Nigel Farage chose Sunderland for the launch of Reform UK’s local election campaign because, he said, it was where he had first sensed the “big political earthquake” underfoot.
A decade ago next month, the city was the first to declare its vote in the Brexit referendum – a thumping 61% opting to leave the EU – and the aftershocks are still being felt across Labour’s heartlands.
From the Lancashire coast to Roker pier, Labour’s “red wall” suffered an astonishing collapse on Friday as hundreds of council seats fell to Reform UK, overturning half a century of political control in Sunderland, Gateshead and South Tyneside. In what will be one of the keenest-felt defeats, Labour lost control in Barnsley for the first time in the council’s 52-year history.
The results were ominous for several of the party’s big beasts. In Wigan, the constituency of the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, Reform UK won all but one of the 25 seats up for grabs, while Labour won none. In Tameside, a borough spanning the constituencies of the former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner and the chief whip, Jonathan Reynolds, Labour also lost control.
One of the most brutal defenestrations, though, came in Sunderland, where Farage’s party won 58 of the 75 seats up for grabs. Labour was left with just five councillors after starting the day with 48 on the council it has run since 1974.
Reform’s newly elected councillors include a man who appeared to say in 2024 that Nigerians in the city should be melted down to “fill in the pot holes”. Another is a pub singer who rose to minor local fame for singing Sexbomb on ITV’s Benidorm.
In the town of Houghton-le-Spring, south of Sunderland, Denise Ralph, 67, said she and her husband had ditched Labour for the first time to vote for Reform UK – and nor were they sentimental about it. “I’m sick of Labour, sick of them not getting things done,” she said, round the corner from the constituency office of Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary.
Among Ralph’s complaints were the taxes on small business and the state of the high street. She and her husband had made a 30-mile round trip by car because the only items available at their closest town centre were “vapes and Christmas cards”.
Her husband, Brian Ralph, 69, added: “Labour’s not working so we wanted to try a change. In the general election we will probably vote for Reform again.”
At Just the Sound record store, owner Stewart Smith, 79, said he was sad about the collapse of the historic Labour vote in the former shipyards and pit villages. Like many around here, Smith had voted Labour all his life – but opted for the Greens on Thursday.
“Keir Starmer is a nice honest fella, but he’s not a politician. I mean, ha’way,” he said, listing Labour’s missteps from the winter fuel allowance to the Peter Mandelson scandal. “I was afraid with these elections that Labour would hardly win a seat [in Sunderland]. I didn’t want that, but they’ve only got themselves to blame.”
His friend Steve Owen, 66, said he could not see Labour winning the next election with Starmer in charge, adding that the party began haemorrhaging support within months of the 2024 election when the U-turns began.
Owen said: “We get a lot of ex-miners, factory workers and bus drivers in here, and the phrase they all use is: ‘I’m never going to vote Labour again as long as I’ve got a hole in my arse.’”
Two of Labour’s north-east MPs, Ian Lavery and Kate Osborne, were among a growing number calling for Starmer to go. But in Sunderland’s Silksworth sports centre, one of the city’s MPs, Lewis Atkinson, insisted that voters were “sick of soap opera politics” and did not want a return to “the revolving door of No 10”.
Atkinson, who was elected in 2024, added that the public had sent a “really clear message” to Starmer and his ministers, and that “people like me need to listen to that”.
