Why Labour stormed local elections across the country - but lost ground in Greater Manchester

As this week’s local election results have come in since Thursday night, the blue has drained from the country’s electoral map. More than 400 Conservative councillors have lost their seats, with the largest chunk of them going to a rejuvenated Labour Party. 

But the results in Greater Manchester look rather different. At the time of writing (which is before Salford has declared its results), Labour is ten seats down, and has lost control of Oldham Council. In Manchester, one of the party’s strongest fortresses, the council’s deputy leader Luthfur Rahman lost to a candidate from George Galloway’s party in a shock result. And in Bolton, Labour failed to make any headway. 

The biggest winners have been Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain, which picked up three seats, and various other hyperlocal and independent candidates, who gained another 12 seats across Greater Manchester. In those results, there’s no doubting the influence of the war in Gaza as a major issue. 

“I don't think there is anything particular in Greater Manchester,” says longtime Miller Rob Ford, a political science professor at the University of Manchester and one of the BBC’s election night analysts, who will be writing a more detailed analysis for us next week. Ford points out that Greater Manchester has large Muslim populations in some areas, and Labour has underperformed in such areas in other parts of the country. 

“There is real significant anger in the Muslim community about the Gaza issue and Labour's stance,” Ford says. “It may also feed into a more general alienation and perhaps a sense that Labour has taken them for granted.” 

To give you a sense of what happened this week, we sent out five reporters to Oldham, Stockport, Bolton and Manchester. Their reports capture the importance of Gaza in these polls — but also the unique and personal dynamics that drive local election results. 

‘Luthfur is gone’

By Jack Dulhanty and Libby Elliott

Luthfur Rahman, deputy leader of Manchester City Council, sat surrounded by aides, activists, and campaigners but looked thoroughly alone. 

The first thing we heard upon stepping into Manchester Central was “Luthfur is gone”. A sampling of the vote put George Galloway’s candidate Shahbaz Sarwar ahead. Sarwar was a first-time candidate, who mounted a campaign at speed. “We’ve had to undo decades of Labour dominance in a few months,” he said. 

When we approached Rahman to ask about the swirling rumours that he was about to lose his seat in Longsight, a “helper” stepped in the way. He didn’t want to talk. A few rows down, Sarwar stood in a three-piece suit and flat cap, smiling and chatting. 

Sarwar’s campaign may have been short but it was intense — focussing heavily, as have all of the Workers Party candidates, on the crisis in Gaza. “It was like a parliamentary campaign,” one councillor in the area said. Leaflets were coming through the door every other day, there were celebrity endorsements and, of course, there was the involvement of Sarwar’s leader Galloway. 

The pair were seen together at events around south Manchester, and it was clear the party was targeting Rahman’s seat. Galloway described Longsight as the “emblematic race” in his party’s campaign to exploit the rejection of the Labour Party in working class, majority Muslim communities. Unseating the deputy council leader of a Labour stronghold was a golden opportunity.

And that’s what happened. The Workers Party edged Labour by 185 votes, 2,444 to 2,259. Before it was even officially announced, Sarwar was speaking to the press. Rahman had disappeared. Speaking to The Mill on the phone, he said “I need to take a few hours before I can absorb the information. So I don’t know if I’m in a position to comment at the moment.”

His fall from grace in Longsight is astonishing. The last time he ran for election, in 2021, Rahman won handsomely, beating the Conservative candidate by more than 2,000 votes. Last year’s local elections saw Labour’s candidate in Longsight beating the Tories by an even larger margin. In this week’s poll, his vote tally was only 500 votes down on three years ago, but Sarwar seems to have turned out an army of new voters, with turnout up from 24% last year to 38%.

How was Sarwar able to unseat a senior Labour councillor when Galloway’s party fell short in other heavily Muslim wards like Rusholme and Cheetham Hill? Within Labour circles, it is well known that Sarwar was a particularly motivated candidate: his overseas aid charity Smile Aid was unceremoniously kicked out of the Pakistani Community Centre on Stockport Road after the pandemic, the centre’s chairman Haroon Khatana is a close ally of Rahman’s. The suggestion is that Sarwar’s campaigning against Rahman was motivated not just by politics but also by personal revenge. 

