By Dave Shaw, former Doncaster Labour councillor
It’s been two weeks since Doncaster Labour suffered a brutal punishment beating, meted out by an electorate that wanted to send a clear message to Westminster.
The party was reduced to just 12 seats on the city’s council, to Reform’s 37.
It is the first time since 2010 that Labour has not held a majority here, and the first time ever another party has had the most councillors on the council.
New analysis of the results shows that if the same were to happen in a general election here, Ed Miliband would lose his seat.
However, the story is less about who voted and more a story of who stayed at home. The electorate held its nose in last year’s general election, reluctantly buying Starmer and Reeves’s promises of jam tomorrow.
Well, not only has the jam failed to materialise, but Starmer and co have served up cold-hearted dollop after cold-hearted dollop of cuts for the poorest while making concessions to the rich.
In a further act of self-sabotage, Starmer’s Labour has tacked hard to the Right, enacting a scorched earth policy to fulfil its obsession with destroying its own Left flank.
This resulted in the Left and centre-Left staying home in Doncaster on polling day, leaving Farage and his band of merry populists to take 37 seats with the support of less than 15 per cent of the electorate.
It’s hard to know how the Labour Party in Doncaster will ever recover, but friendships and mutual respect among Labour councillors and ex-councillors are stronger than ever.
This is probably a result of the shared trauma of managing years of declining council budgets enforced through Tory austerity before being thrown under the bus by their own side.
It is little wonder those outside of Labour on the Left in Doncaster are currently wearing “Told you so” T-shirts.
Within the local Labour group recriminations are non-existent. They are reserved entirely for Starmer’s Labour.
On results night, one influential, now ex-Cabinet member, hunted down Milliband, giving him both barrels and reloading several times. Whether his mealy mouth is able to convey the message he was asked to give Starmer is difficult to say.
Even the darkest of clouds can have a silver lining, and this was provided by the re-election of Ros Jones, the city’s re-elected Labour mayor.
It is widely accepted that her win was, to a large degree, due to the former Tory MP Nick Fletcher, who also ran and did an excellent job of splitting the vote.
Prior to her political career, Ros was an accountant at the council, and in many respects she still is.
There is no doubt that her leadership has not been perfect, but not many could have navigated the last 15 years of a tone-deaf Westminster, economically “punching down”.
Standing in front of the cameras the day after her re-election and telling her party that it needed to listen may have seemed to some to be too little, too late.
But for those who know Ros, a party loyalist, and staunch believer in party discipline and collective responsibility, it was an uncharacteristic public response that should echo around the tin ear of Starmer and his government. They ignore such a loyal and moderate voice at their peril.
It is no secret among those in Doncaster Labour, who they hold responsible for this near extinction event, and it’s not Ros Jones and her Labour group.
It is true to say that immigration was an issue on the doorstep, and this clearly drove the Reform vote. But the bigger issues for the majority were the winter fuel allowance; changes to PIP and disability allowance; the crumbling health and social care systems; Labour MPs taking donations and freebies from big business and foreign governments; and Palestine.
Couple all of this with Starmer’s attempt to out-Farage Farage, and Labour may well find that it is fishing in a tiny pool of unwinnable voters at the next election. All while continuing to alienate the vast majority of the electorate who could well remain at home when the time next comes to vote.
Originally published by the Daily Telegraph
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/05/14/reform-could-oust-miliband-in-labour-election-wipeout/