon, this election expresses a dramatic deepening of the process under a Labour government. It arises from the profound crisis of the capitalist system, expressed in the 2007-08 world economic crash, the years of austerity since, and the political turmoil with governments being thrown out of office across the world only to be replaced by another unstable unpopular party or coalition of unpopular parties who have no alternative to attempting to defend rotten capitalism on the backs of the working class.

No political voice

Last year the combined wealth of all UK billionaires soared by £11 billion alongside austerity’s hungry children, cold pensioners, and rising poverty and homelessness. Labour has carried on where the Tories left off, defending the former and maintaining the latter. There is no political voice, for example, for the big majority who support nationalisation of the energy companies, including 75% of Reform voters, according to polling last July.

The extrapolations from Reform’s vote to a victory in the next general election are a warning to the socialist and trade union movement – but are certainly not written in stone.

In the 2013 elections in the council seats contested this year, UKIP, one of Farage’s previous vehicles, won 139 new seats, putting them on 147. But, when those seats were again up in 2017, UKIP lost every seat. In the general election that year, Corbyn’s anti-austerity manifesto took a million votes, off UKIP.

The lessons must be drawn from the subsequent failure during the Corbyn ascendency to fight the defenders of capitalism and transform Labour into a workers’ party with a socialist programme. Transforming Labour is no longer an option but a new workers’ party is a necessity.

It is urgent that the trade unions now discuss at every level the question of how the authority of its six million-strong membership and record of defending workers’ interests can be turned to the task of building a new political voice for our class, armed with a socialist programme.