Labour’s Cracking Wide Open — And Starmer’s Holding the Hammer

Right, so for so long they’ve been telling us Labour and therefore the country, is in safe hands — grown-ups back in charge, stability restored, Britain under adult supervision at last. But look at the numbers: Reform snapping at their heels and surging ahead in the polls, the Greens overtaking them in a poll for the first time ever, and councillors walking out faster than the press can update their contact lists. This isn’t stability — it’s rot. The façade still says “responsible government,” but underneath it’s a demolition site, and the wrecking crew’s wearing red rosettes. The real steady hands are walking away. Nottingham proved it when six councillors just quit and formed a new bloc of their own, Bristol confirmed it when one more of theirs crossed to the Greens, and together they’ve done what the headlines won’t: they’ve shown Labour’s collapse isn’t some future risk at the ballot box, leaving Starmer in charge in the hope that he can turn things around before May’s Local Elections. It’s already happening, right now, in the councils that were supposed to be their strongholds. So why wait? Starmer was finished a long time ago.
Right, so right now, Labour isn’t winning — it’s unravelling. Reform UK have been leading the polls by miles for months, the Greens even overtook Labour in one survey for the first time in history, and Keir Starmer’s approval numbers keep sliding. Commentators and figures within Labour – anonymously - still talk about next May’s local elections as the moment of reckoning, but the evidence of collapse is already here. You don’t need to wait for the ballot boxes of next year. The rot is visible now — in councils breaking apart, councillors walking out, and members openly saying Starmer’s time is up if the results mirror what they’re seeing on the ground here and now. Nottingham and Bristo are simply the latest examples of what have made the decay impossible to ignore. Yet the mainstream media are very much trying.
On 30 October six Nottingham councillors walked out of the Labour group and formed a new opposition bloc called the Nottingham People’s Alliance. And their statement was direct:
Councillor Kirsty Jones there speaking for not just a group of Nottingham councillors but so many of us who either still remain in Labour yet are just as disgusted, or have already left, refusing to be soiled by association a moment longer. Labour, they said, had abandoned “traditional Labour values” and was treating its own members with contempt. These weren’t fringe figures or temporary independents; they represented key wards — Mapperley, Lenton & Wollaton East, St Ann’s, Hyson Green & Arboretum, Bilborough, and Sherwood — the parts of Nottingham where Labour’s red vote was once so solid you could count it by habit. Within hours, Labour’s majority on the council had dropped to 43 of 55 seats. Still in control, but it’s still a measure of decay.
The story behind it says more. After the councillors resigned, a senior Labour figure messaged them, telling them to, well how shall I put it, ‘go forth and procreate.’ Actually I will admit to nicking that phrase, it was Skwawkbox covering this story in The Canary who has covered this story and published it from internal messages — but it tells you everything about the state of the party. The language isn’t strategic; it’s emotional: contempt dressed up as authority. It shows a leadership culture that treats conscience as betrayal and dissent as defection. The councillors didn’t shout back, they made it quite clear that they didn’t leave Labour, Labour left them. They formed a new group, registered it, and walked out quietly all things considered, very much taking the moral high ground with them. That silence is the real headline.
Move 140 miles south-west, and the same day, in Bristol, Labour councillor Alsayed Al-Maghrabi crossed to the Greens. He said that Labour no longer represented his values. One man, one seat – one seat that now means the Greens now have exactly half the seats on City Hall and again it is a story of an elected official saying I haven’t left Labour, Labour has left me – but its a line that’s been heard in council after council this year. The Nottingham walk-out showed collective collapse; the Bristol move showed another example of personal conscience. Between them, they confirmed what’s been happening all year long.
Because if you pull the thread back throughout this year – this year alone - you can map the unravelling month by month.
In January, Broxtowe Borough Council in Nottinghamshire lost 20 Labour councillors in one go. They didn’t join another party; they formed the Broxtowe Independents and said Starmer’s leadership had “abandoned traditional Labour values.” Twenty councillors, enough to strip Labour of control. That was the first crack.
By March, Greenwich in London followed — councillor Majella Anning left Labour after being blocked from re-standing. In September two more councillors quit there for the same reason. Deselection dressed as modernisation — the new Starmer machine at work.
Then came July, when two councillors in Hammersmith & Fulham, Trey Campbell-Simon and Liz Collins, left Labour and joined the Greens. They said Starmer’s rightward drift had become impossible to defend. For the first time, the Greens held seats on that council — not through election gains, but through defection. But that’s how realignment begins: not with slogans, but with exhaustion.
