The Bromsgrove By-Election: Fear and Loathing in the Shires
If Labour ever wants to regain its soul, it must stop following the polite whisperings of tactical politics and start listening again to the roar of the street.
No one should take a local council by-election too seriously. A few thousand votes on a wet Thursday night in Worcestershire is hardly the stuff of history. But every so often one of these minor contests tells a bigger story, not about potholes or parish budgets, but about the political mood of the country.
Last week’s Bromsgrove South result did just that. The Liberal Democrats stormed home with a comfortable victory, pushing Reform UK into second and knocking both the Conservatives and Labour into the long grass, though to be fair, the Tories had already made a decent start on getting lost there themselves.
The headlines were predictable: “Reform beaten back!” and “The anti-Reform alliance wins the day.”
But dig a little deeper and you see something more revealing. Reform’s vote actually held solid, dipping only slightly, down by barely one and a half points. This was not a rejection. It was the familiar old parties discovering, perhaps for the first time, that survival demands cooperation. Bromsgrove was not a revolt against Reform, it was a moment of collective panic among the political establishment learning to cling together out of fear.
The quiet understanding
It was not a noisy campaign of leaflets or door-knocking. Quite the opposite. Observers noted that Labour’s presence was almost ghostly, with no real push, no visible energy, just a name on the ballot and a polite nod to form.
Was that deliberate? We cannot be certain, but it has all the hallmarks of a quiet tactical understanding, the sort of unspoken collaboration that needs no formal handshake. The aim was simple enough: let the Lib Dems take the lead, stand back, and box out Reform.
It is a very British kind of politics, gentle, polite, and deeply Machiavellian. Yet it is also a short-term fix, a temporary convenience dressed up as virtue. You cannot build a movement on fear of someone else. You cannot keep a party alive by pretending to be something it is not.
The illusion of unity
The comfortable old political class is fragmenting. They can only hide their true colours for so long before the mask slips.
How long can a Labour voter keep supporting a Lib Dem candidate just to stop Reform? A month? A year? Twenty years?
At some point it becomes absurd.
A democracy built on tactical illusion is no democracy at all. Voting should be an act of belief, not fear. When people are pushed into corners where conviction gives way to calculation, something fundamental is lost, the honesty that keeps politics real.
And when that honesty returns, when voters say, “No, I will vote for what I believe, not what I am told to fear,” the whole fragile arrangement collapses.
Reform will not sit quietly
Do not expect Reform to sit around sighing “oh dear me.” They have read The Prince too and they understand power. They know that what they face now is not popular rejection but an establishment counter-move, tactical, temporary and fragile.
They will respond not with outrage but with strategy.
They will hold discipline and refuse to mirror the chaos around them.
They will build credibility at the local level, showing they can govern as well as protest.
They will call out the dishonesty of parties who hide their own convictions while accusing others of extremism.
And they will remind voters that conviction, even when imperfect, is worth more than choreography.
When these new alliances start fraying, and they always do, Reform’s clear line of belief will stand out like a clean flag in a field of confusion.
Labour’s choice
And what of Labour? The party of working men and women has drifted far from its roots, lost in a fog of managerial comfort. It has become a club for the entitled and the self-satisfied, the ones who think politics is about telling people how to live rather than trusting them to make a noisy, messy, glorious mess of freedom.
If Labour ever wants to regain its soul, it must stop following the polite whisperings of tactical politics and start listening again to the roar of the street.
The pudding and the proof
So, was Bromsgrove a Liberal Democrat victory? Perhaps. Was it a Reform defeat? Not really. It was more a snapshot of a political class coming to grips with an uncomfortable truth, that the voters they took for granted are no longer theirs to command.
The old parties are discovering that you cannot laugh forever at something that keeps growing. Fear has replaced mockery and tactical cooperation has replaced confidence.
I am not happy with my own party, Labour, far from it. But hell will probably have to freeze over before I drop them. That might seem daft, but at least it is honest. When Walsall dropped into the fourth tier of football I did not go and become a Blue Nose or a Villa fan. You stick with what you believe in, for better or worse.
If only our political class could show the same honesty. Because the proof, as they say, is in the pudding, and right now the pudding tastes of panic.