No amount of Labour spin will disguise the party’s dreadful night, but the hefty losses of seats in English council areas are nothing more than was expected. The bigger story of the night is the failure of the Greens to make any meaningful breakthrough. With 40 councils so far declared – a minority, as most did not count votes overnight and will declare this afternoon – the Greens have made a net gain of just 25 seats, less than a tenth of the gains made by Reform UK. They are running at around 18 per cent of the popular vote, while Reform UK are pushing 30 per cent.

The Greens have made a net gain of just 25 seats, less than a tenth of the gains made by Reform UK

This matters because for months Zack Polanski and the Greens have been promoted (and not just by themselves) as the mirror image of Nigel Farage and Reform UK: they are supposed to be the insurgent party of the Left to balance Reform as the insurgent party of the Right. There has been talk of them entering government as part of a left-wing coalition after the next election, possibly as the largest party.

Yet today’s results show what a forlorn hope that is for the Greens. A genuine insurgent party would have walked it in Tameside and Wigan, yet it was Reform UK which romped home there at Labour’s expense.

The Greens are only really doing well in student areas. This shouldn’t come as any great surprise, as they have been leading in the polls among 18 to 24 year olds. Their policies could not be better tuned to stirring student activists: climate change, Palestine, as well as declaring war on billionaires and small-time landlords. Yet their policies, similarly, could not be better calculated to offend Red Wall voters. They want to ban horse-racing and make driving a privilege rather than a right and force motorists to retake a test every five years. Just try selling that to white van man.

For the past few decades the Labour party has succeeded in holding together an often unholy alliance of low paid working people and aggrieved minorities: the broke and the woke. They deftly found the language to win support, for example, from both gay rights activists and socially-conservative Muslims, even though those interests might seem to be diametrically opposed. Polanski’s Greens, by contrast, have no such political skills. They have made a loud noise by appealing only to the woke side of Labour’s fragile coalition. That is no basis to win a general election.

As Labour’s spinners have been trying to tell us all morning, what happens in local elections is no guide to what happens in a general election. True. Voters increasingly seem inclined to use local elections as a protest vote. Often, though not always, they will then revert to type at a subsequent general election. But there are some important indicators from these council elections. Reform UK is succeeding as an insurgent party of the Right and Left. Moreover, while they have their bitter enemies, who see the party as a grave threat to the nation, those enemies are not sufficiently numerous nor organised to damage Reform. Farage’s party may never get much over 30 per cent of the vote, but in a four or five party, first past the post system, that is an extremely powerful proportion of the popular vote.

Labour may well dump Starmer as a result of these elections. It will do them no good whatsoever; merely make them look riven by internecine warfare, just as the Tories did in their latter years. But then neither do the Greens look in any position to capitalise. Reform UK has now firmly established itself as the favourite to win the next general election, quite possibly with a good working majority.