Starmer's Labour SHATTERED After Triple By-Election Losses!

Right, so whilst all the mainstream media have in the last week talked up a narrow win for Labour in Scotland as some kind of seismic event, rather than first past the post delivering a result arrived at more by luck than judgment, on the same night there were some other by-elections going on and these, buried by the media, didn’t go Labour’s way at all, coming last in all three of them and every result being recorded in single digits. These weren’t so much losses as electoral massacres, every single other party beating them bar none.
This is far more in keeping with national polling trends that are being recorded than a Scottish outlier, Labour’s national approval ratings now languishing at just 12%, yet still there’s not a single move to oust keir Starmer for what is clearly abject failure. Losing is fine, as long as the Labour right control the party. Its why Corbyn had to go, but Starmer remains safe as he keeps on failing, as he continues to become more and more unpopular, but the cost to the country is dire, because Reform UK are the main beneficiaries. Starmer and the dregs of the Tory end of the Labour Party would rather see fascism descend on the UK than offer change and the longer they take to remove Starmer the more they confirm that to be the truth, but as long as they hold the resins power over the Labour Party, they’re perfectly happy. The only way to wipe the smug grins off their faces is to let the party collapse and take our votes elsewhere to take the fight to Reform.
Right, so on the same evening Labour barely clung on to the Scottish seat of Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse, winning by a wafer-thin margin, the party faced an electoral rout closer to home in West Sussex. Three simultaneous by-elections—St Leonard’s Forest, Burgess Hill North, and Hassocks & Burgess Hill South—delivered crushing defeats: Labour finished dead last in all three, with single-digit vote shares and trailing even far behind the likes of the Greens and Reform UK. These results, compounded with Labour’s average vote share across last month’s English local elections dropping to just 14%, suggest an existential crisis far deeper than the mainstream press is prepared to acknowledge as they fixated on that Scottish result.
So let’s start with that Scottish result anyway. On 6 June, Labour launched itself across the finish line in Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse, with candidate Davy Russell sweeping up 8,559 votes (31.6%), narrowly besting the SNP’s Katy Loudon (29.4%) by a slender 602 votes. This modest gain was lauded across all the usual mainstream media outlets.
Yet beneath the spin, all was not as it seemed. Despite winning, the overall Labour vote share sank by 2% as SNP support collapsed by just under 17%, accounting in part for Reform UK's surge, securing 26.1% of the vote and coming third. Despite being the only party touted as having a shot at taking this seat to make gains, they came third, Labour just lost less than the SNP did, in a seat the SNP had absolutely no ground game in. Reform UK’s rise cut into both parties, but the way it worked out, crucially underscored Labour's weakness, not dominance.
Labour won here in exactly the same way it ended up with a supermajority and taking government, because Starer secured less votes and less vote Share than Jeremy Corbyn did for Labour in 2017 and 2019. First Past The Post is a sham.
While Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar billed the result as evidence the “SNP’s balloon has burst”, leading pollster John Curtice insisted the contest was tighter than political reporters would suggest. He confirmed Labour’s share was flat against 2021, reinforcing the point that this wasn’t a swing back to Labour—it was more a tumble away from the SNP.
In the following days, Sir Keir Starmer called the result “fantastic” amid fanfare—accompanied by coverage presenting Labour’s victory as redemptive and transformative. But its nonsense.
All across Westminster and media circles, momentum was proclaimed. Coverage spotlighted the “surprise” factor, the strategic ground operation, the significance for the 2026 Holyrood elections.
However, this scramble to tag a positive outcome overlooked an immediate counter-narrative that Labour was hemorrhaging in England, precisely at the same time.
On the same exact evening Labour’s win was paraded as a breakthrough in Scotland, the party suffered humiliating defeats in three West Sussex County Council by-elections:
In St Leonard’s Forest the Lib Dems Sam Raby won with 32.5% of the vote, up 2%, the Tories collapsed losing 34% of their vote share coming third on 20%. But Labour came last of all, losing over 10% of their vote share to get just 4.7%.
It was a story replicated twice more.
The Lib Dems won in Burgess Hill North as well, taking 41% of the vote, Labour took just 3.5% of the vote here.
And in Hassocks and Burgess Hill South, the Lib Dems won again, taking 55.3% of the vote, with Labour last for the third time, with just 4%.
Labour couldn’t muster even 10% in any seat. They were shut out by every single other party in every single contest.
To say this performance was “bad” is an understatement. This was Labour being outflanked left and right by not only the progressive alternative in the Greens and the populist snake oil salesmen that are Reform UK, but every other party as well. That Labour could only garner between 4–5% even in leafy Sussex constituencies which aren’t necessarily labour’s usual home, still signals a collapse having swung to the right under Starmer to near-irrelevance.
Most media outlets barely mentioned these three results. They didn’t enter roundtable debates, radio bulletins, or column inches—the by-elections were deemed too insignificant for that, that these "low-profile" Sussex skirmishes were too minor compared to Scotland’s grand narrative.
But on an already dismal night for Labour, these losses should have overshadowed any single victory. Not because the Scottish result doesn't matter—but because the English implosion matters as well. It cuts to Labour's electoral chances, where it must deliver and it keeps failing to under this noxious regime.
