Labour Loses 1,400 Council Seats as Reform UK Surges

The political weight of the day in Britain came from one demand: Catherine West, the Labour MP for Hornsey and Friern Barnet and a former junior Foreign Office minister, told the BBC's PM programme that she will start collecting signatures from the Parliamentary Labour Party on Monday morning to trigger a leadership contest against Keir Starmer if no cabinet member has openly challenged him. Her preferred outcome, she said, is a cabinet-led reshuffle in which Starmer is moved to "perhaps an international role." The threat lands at the end of a count in which Labour lost more than 1,400 representatives from English councils — the local-government tier on which most neighbourhood services depend — and lost First Minister Baroness Eluned Morgan's seat in the Senedd, prompting Morgan to resign the Welsh Labour leadership a day earlier.

Starmer's response was to draft in two senior figures from the party's recent past. He appointed former prime minister Gordon Brown as envoy on global finance and former deputy leader Harriet Harman as adviser on women and girls, framed as shoring up the leadership while the count continued. He thanked Ken Skates — first elected in 2011, a former Welsh transport secretary and economy and infrastructure secretary, re-elected for Fflint Wrecsam — for "stepping up" as interim Labour leader in Wales for "a period of necessary reflection and rebuilding." Welsh Secretary Jo Stevens praised Skates's "determination, experience, and values" and pointed to the UK Labour government's £14 billion rail plan for Wales as the joint work to build on. "Today is just the beginning of a process that will help us to understand what we got wrong. Because we did get it wrong," Skates said.

The story on the other side of the ballot was the size of Reform UK's advance. Home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf said the party had won more than 1,400 councillors across Britain, swept Essex County Council, took Calderdale, Wakefield and Leeds from Labour, and finished second in the Welsh Parliament elections behind Plaid Cymru. In Scotland, Reform UK tied for second on 17 MSPs alongside Scottish Labour, behind the SNP. Reform UK ended more than 50 years of Labour rule in Barnsley, where voters told reporters they had felt abandoned and were specifically dissatisfied with Starmer. In Bradford, Reform UK was on track to be the largest party with 29 of the first 75 seats declared, against 18 for the Conservatives and 15 for Labour. In Croydon, neither Labour (30 seats) nor the Conservatives (27) reached the 36 needed for a majority; the Greens won 8, with two seats each for Reform UK and the Liberal Democrats.

Wales delivered the night's most decisive break. Plaid Cymru leader Rhun ap Iorwerth — a former BBC journalist who took over a party in disarray in 2023 and campaigned on Labour's failure to stem migrant Channel crossings, NHS waiting lists and economic decline — is poised to become Wales's first Plaid Cymru first minister, ending a century of Labour dominance. In Edinburgh, SNP leader John Swinney won a fifth consecutive Holyrood election but fell seven seats short of a majority; he ruled out negotiations with Reform UK as he opens talks with every other Holyrood party, citing what he has called Reform's acute threat to devolution.

Outside the count, the Channel passed a grim milestone: the Home Office confirmed on Friday that more than 200,000 migrants have crossed in small boats since records began in 2018, after 70 people arrived on a single boat. Annual crossings have more than doubled across the period, despite successive UK governments' attempts to stem the flow.

The day's other major government action ran through the Iran war: the United Kingdom is deploying the Type 45 destroyer HMS Dragon to the Middle East to pre-position for a potential multinational mission to protect commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, jointly led with France and described as strictly defensive, contingent on operational triggers. The deployment lands as Trump's own Project Freedom safe-zone collapsed after 50 hours, leaving more than 1,550 vessels stuck in the Gulf and no merchant transits on Wednesday or Thursday.