There may have been other factors too. One local member points to Labour’s lack of engagement with Longsight’s residents in recent years. “Longsight was one of the safest seats in the city and they took the residents for granted,” the member says. “It was complacency, laziness, arrogance.” 

After his win, Sarwar was asked how he was going to celebrate. He said “I’m just going to wait for George to get here.” By that time, Galloway was in a taxi from Rochdale — a “£75 taxi”, he clarified — to sling his arm around Sarwar and speak to the press. “He’s my hero, I can’t believe it,” he said. “This is the most significant result of the night.”

“Clearly there’s work to be done, we will come back and re-double our effort in Longsight,” says Afzal Khan, the MP for Gorton, who recognised that at the heart of the ward’s rejection of Labour was the party’s stance on Gaza. “A lot of people are upset and wanted to send a message,” he said. 

Sitting in a side booth after the results, council leader Bev Craig didn’t look particularly fazed by the upset. Rahman was, after all, the man she narrowly beat in a leadership race in 2021 and who has been considered by many to be her most serious rival. One Labour member describes Rahman as “an unsettling individual” who never accepted his defeat by Craig and whose ambition for the top job destabilised Manchester’s politics, particularly in the months after the leadership election. 

How will Rahman’s exit impact the city’s governance? “I think it will help the cohesion,” says one insider. “There is no rival any more.” Overall, little changed on Manchester City Council — with Labour winning back a seat in Hulme from Ekua Bayunu, who had defected from Labour to the Greens, and ending the week with the same number of seats it started with. 

Craig says she isn’t looking forward to working with Sarwar in Longsight. “Absolutely not,” she told The Mill at the count, referring to what she sees as a dirty campaign. “What we’ve seen has been tactics and policies that wouldn’t be welcomed in the Labour Party.”

Galloway, of course, is jubilant. He’s ridden into Manchester from his new perch in Rochdale and come back with a major scalp. “They threw everything including the kitchen sink and in fact the toilet bowl because they got down and dirty, believe me,” Galloway told reporters yesterday. “And we beat them, Alhamdulillah [praise be to God].” 

Labour loses Oldham

By Mollie Simpson

3am at Oldham Civic Centre. Arooj Shah, the council’s Labour leader, is talking to Oldham East and Saddleworth’s MP Debbie Abrahams, looking visibly stressed. Outside, Aisha Kouser, the independent candidate for St Mary’s, has started setting off fireworks. A crowd cheers.

Labour has picked up seats across the country. But in Oldham, the party has been humbled, losing control of the council for the first time in 13 years. Labour’s chances were badly hit when former Labour councillor Nyla Ibrahim abandoned the party at the very last minute, leaving no time to parachute in a new candidate. Ibrahim won as an independent.

There’s little doubt that Labour’s stance on Gaza and initial refusal to back a ceasefire has proved a decisive factor in wards with large Asian populations, such as St Mary’s, where independent candidates have been pushing campaign leaflets featuring quotes from Sir Keir Starmer’s disastrous interview with LBC, where he appeared to suggest that Israel had the right to withhold food and water from Palestinians in retaliation for the Hamas attack on October 7. But it’s notable that Labour also suffered losses in white working class areas like Royton South and Failsworth West — the kinds of places it has been losing ground in the past few elections and long before the Gaza issue reared its head. 

At around half three in the morning, Steve Bashforth, the Labour incumbent candidate for Royton South, disappears from the building. The early signs he might be losing in his ward, a previously safe and mostly white working class area, baffled his colleagues. One Labour source thinks the swing towards the independents is less a sign of support for their localist policies and promises to launch yet another review into child sexual exploitation in the borough, and more a rejection of Oldham’s Labour leader, Arooj Shah.

“The opposition have been very successful in saying vote against Arooj Shah’s Labour council,” the source tells The Mill, saying independent candidates have been highlighting Shah’s friendship with “Irish Immy”, a convicted criminal known for being a getaway driver of notorious criminal Dale Cregan. Though Shah is not up for re-election this year, the dramatic number of votes against other Labour candidates could signal jeopardy for her position in the next all-out elections. “Even if it weren't for Arooj Shah’s friendships, unfortunately there’s a hostility towards an Asian woman being leader of the council. But those associations make people feel more justified in their hostility.”

