A catastrophe in their spiritual heartland is the beginning of the end for Labour, writes Suella Braverman

2 May 2025, 12:24 | Updated: 2 May 2025, 13:05

By Suella Braverman

There is no gentle way to dress this up: these results are a catastrophe for Labour.

Less than a year into office, after a victory of historic scale and self-satisfied moral preening, the governing party has suffered a collapse so broad and so brutal that it now resembles something more profound than a political hiccup.

It looks like the beginning of the end.

These weren’t just setbacks in marginal wards. They were defeats in the very places that propelled Sir Keir Starmer to power—towns long taken for granted as Labour’s spiritual base. These losses suggest not merely disappointment, but disillusionment on a national scale.

Of course, Labour remains in office. But it governs now with the air of a party that has lost the room. Just 12 months ago, Starmer was hailed—largely by himself—as the “adult in the room,” a messianic alternative to years of alleged Tory chaos.

Today, he cuts a diminished figure: stilted, evasive, and palpably out of his depth.

This is no mere midterm grumble. Voters are not in a sulk—they are in revolt. The collapse in confidence is not an aberration; it is the consequence of governing without conviction.

Of pledges abandoned. Of policies that seem dreamt up in Islington chambers and discarded at the first sign of friction with real life. It is the price one pays for leadership that is poll-tested rather than principle-led.

The litany of betrayals is long, but the symbolism lingers. Pensioners – many of them lifelong Labour voters- robbed of their Winter Fuel Allowance. Small business owners- many of them who voted Labour out of exasperation with the Conservatives- hit by crippling taxes. None of this was warned about, explained or needed.

But if there was a defining moment, a psychic rupture, it came with the early release of prisoners.

The image of hardened criminals—rapists, abusers, gang members—punching the air in jubilation at their sudden liberation was too much for many.

Starmer, ever eager to remind us of his stint as Director of Public Prosecutions, now presides over a justice system that frees the guilty and punishes the politically inconvenient. Southport rioters receive punitive sentences; a woman who posted a repugnant tweet is still in jail, while violent offenders walk free.

Such episodes cut deep. They shatter the public’s sense of fairness—and, crucially, their trust.

When I speak to people in Fareham or Waterlooville, I don’t hear abstractions. I hear worry. The business owner unsure if they’ll make it through the next quarter. The family choosing between the gas bill and the weekly shop. The young graduate with a degree but no real prospects. They were promised change. Instead, they are counting the days.

Labour, like so many opposition parties before it, talked loftily of “growth.” Now, just months in, the numbers are shrinking. Wealth creators are leaving. The tax burden is rising. Employers’ National Insurance has been hiked. Farmers are being squeezed. The promise not to raise taxes on working people has joined the long list of political fairy tales.

And then, the issue that dare not speak its name: Immigration. Labour said it would smash the gangs. Instead, illegal arrivals are outpacing even the worst Conservative years. The system remains overwhelmed, and the public is expected to tolerate it in silence—lest they be accused of bigotry.

And while all this unfolds, the trade unions—those eternal relics of 1970s obstructionism—have discovered their mojo. Labour ministers bend the knee. The BMA, Unite, the train drivers: they bark, and this government jumps. It is not negotiation. It is appeasement.

What the public now feels is not simply disappointment—it is betrayal. And worse, it is fear. Fear that this is not the nadir, but the beginning of a long and painful decline.

So what now for Labour?

If Sir Keir Starmer has any political survival instinct left, he would do well to listen—not to his advisers, not to the Guardian’s editorial board, but to the country.

They do not want more immigration. They do not want woke policing, ideological justice, and the rebalancing of rights away from victims and towards criminals. They want lower taxes. They want a GP appointment. They want a police officer to turn up when their house is burgled.

They want, above all, freedom. Not the paper-thin version peddled by metropolitan lawyers and progressive think tanks, but the real thing: economic independence, social security, national pride.

They want their country back—not from foreigners, not from Brussels—but from a political class that no longer sees them, let alone understands them. They want a government that governs for them, not for lobbyists, not for activists, and not for the fashionable few in London townhouses who sneer at everything Britain once was.

They want to believe again.

And right now, Labour gives them no reason to.

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