Election Maps has crunched the numbers on every council by-election since the 2025 locals. There have been 202 contests so far – and Reform is hoovering them up, with a net gain of 61. Unsurprisingly Labour has tanked…
RFM: 72 (+61)
LDM: 58 (+20)
CON: 23 (-24)
LAB: 16 (-46)
GRN: 15 (+2)
Ind: 9 (-6)
Local: 5 (-5)
SNP: 4 (-1)
PLC: 3 (-1)
No doubt this trend will be reflected in May’s locals. Guido members can read what’s really going on behind the scenes in our weekly Bursting the Bubble…
A website was registered yesterday for members of the public to lobby their Labour MP to support Starmer. How desperate is it getting…
HoldTheLine is a swish website through with the headline message: “Tell Your Labour MP To Stand Firm. In a world where Trump tears up international rules and Reform waits in the wings, Britain needs stable government, not another leadership crisis.”
Constituents can send their Labour MP the following message:
“I’m writing as a constituent. I’m angry about the government’s errors and the judgement failures that have driven this week’s crisis, but I do not want Labour MPs to respond by collapsing the leadership and detonating the government.
Reform is polling at, or near, the top nationally. If Labour fractures, there is no orderly handover to a better alternative, there is a vacuum and Reform benefits. That is the reality of the moment, and it is reckless to pretend otherwise.
The bigger picture is that Reform is not simply another opposition party waiting for a turn in office, it is a clear and present danger to Britain’s social fabric and democratic culture. It thrives by turning neighbours against each other, stoking fear about immigration and asylum, and normalising contempt for basic standards in public life, with real consequences for minorities, refugees, and anyone who has already been treated as expendable by our politics.
It also offers an economically illiterate fantasy that would hit ordinary households first, wreck trust in institutions further, and deepen the instability that has already done so much damage to living standards. A Labour collapse would not be a cleansing moment, it would be a national own goal that hands momentum to an insurgent right that has nothing constructive to offer and every incentive to inflame division.
I want you to back the Prime Minister through this period, demand reforms to decision-making in No 10, and keep the parliamentary party disciplined. Fix the mistakes, restore seriousness, and do not gift this country to Reform.”
If you input the postcode of a non-Labour MP it says: “This campaign is focused on encouraging Labour MPs to support the Prime Minister during this critical period. If you have access to a postcode in a Labour constituency, you can try again with that postcode.” Some Farage said he hopes Starmer will stay, too…
Handily at the bottom it says: “This tool is not affiliated with the Labour Party.” Morgan up coding at 4 a.m…
Entries in the comments…
The large Labour Party society LGBT Labour has removed all of its House of Lords ‘patrons’ from its website. Presumably because one of them is Peter Mandelson…
This is what the section used to look like:
That entire section is now gone from the website. A great purge is taking place in Labour, from front to back…
Angela Rayner will be the headline guest speaker at Mainstream’s spring reception next month, with MPs, hacks and “friends from civil society and across the labour movement” invited to a central Westminster location (TBC) to discuss “[building] principled, practical and popular Labour politics for the country”. Mainstream was founded last September by Compass group and Open Labour, with the support of Andy Burnham just as he prepared to dump on Starmer at party conference. Its mission is to prevent Labour’s “clear drift to the right” under Starmer…
Rayner is rallying the troops against Starmer in broad daylight. If he’s even still in situ by the time she speaks…
New figures out from the ONS show public sector productivity is flatlining under Labour after failing to recover from Covid:
- “Our latest annualised estimates of total public service productivity in the UK show growth of 0.8% in 2023, revised down from 0.9%, and 0.0% in 2024, revised down from 0.3%.
- Total public service productivity was 3.4% lower in 2024 than the 2019 level (compared with 3.0% lower, as previously published).
- Healthcare public service productivity was 7.9% lower in 2024 than the 2019 level (compared with 7.8% lower, as previously published).”
The public sector is now as large as it has ever been. Labour continues stealing from the productive private sector to hand out cash to unproductive public sector workers. Death spiral…
Speaking at his speech on how to achieve “progressive capitalism” Wes Streeting fired a dig and Andy Burnham:
“Bond markets are not bond villains and fiscal rules matter.”