Labour’s polling trajectory now resembles a cliff face. Approval stands around 12% —a catastrophic low by any measure, ranking lower than his predecessors at similarly early points in office. Any national leader and their MPs should be alarmed by this, that Starmer is still managing to remain more popular than Liz Truss isn’t a high bar, but she’s literally it.
The public is weary of nothing changing, weary after 14 years of Tory austerity and weary of Starmer carrying it on. Big spending on defence with big cuts to incomes, beating the drums of war while pursuing welfare austerity.
This isn’t passive drift—it’s active alienation of Labour’s base. Starmer's policies on winter fuel payments and disability benefit reductions triggered die-hard traditional voters to jump ship, pushing some to other parties and others into staying at home.
If approval is collapsing, why wasn’t media discourse dominated by the West Sussex devastation? Why did front pages scream “Scottish breakthrough” instead?
Mainstream media insistence on highlighting "Labour's spark" in Scotland fosters a false perception: that the party is rejuvenating, is successful and they need to do that because Labour represents the staus quo, the establishment and not what we need. But this spin does nothing to mend Labour’s deep structural crisis: that the party is increasingly unable to mobilise voters, failing everywhere – even in Scotland – as a result.
And this isn’t confined to Sussex. Last month’s English local elections were a bloodbath. National polls place Reform UK hovering at ~24%, neck-and-neck with Labour depending on the poll you’re looking at. The Greens are consolidating progressive bases and have a golden opportunity to become a much greater force under the potential leadership of Zack Polanski. Lib Dems are eating into Tory and Labour soft support alike. What emerges is a fragmented centre and right—and Labour isn’t even the centre anymore.
Labour’s vacuum is being filled from both flanks. Reform, with it’s populist if dishonest messaging under Nigel Farage’s leadership, has gained 26% in Larkhall and is claiming 24% nationally. Sitting on the same ballot paper, Reform outperformed Labour in all three of those West Sussex seats—revealing that disaffected working-class or traditional Labour middle voters are increasingly receptive to its pitch.
Meanwhile, the Greens have overtaken Labour in seat after seat. Their social justice messaging resonates with many former Labour backers sick and tired and utterly disillusioned with austerity politics.
Labour is being squeezed on both sides, losing credibility with its base from the left to the Greens and being outmatched on the right, competing with both the Tories and Reform for the same voters on the basically the same policies these days.
Media endlessly repeating Scotland’s by-election result gives Labour room to argue that all is well, that its narrative arc is upward. But the West Sussex results dismantle this assertion and the far closer align with more national polling.
By framing Labour’s night as a win, not a loss, when it still was a loss in vote share, media outlets shape political discourse into PR rather than reality. It allows London bubbles to see events filtered through hopeful spin—details of vote share decline vanish from the collective memory.
Consider that in St Leonard’s, Reform nearly matched the Lib Dems, the Green was stronger than Labour—and yet none of this pierced national coverage . To watch national news is to watch Labour get credit for a Scottish “victory”—even as it collapses in southern England.
Labour’s fixation on Scotland reveals a dangerous institutional arrogance: the belief that winning seats is enough, regardless of narrative or vote share. Yet democracy isn't just about presence—it’s about resonance, narrative and trust.
A true democratic check would include vigorous coverage of defeats. When sitting MPs lose their margins, national media should ask harder questions. Why is Labour so weak locally? Why have its voters normalised punishing the party at the ballot box?
Instead, media coverage is skewed: “Labour victory!” becomes the lead, and “Labour collapse across the country” becomes buried in middle page paragraphs, if covered at all.
The Larkhall win in Scotland is not nothing. It shows potential—yet measured modestly. But its significance is dwarfed by Labour’s accelerated decline in West Sussex and nationwide. Single-digit vote shares, double-digit Liberal Democrat majorities, Greens outpacing Labour, Reform UK surging—these are not local anomalies. They are symptomatic of a party adrift and directionless.
Media narratives of Labour’s “fantastic” Scottish night is not only misleading—it’s politically irresponsible. Journalism must scrutinise losses with equal ferocity as it highlights victories. Political accountability demands confronting failures honestly.
Labour leadership under Keir Starmer should take West Sussex as a wake-up call: base collapse, narrative capture, existential danger. The party needs to urgently reconnect with voters—revive its core values, define priorities, and abandon hollow political slogans to save itself. But as I said before, the Labour right don’t care about that: as long as they are in charge of the party, the party can sink, we all lose out to right wing party after right wing party, to governments drifting ever further away from serving our needs and they’ll still sit there wondering why people won’t vote for them.
Of course to protect the likes of Starmer and Co, the media will happily vilify anyone who is progressive and is seen as a threat to establishment interests, which is why the Green Party gets such scant media attention. Take the media character assassination of one of the Green party’s deputy leader candidates for the crime of being Muslim for example. You’d think they’d learn with Muslim communities turning their back on Labour last year for not listening to them, but they picked on the wrong guy when they went after the hero of Harehills, Mothin Ali. Get all the details of Mothin’s story and why he is the epitome of every the Green party stands for in this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch.
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