23AUG

Labour crumbles in two more wards

1 min read

19:09UTC

On the same night Reform lost Old Catton, the Conservatives gained Dereham Toftwood and the Greens gained Fletton and Woodston, both from Labour, with Reform holding second in each.

← Back to Reform loses three wards, wins Clacton Jump to analysis ↓

PoliticsDeveloping

Key takeaway

Conservatives and Greens took two more seats from Labour, which lost ground in all three 16 July by-elections.

The Conservatives gained Dereham Toftwood on Breckland council from Labour on 16 July 2026, with Reform UK a strong new second on 36.9% and Labour's share down more than 35 points ¹. On the same night the Green Party gained Fletton and Woodston on Peterborough City Council, also from Labour, with Reform again holding second on 29.7% ².

The Fletton and Woodston seat fell vacant after a Labour councillor quit alleging "sustained bullying" over her push for closed-circuit television (CCTV) in taxis ³. Neither result unseated Reform; both unseated Labour, the same pattern visible in Reform's own loss at Old Catton the same evening.

Read across the three contests, Reform lost only where it was defending its own seat and grew where it attacked a Labour incumbent. Labour lost in all three. Burnham's party changed leaders this month to relieve exactly this pressure , and the first by-elections of his premiership deepened it instead.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Two more council by-elections on 16 July went badly for Labour. The Conservatives took Dereham Toftwood from Labour in Norfolk, and the Green Party took Fletton and Woodston from Labour in Peterborough. Reform UK came second in both. A council by-election fills one vacant seat; it does not change who governs nationally. But a run of losses like this in a single day suggests Labour's support has weakened at the local level too, beyond what the national opinion polls show.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

An unnamed Labour councillor's complaint of 'sustained bullying' in Peterborough points to local party organisation problems compounding the national polling slide, a structural weakness in activist bases Labour has not defended seriously since boundary changes, rather than a single cause.

Reform UK holding second place in both contests despite Labour's collapse shows the party's roughly 40 cumulative councillor losses nationally by early July have not yet cost it its position as the default opposition-to-Labour vote in these wards.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Consensus view: Professor Rob Ford of the University of Manchester has argued that repeated fourth and fifth-place finishes for Labour in wards it held only a few years ago reflect a genuine erosion of its core vote, because the same pattern is now visible across dozens of separate contests rather than one outlier result.

Counter-view: The Institute for Government has cautioned against reading too much into by-election vote shares on the low turnouts typical of these contests, arguing single-ward results reflect motivated opposition voters turning out rather than any broad shift in Labour's underlying support.

Key tension: Whether Labour's repeated low finishes signal a genuine collapse in its core vote, or the low-turnout dynamics that always favour whichever party is angriest at the government of the day.

Sources:Bin The Labour Party

Mentions:Green Party →Reform UK →Old Catton →Norfolk →Institute for Government →Labour Party →

First Reported In

Update #13 · England's council map redrawn as five sue

Bin The Labour Party· 24 Jul 2026

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Causes and effects

This Event

Labour crumbles in two more wards

Labour, not Reform, was the consistent loser across all three of the 16 July by-elections.

Led to

Clacton's ballot paper splits the right four ways

The two wards where the anti-Reform vote stayed split show Reform holding second place, contrasting with Old Catton.

Occurred 17 Jul 2026

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Greens take a seat Reform came second in

Continues the mid-July pattern of opposition parties consolidating against Reform and Labour incumbents in council by-elections.

Occurred 6 Aug 2026

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Different Perspectives

Ian Davidson, Acting Returning Officer for Clacton

Davidson's office printed a 90cm ballot paper for the record 34-candidate field, with nothing in electoral law capping candidate numbers or the £500 deposit each pays. He expects the paper's size to raise printing costs and slow the count into the early hours, a strain that follows from the major parties' boycott, not from turnout.

Scottish Labour members

Members now choose between Michael Marra and Joe Fagan after Monica Lennon fell one MP nomination short of the three-MP, three-MSP threshold, a bar set by MPs and union officials rather than the wider membership. Whoever wins takes office having faced only one rival on the members' ballot.

Labour Party

Labour gained Penistone East from Reform on 20 August but lost Harraby South to Reform the same night, a wash that undercuts any claim of momentum. The party can point to beating Reform in a genuinely fought contest, but not to a pattern running only in its favour.

Liberal Democrats

The Liberal Democrats took two of Reform's May wards, Almondbury on 13 August and St Neots Eynesbury on 20 August, the latter on a 29.8-point rise in their own vote share. Both results let the party claim it is the beneficiary when voters turn against Reform, not Labour or the Conservatives.

Reform UK

Reform UK can point to winning Clacton unopposed by the other major parties and to taking Harraby South from Labour, a ward it had never previously contested. That gives the party two results to cite even as three previously held wards changed hands elsewhere in August.

Sinn Féin

Sinn Féin's John O'Dowd ruled out a Stormont walkout on 11 August despite calling the DUP increasingly difficult to work with, closing a question Conor Murphy had left open a fortnight earlier. Only Sinn Féin or the DUP can collapse the joint First Minister office, so the denial gives up the party's own leverage in budget talks.