It’s also a sign of how fractured things have become in this neck of the woods. “Oldham has been a particularly turbulent bit of the country for a while — you've got an unusually divided and polarised community,” says Ford, the elections expert. Certainly, regular Mill readers will have been less surprised by Labour’s loss of Oldham than some of the national commentators — what we called “The paranoid style in Oldham politics” is still going strong.

Across from us, Mark Wilkinson, a tall man with thick tufts of grey hair and a purple shirt, is sitting comfortably. Wilkinson first won a seat from the then-Labour leader Sean Fielding in Failsworth West in 2021, running under the banner of the Failsworth Independent Party, who promised to reinvigorate “forgotten Failsworth”. After falling out with other members of the Failsworth Independent Party in 2023, Wilkinson announced he would run as an Independent Candidate of Failsworth, inspiring memes about the Monty Python sketch on the People’s Front of Judea vs The Judean People’s Front. Perhaps due to that confusion, Wilkinson lost that election, but is running again this year as “one last round”.

Candidates are allowed to “sample” ballot boxes to see how they’re performing. At first, it appears that Wilkinson and the Labour candidate Kyle Phythian are “neck and neck”. Then, the results start coming in from Ridgefield Road, the large polling station near Wilkinson’s house, and Phythian tells Wilkinson: “I think you’ve won.”

The next day, Wilkinson is sitting on his mum’s sofa as she makes him a cup of tea to celebrate his victory. “I’m thrilled, I’m absolutely thrilled,” he says over the phone. He’ll continue to push for another review on the issue of child grooming in Oldham (“If there’s nothing to hide, then let’s get on with it,” he says), and says he would like to “bring the community together”.

‘This is a win for Palestine’

By Molly Wilkinson 

“People are getting fed up with the mainstream parties,” says Paula Tracey Connor-Bennett, a candidate running under the banner of the hyperlocal party Farnworth and Kearsley First. In the early hours of Friday morning, she swept to victory in Farnworth South, dramatically unseating the ward’s Labour candidate Champak Mistry. 

If, like us, you’ve been observing the results in Bolton closely — perhaps with an iced coffee and a bag of crisps on hand to stay awake through the night — you’d be forgiven for thinking that nothing has changed in the borough. Labour has failed once again to achieve a majority, remaining in minority control, while a Green candidate surprisingly picked up a seat and hyperlocals snatched a couple of safe Labour seats. But the elections reflect other storylines across Greater Manchester, where Labour’s progress in some areas was cancelled out in others, notably ones where Gaza was a big issue. 

“We've made historic gains in Bradshaw from the Tories, we've taken Hulton from an independent and we've taken Westhoughton South from the Liberal Democrats, Labour leader Nick Peel,” told the Bolton News. "However as a direct result of the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Palestine many South Asian voters have not supported Labour or the Conservatives."

“This is a win for Palestine,” said Independent candidate Ayyub Chota Patel after his victory in Rumworth. “Gaza cost us three of the five we lost,” Labour councillor Sean Fielding told The Mill. “Had that not been a factor we would’ve been up one overall. Gains in Hulton, Westhoughton South and Bradshaw are more reflective of the national picture.” 

Fielding, whose name will be very familiar to Mill readers from his former life as leader of Oldham Council, says Labour need to get smarter about how they take on the smaller players in Bolton. “We need to work out how to defeat hyperlocal independents. They describe their ideology as ‘localism’ but that kind of parochialism — pitting area against area — doesn’t provide a programme to run a council, which is why the independent-supported Tory council was so rudderless when they formed the administration. We need to do more to expose that.” 

Connor-Bennett offers a simple explanation for the success of the independent candidates: “I live in the ward, I’m a local person. People may have swung my way because they actually know me personally.” Many agree that council seats in Bolton are now won and lost depending on how closely enmeshed you are with the local community, or how good you are at performing an authentic connection with the community. “This time, I think who you are personally and how you come across to constituents is going to count for so much more,” says Chris Green, Conservative MP Bolton West and Atherton. 

