Why a Reform legal challenge forced Keir Starmer to U-turn on local elections

You know the script by now. Sir Keir Starmer and his government announce a controversial decision. They spend months defending it, throwing vast amounts of political capital at explaining why it’s necessary (if not desirable) or desirable (if not necessary).

Then, when the pressure reaches breaking point, they do exactly that – break. A U-turn is announced, and a minister is sent on the morning round to set out why this new position is entirely consistent with what they’ve been doing all along.

On Monday, we saw the latest spin of this cycle with the announcement that 30 English local council elections that had been postponed have now been unpostponed. A brief bit of research suggests this is the 15th major U-turn executed under Starmer.

None of those have been ideal, but this one has the potential to be particularly painful.

The government crumbled in the face of a legal challenge by Nigel Farage, allowing the Reform UK leader to portray himself as a bold champion for democracy.

And there’s the obvious point that this is all about elections… meaning Labour candidates will face having to defend this flip-flopping on the doorstep before putting their future in voters’ hands sooner than they expected.

At times like this, I take a bit of sadistic pleasure in tracking down the original announcement to see how ministers sold the U-turn-to-be as an essential step.

Way back on January 22, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government was telling us councils had asked for these postponements to help them prepare for major restructuring. (Labour is planning to replace the ‘two-tier’ system of district and county councils that cover a single area with new unitary authorities.)

Local Government Secretary Steve Reed told MPs that allowing elections for those specific councils to go ahead would ‘slow down making these vital reforms, which will benefit local people’.

With the risk of legal action hanging over their heads, the government appears to have decided they can, in fact, afford for these ‘vital reforms’ to slow down.

It won’t be cheap. First, there’s the £100,000 legal bill from Reform that they have agreed to pay. Then there’s the millions in administrative costs to run the elections. And Reed also announced up to £63 million in capacity funding to help these areas gear up for reorganisation.

Speaking in Wales yesterday, Keir Starmer implied the initial decisions to delay the elections were solely down to the councils themselves, and his government just gave them the thumbs up.

He told reporters: ‘I think it’s important to remind ourselves that the decision to cancel was a locally led decision, in the sense that each authority could decide.’

The U-turn, meanwhile, was simply a result of ‘further legal advice’. So, there you go – the new position is entirely consistent with what they’ve been doing all along.

Whenever the next one comes, I’m sure we’ll be hearing something very similar.

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