Three minor political events occurred in the North East this week, any of which, or all, or none, could in today’s febrile political atmosphere herald future developments of real significance. On Wednesday Reform UK won its first seat on North Tyneside Council (though it failed to win a second). The following day it lost a by-election in County Durham. And that evening North East leaders of parties of the left met to discuss their response to the current political situation in the country.
It was an opportune moment to do so. The Labour government is marking (one can hardly say celebrating) its first anniversary, there is turmoil over welfare reform and, in the region and elsewhere Reform UK has taken control of important councils including County Durham.
Reform UK – win one, lose two
In Killingworth, Reform UK came from nowhere to take the ward from Labour with 38.5% of the vote. Labour’s share compared with 2024 fell by 22.7% to 31.9%. The Conservatives got 21.4% (-3.5%), Green Party 4.2% (-16.3%) and Liberal Democrats 4%.
Also in North Tyneside, Labour held off a Reform UK challenge in Longbenton & Benton but with a much-reduced majority. Labour polled 39.6% (-16.8%), Reform UK 32.3% (+19.3%), Greens 13.9% (-7.8%), LibDems 9.8% and Conservatives 4.4%.
The Killingworth result could turn out to be the start of inroads by Reform UK into Tyne & Wear following its stunning victory in May in County Durham, where it won 65 of the 98 seats, and Northumberland, where it came second to the Conservatives, with 23 seats to the Tories’ 26, though Reform UK won a marginally larger share of the vote (29.3% – 28.9%).
The following day Reform UK suffered a setback when it lost a seat in a by-election in Benfieldside in County Durham to the Liberal Democrats and was pushed into third place by Labour, adding to the feverishness and uncertainty over voter intentions. The result was tight though, with the parties getting 824, 800 and 747 respectively.
The only previous representatives of Farage parties in the North East before this year have been in Sunderland, where UKIP won three seats in 2021 but lost them again the following year, and where Reform UK won a seat in 2023.
Labour’s Tyne & Wear resilience
Reform UK hopes of big gains in Tyne & Wear in next year’s council elections to match those in Northumberland and County Durham will not necessarily be fulfilled. Tyne & Wear is a resiliently Labour area. The occasions when the party has lost control of the five metropolitan councils have been extremely rare since they were established in 1974; they occurred most notably in Newcastle, where the Liberal Democrats controlled the council in 2004-2011, and North Tyneside, where there was a Conservative elected mayor in 2002-05 and 2009-13.
At parliamentary level, Labour holds all 12 seats in the metropolitan county and held all 12 – with different boundaries – even in the Tory landslide victory under Boris Johnson in 2019.
A rare and major factor in next year’s council vote is that boundary changes mean there will be all-out elections in four of the five Tyne & Wear councils – Newcastle, Gateshead, South Tyneside and Sunderland – which may encourage a higher turnout if voters believe the stakes are higher. Only North Tyneside will elect just one-third of councillors according to the normal cycle.
The LibDems remain, on paper, the biggest threat to Labour in Newcastle, where they have 22 seats out of 78, Gateshead, with 18 out of 66 and to a lesser extent Sunderland, with 12 out of 75. In South Tyneside, Labour is already down to a 50% share of the 54 seats. There are nine Greens and 18 others.
The political situation on Newcastle Council is complex and turbulent. As well as the 22 LibDems, Labour faces two Greens, a Conservative and 15 assorted others including six of its own former members who resigned and formed the East End and Associates Independent Group, causing Labour to lose its majority.
Among those who resigned was former council leader Nick Kemp, who was the second council leader to be lost by Labour in the past three years. Councillor Nick Forbes was deselected by his local party in Arthur’s Hill in 2022.
The left lives on, in many guises
In the midst of the current political turmoil both nationally, especially over welfare reform, and locally, four representatives of parties or groups on the political left met in Jesmond Library, Newcastle, before an audience of three or four dozen to discuss: “Ideas, Strategy and Tactics: What does the future hold for politics in the UK?”
The four were Jamie Driscoll, former Labour mayor of North of Tyne, Laura Pidcock, former Labour MP for North West Durham, Martin Levy, long-time member of the Communist Party, and Matt Williams of the Green Party. The Labour Party, though invited, was not represented, thus sparing itself one barbed reference to it as the hard right.
Driscoll now represents Majority, a political party he founded whose vision is “to rebuild our democratic institutions to serve the interests of the many.” He resigned from Labour in 2023 after being barred from standing as its candidate for North East Mayor, citing the party’s increasingly centralized control and what he described as factionalism as key reasons for his departure.
During the course of Thursday’s meeting he revealed he had been involved with Jeremy Corbyn, former Labour leader, and Zarah Sultana MP in setting up the new party announced by Sultana that very evening.
Pidcock, who lost her parliamentary seat in 2019, was billed for Thursday’s meeting as representing Declassified UK, an investigative news site currently dominated by reports about Israel, nuclear weapons and the arms trade and critical of the BBC. The political organisation she mentioned, however, was the Rise Movement, which is “committed to transforming society through building independent working class power.”
Emphasis during the meeting was on building a mass movement rather than on winning elections in the short term – Pidcock referred dismissively to electionism. That is not to say that winning at the ballot box was regarded as of no interest at all, but just secondary at the moment. Driscoll made the point, for example, that after being barred by Labour he had stood for mayor as an Independent and won 126,652 votes (28.2%). Though the speakers were amicable towards each other they could not be described as collaborative; there was no commitment to election pacts, for example.
With four left-of-Labour parties, groups or movements – Majority, Rise, Communists and Greens – represented at one single meeting in a Newcastle library, as well as the Corbyn/Sultana party on the sidelines, the prospect if and when they do take up the electoral battle is of damage to Labour without any compensating gain for anybody else except those in the centre and on the right.
Early polling by More in Common for Labour List and the New Statesman suggests the new Corbyn/Sultana party could take 10% of the national vote, which might give it a handful of seats if concentrated in a few constituencies, none of which is likely to be in the North East. This prospective relative lack of success, at least regionally, perhaps explains the comparative lack of emphasis on elections at Thursday’s meeting in Newcastle. But the alternative or parallel approach of building a mass movement to the left of Labour, never mind several supporting different factions – if that is what is attempted – looks just as challenging. Labour and the Greens stand to be the main losers as a result of the new party, according to the More in Common poll.
However, with politics as febrile as it is, it would be rasher than usual to predict the future. The political state of the nation and of Tyne & Wear may become clearer on 7 May next year when council elections will be held in all the London boroughs, many metropolitan boroughs including those in Tyne & Wear, district councils, unitary authorities and county councils. They will be the most fascinating and significant for a very long time, even if some parties are still too busy building their base to participate.
*This week’s meeting was advertised as the first of three, with discussions for the centre and right parties to follow. Dates, participants and other details are to be announced. See Jesmond Library website for information.