August added Cambridge and Preston. In Cambridge, councillor Dave Baigent resigned over Gaza, saying he could no longer serve under a party silent on mass killing. In Preston, former mayor Carol Henshaw left Labour to join Your Party, saying that Labour’s leadership had turned its back on ordinary people. Two councils, two different cities, same story: moral politics replaced by managerial control.
September brought a steady run: Councillor Majid Nagra’s resignation over Labour’s Gaza stance in Wokingham; Councillor Mustafa Cetinkaya’s statement that the party was “drifting away from core values,” as they left the party in Enfield. In Lambeth, Jewish Councillor Martin Abrams’s letter quitting Labour over Gaza and what he called a bullying culture, perpetually blocked from being able to speak by his own party amidst suspension until he defected to the Greens as well, who finally let him speak. These weren’t orchestrated campaigns. They were isolated exits linked only by experience — a sense that speaking plainly inside Labour now carries a penalty. Saying the wrong thing is punishable – how can you represent anybody when you yourself are restricted from diktat upon high?
Add it up: twenty in Broxtowe, six in Nottingham, two in Greenwich, two in Hammersmith, one in Cambridge, one in Preston, one in Wokingham, one in Enfield, one in Lambeth, one in Bristol. Thirty-six councillors gone in ten months — every figure verified in local or national press. Thirty-six isn’t speculation; it’s arithmetic, and it’s only the ones that have occurred this year. Starmer has been PM since the middle of last year and Labour leader since 2020, it goes back a lot further.
What ties all these departures together isn’t just policy. It’s culture. The word that keeps coming up in statements and local reports is toxicity. In Lambeth, Martin Abrams describing a bullying environment. In Nottingham, the insult messages as published in The Canary speak for themselves. In Greenwich, the block on councillors re-standing shows how centralised the party’s control has become. And in every resignation citing Gaza, you can see the moral fracture that’s opened between Labour’s public image and its internal conduct.
Inside Starmer’s Labour, loyalty now means silence. Councillors who speak about Gaza risk suspension; those who question welfare cuts risk deselection. The leadership calls this discipline. It’s not. It’s control through fear. The result isn’t unity; it’s paralysis. Councillors stay quiet, watch colleagues resign, and hope the next purge misses them.
Look at Nottingham again. Six councillors left, and Labour’s immediate response was hostility. Not introspection, not dialogue, just abuse. That tells you this isn’t about policy disagreement; it’s about hierarchy. A party confident in its values would ask why people are leaving. A party that’s lost its values attacks the people walking out, because they remind everyone else what a conscience looks like.
That culture comes from the top. Since 2020, Keir Starmer has rebuilt Labour as a command structure. Candidate approvals run through central office; local parties are overruled; councils are expected to mirror Westminster discipline. In theory, that produces efficiency. In practice, it destroys trust. When every decision must be signed off by Labour HQ, local councillors become administrators, not representatives. They answer up the chain, not outwards to the people who voted for them. Voting Labour gives you less representation as a consequence.
The defections prove the cost. Councillors elected to serve communities find themselves trapped between residents demanding moral clarity and a party leadership demanding silence. Some stay and swallow it; others resign. The ones who leave are dismissed as trouble-makers, but look at the pattern: they’re teachers, social workers, former mayors, long-serving ward representatives. These are not opportunists. They’re the backbone of Labour’s local credibility. They are the known faces around town. When they walk, people notice.
Meanwhile, the national narrative stays detached. Party spokespeople insist local issues have no bearing on Labour’s national readiness for government. But it’s the same structure, the same culture, the same leadership logic. If a party can’t tolerate dissent in Nottingham, it won’t tolerate it in Westminster and we’ve seen that with MPs being suspended for not dutifully voting to keep kids in poverty as a well known for instance.
There’s a phrase older members used to repeat: Labour governs best when it listens. Under Starmer, listening has become a liability, he only listens to Morgan McSweeney. The leadership treats questions as threats. Councillors who raise them are labelled disruptive. Those who leave are erased from internal communications, their statements unacknowledged. The public sees none of this — until a headline appears in local or independent media about another defection, rarely does the national news bother with such things. But they matter and by then, the damage is done.
Take the abuse in Nottingham. That wasn’t a slip. It was an expression of a culture built on contempt. You don’t tell a colleague to “eff off” unless you think authority excuses it. That same contempt runs through Labour’s disciplinary machine — from councillors expelled for sharing petitions on Gaza to MPs warned for attending vigils. Every level mirrors the same instinct: control first, empathy never.
