Labour may soon be no more than a metropolitan fringe movement that can only govern in a Left-wing coalition
Daily Telegraph
20/11/25
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As the psychodrama over Sir Keir Starmer’s future plays out in Westminster, an equally captivating spectacle is unfolding across the last of the Labour strongholds.
The second wave of the Red Wall revolt – this time in the reddest of red seats – is gearing up to be even more momentous than the first. The most “iron red” areas – the mining towns and steel seats that held strong even during Boris Johnson’s insurgency of 2019 – are poised to ditch the party of their ancestors. The tsunami that threatens to rip through the most Labour corners of the country makes the Red Wall hurricane of the Brexit wars feel like a mere breezy interlude.
That seats from Doncaster to Wigan have stayed Labour since they voted for Brexit in 2016 is testament to the stickiness of the Red vote. For all the talk of realignment, Labour’s credentials as the party of the NHS, worker solidarity and ordinary folk struggling on the breadline mattered; in the old mining towns – where tales of police charges at Orgreave during the Great Strike of 40 years ago are still recalled with rage in working men’s clubs – a visceral hatred of the Tories endured.
But something extraordinary is happening. When I travelled to Labour strongholds in the old mining areas of Yorkshire, I could not find a single Labour voter. What is so interesting – and fatal for Labour – is that people are deserting Starmer’s party despite the costly regeneration plans underway in their towns. While the term Red Wall might conjure images of mobility scooters and vape shops, these are places where tech startups are becoming more common, and life unfolds to the soundtrack of whining drills.
In Barnsley, I found a town centre scintillating from a £220m revamp, which includes a snazzy mall selling Balenciaga handbags. Its logistics sector, which includes giants like Asos, has made it one of the fastest-growing economies in Yorkshire. With a tech campus in the offing, it aims to become one of the UK’s leading digital towns.
Yet Barnsley’s local entrepreneurs seem desperate for Labour’s demise. The fishmonger Angus – whose family business has been selling Grimsby seafood since 1889 – is tearing his hair out over minimum wage hikes. Essential oils emporium owner Georgina put it bluntly: “Every time she [Rachel Reeves] opens her mouth, footfall drops”. Dairy farmer James has saved his struggling farm by opening funky flavoured milk vending machines across the region. But he is at his wits’ end over the looming milkshake tax.
Labour may be pouring cash into the Red Wall, but it this is not translating into votes. Their failure to get basics right is cancelling all the other good work; the tryers feel that government is not helping them but appears instead detremined to “make life harder”.
Barnsley’s alienation from Labour seems irredeemable. In the town’s mining union building – a former Methodist church drenched in gold leaf – ex miner Chris Kitchen traced Labour’s doom to its failure to produce an inspirational leader with a vision for our times.
A miner who worked at the Kellingley colliery until 2007, Kitchen contrasts the “jobs for life” that used to be enough to raise a family in a coal board house, with an annual holiday in Scarborough, with today’s low-paid warehouse gigs where “a two-year stint is regarded as a long career”. Stroking his “Coal not Dole” badge he excoriates the supposed workers’ party’s blinkered failure to “draw the line” on disability benefits.
Thirteen miles south in Rotherham it was a similar story. Some £90m is being pumped into a revamped market and new riverside leisure hub. But the takedowns of Labour were just as scathing – from the nurse who railed against Labour’s attack on the vulnerable to the pensioner that shivered at the party’s “cold, clinical political Christianity” in the era of woke.
Some were ambivalent about Reform. One questioned whether they were replacing “champagne socialists” with “champagne nationalists”; another made the money rub gesture as he meditated on its “neoliberal, millionaire dynamic”. But many were open to “giving them a go”, as the polling also indicates strongly.
Perhaps most damningly, the sensation that Labour evokes among former faithfuls is not anger but bemusement – just like the Tories. Nobody really understands the point of either party any more. Even if Labour can offer some sensible policies and incremental improvements, it has no clear perspective on any of the big questions of our time. Its original purpose – to stand up for workers against the interests of capital – no longer makes sense. The party’s loyalties are divided; its target market unclear; its principles muddied as it battles for survival.
Labour’s weakening grip on its former strongholds will be central to the outcome of the plot to oust Keir Starmer. Some Red Wall MPs, although they consider Starmer to be a liability given the dire feedback on the doorstep, worry about elbowing him out. They fear the party would elect a charismatic operator from the liberal-Left and then have no hope of delivering on the “election decider” of immigration.
Some Labour MPs remain hopeful that it isn’t yet in the bag for Nigel Farage’s party. Perhaps this is true: Reform insiders admit Labour is still better at doorstep electioneering. The latter are refining the art of lambasting their opponents with the perfect blend of amusement and disdain.
As Barnsley North MP Dan Jarvis puts it: “If anyone thinks a Reform-led council will deliver for Barnsley, I’ve got a bridge to sell them.”
But the collapse in Labour Red Wall support strengthens the hand of those within the party who want Labour to stop aping Reform, and competing for its voters – and instead take the fight to the Greens and Lib Dems, shoring up the urban precariat and professional vote. That would reduce Labour from a majority-winning party of the masses to a metropolitan fringe movement that can only govern in a Left-wing coalition. Perhaps that is indeed where we are heading.
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