Hanif Alli, a Green candidate whose middle name translates to “rebel”, surprisingly picked up a victory in Halliwell. In an interview with The Mill, he promised to enact “participatory budgeting” to give local people more power over how councils spend public money. “It would be nice if the communities who live there decide what potholes should be filled first, it’s giving power to the people and I’m all about that.”

One Labour candidate who was desperate to hold on to her seat was Kate Elizabeth Taylor, the incumbent for Astley Bridge, a mostly white, middle-class ward near Egerton. She ran as a paper candidate last year, not expecting to win, but clinched a victory from the Conservatives at the last minute. “It has been a complete whirlwind of a year,” she said, wearing red acrylics and a Labour rosette, flanked by Bolton South East’s MP Yasmin Qureshi and Fielding. “It’s one of those things where you don’t realise how much you want it until there’s the chance you’ll lose it.” 

She mentioned plenty of encouraging messages from locals who promised to vote for her and a positive reception on the doorsteps, and seemed hopeful about her chances. But in the end, after calls for a recount, the Conservative candidate Toby Hewitt took the ward from Taylor by a single vote. “You can say that your vote doesn’t matter, but sometimes they really do,” Hewitt said in his acceptance speech. 

Karl Marx wins in Stockport

By Jacob Hartley

“It was good community campaigning,” said Mark Hunter, the Lib Dem leader of Stockport Council. Though not up for re-election himself, the Lib Dems had just won two closely fought seats against Labour in Offerton and Cheadle East and Cheadle Hulme, leaving the party one short of a majority. 

While it was a local election seemingly dominated by national issues — in particular Labour’s position on Gaza — the sense was that the fight for Stockport was won on issues closer to home. “I think it’s track record,” said Hunter. “I think we’re just known as a party that cares and has done well for Stockport. We’ve only been back as the lead party for two years. But [...] we’ve achieved more in these last two years than the previous Labour administration did in six.”

One “Karl Peter Marx Wardlaw” was re-elected to Brinnington and Stockport Central, Stockport’s most deprived area. He defected from the Green Party, being not as “keen on cooperation with the Liberal Democrats,” and he says his namesake didn’t come up while campaigning. He’s been “surprised” at the level of coverage his name has received, because he’s already been a councillor for a year.

Labour’s Rosemary Barratt increased her majority in Bredbury and Woodley by several hundred votes in what, given the results in other Stockport marginals, might have been expected to go to the Lib Dems. It’s all, she says, been about “rebuilding trust.” She and her son Joe (they think they are the only mother-son pair in one ward in the entire country) are the first two Bredbury and Woodley Labour councillors in “years and years and years”.

The two don’t just campaign as a pair, but work closely together — they hold two drop-ins a month — “and a surgery!” Rosemary exclaims. It’s all about “trying to show people that actually, councillors can do a good job and be visible.” That’s their pitch to the public, Joe tells me: they achieve more “as a collective” than he would on his own. 

It’s clear she’s well-liked. There’s a huge cheer as she wins, and even some begrudging cross-party smiles. A big hug from son Joe. Claire Vibert, Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Hazel Grove and councillor for Heatons South, tells Rosemary that “it’s all about you tonight.” But even with her big win, she was clear that it wasn’t enough — “bittersweet” was the word.

Fewer smiles for the Conservatives. After their annihilation in last year’s elections, they weren’t expecting much. Paul Athans, their parliamentary candidate for Hazel Grove, makes sure to stress before the results that it’s a “tough time nationally”. What does a good night look like for them? “Progress,” Athans says, with a wafting, vague, hand gesture that suggests he’ll take what he can get. Anything is good news when you’re at rock bottom. In terms of seats on the council, this progress doesn’t materialise, but they get very, very close in Bramhall South and Woodford. There are only 81 votes in it.

The sigh from the Conservative benches as the winning vote was read out told their whole story. And, as Labour and Liberal Democrats filtered through to the press, the Conservatives were nowhere to be seen.