When councillor Al-Maghrabi crossed to the Greens, the local Labour office issued a short statement noting his departure but offering no comment on his reasons. That silence said enough: a human resignation treated as routine administration. That’s the real face of the modern party — transactional, not transformational. The Greens, meanwhile, welcomed him loudly, Zack Polanski himself acknowledging his, publicly welcoming him on social media and noting that he is the 20th Labour councillor to defect to the Greens this year and quoting Alsayed’s words by saying “I will never stop standing up for equality, justice & the right to speak truth to power." Those words matter, because it shows within labour you are unable to do that, so what is Labour even for now? Across the country, Labour’s lost councillors are re-emerging as independents, Greens, or members of grassroots alliances like Broxtowe Independents or Nottingham People’s Alliance. They’re not vanishing; they’re regrouping outside the brand, so they can actually still represent the people who elected them.
If that continues through 2026, Labour may enter the next local elections heading into historic levels of catastrophic electoral collapse. It’s one thing for councillors to walk, ita another when we get to choose who gets elected to begin with. A party that can’t keep its councillors can’t keep its promises and voters know it.
The leadership knows this too, but it still calculates that national momentum will drown out local revolt. That’s a short-term bet. Councillors are the party’s link to everyday governance — the ones who sign contracts, approve planning, manage housing stock. When they leave, competence leaves with them. You only need look at the state of Reform UK where they get elected to see what happens when the competence test fails. Councils start relying on interim managers and private consultants. Costs rise, accountability falls. Labour’s national message of “fiscal responsibility” becomes a punchline.
You can see that trajectory in Broxtowe. After the January exodus, Labour lost control of the council entirely. Twenty councillors quit to form the Broxtowe Independents, ending Labour’s majority and leaving decisions in the hands of a new non-party grouping. That’s what “collapse” looks like statistically: the party still exists on paper, but power has migrated. Nottingham and Bristol are the latest chapter in that story. Both are warnings that Labour’s real crisis isn’t external opposition — it’s internal corrosion. The Nottingham People’s Alliance is now recognised as the opposition group on the council, according to local reporting. Imagine that: Labour’s most vocal opposition in Nottingham now comes from its own former members. Suck on that one Starmer.
Every resignation this year has carried the same undertone — disappointment hardened into refusal. They tried to fix it from inside; they were shut down. They raised Gaza, welfare, local democracy, and were told to stop “undermining the leadership.” When they wouldn’t, they left. That’s not factionalism, that’s not abandoning those who voted for them and voted Labour; that’s conscience.
The leadership calls them disloyal. But loyalty to what? To a party that treats moral clarity as a threat? To a culture where discipline means silence and abuse is casual? These councillors are doing what Labour once taught generations to do: stand up when you see injustice. The tragedy is that they’re now doing it outside the Labour banner, because that injustice is now internal.
In political terms, this is what historians will later call a legitimacy crisis — when the base no longer recognises the authority above it. The figures prove it; the testimonies describe it; the leadership still denies it.
But when next May comes, the press will count council seats and declare winners and losers.
Labour’s machine will claim credit for every seat it retains and call every loss an anomaly, it’s what they always do. Personally I have a feeling the losses will be far too large to swallow that excuse and it will be the death knell of Starmer’s premiership I’m sure, but he should have gone long before now. If Corbyn still led, he’d have a dozen coup attempts against him on these numbers, showing the collapse is endemic and not limited to Starmer and his clique. But the deeper loss — of trust, solidarity, and purpose — won’t show up on the spreadsheet. You can hear it in every councillor’s resignation letter: “This isn’t the party I joined.” That line isn’t nostalgia. It’s a diagnosis.
The question now isn’t whether Labour can win an election. It’s whether it can still represent anything beyond its own leaders authoritarian whims. When councillors form new groups called People’s Alliance, when independents build coalitions around values Labour discarded, it’s no longer renewal — it’s replacement. The Green party is surging on a message of replacing Labour and polling is starting to show them literally doing it.
That’s how collapse happens in real time: one insult, one resignation, one quiet line crossed, but it builds up until the structure left behind is all façade and no foundation.
They’ll tell you Labour’s stronger than ever. I’ll tell you that Labour’s dead. Starmer should have gone long ago, but his replacement will inevitably be no different.
For more on the Green surge as it is happening and the history they’re now making with it, check out this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch.
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