After the local elections, the Grim Reaper has written to Labour and the Tories, they’re still ignoring it

These elections didn’t just redraw council maps, they did something far more serious to the old parties.

Losing seats comes with the territory in politics. Power ebbs, fortunes change, and over time ground is usually regained. This time looks different.

The problem isn’t the number of seats lost, or even who now controls which councils. It’s the loss of councillors themselves: the people who make the entire system work.

They knock on doors, raise money, organise campaigns and turn passive support into votes. Strip the councillors away and you don’t just lose one election, you lose the ability to fight the next one properly.

You can’t run a national campaign without a local army. The army’s just been shredded.

The consequences will build from here. Fewer councillors means weaker campaigns. Weaker campaigns mean fewer wins. Fewer wins mean fewer people willing to step forward for parties that look like they’re fading. Politics runs on momentum, and this is momentum in reverse.

This decline has been building for years. Both main parties drifted away from the communities they claim to represent. They ditched real conversations for data and tech.

Polling has its place. But it's no substitute for what councillors do every day - listen to people in shops, on doorsteps and at the school gate. When you stop listening locally, you lose your feel for the real world.

That gap appears to have been filled by Nigel Farage. A very different figure who understood the basic point.

Reform UK didn’t outspend Labour and the Conservatives. They out-listened them.

They had fewer resources and less infrastructure but it turned out to be an advantage. No layers of consultants. Just simple messages delivered plainly. Reform have named problems in a way people recognise. And they speak with conviction.

Protest politics has its limits, and there’s no evidence these parties are ready to govern.

The full impact of these results won’t be measured this week. It only starts this week. The now weaker party machines will struggle to rebuild. And party HQs will finally feel the absence of the people who once powered them.

Labour and the Conservatives can recover, but only if they face what has happened and change how they work. If they try to fix this from Westminster, they will repeat the same mistakes.

If they rebuild from the ground up, with real people doing real politics in real communities, there is still a path back.

If they don’t, this will not be remembered as a bad set of elections. It will be remembered as the point where decline became terminal.

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Andy Preston, is a TV and radio political commentator; (also Conservative Party donor and former Mayor of Middlesbrough)

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