Why Keir Starmer will be sweating over by-election showdown with Reform

Over the last few months, the quiet town of Runcorn has found itself in the national political spotlight, and today, that glare intensified. With disgraced MP Mike Amesbury resigning, this little corner of Cheshire is about to host a by-election that could tell us more about the future of British politics than any speech from Keir Starmer or Nigel Farage ever could. The stakes? Whether Labour still speaks the language of the working class, or whether Nigel Farage and his band of irreverent insurgents have finally muscled in on the territory Labour once considered its birthright.

This isn’t just another by-election where voter turnout barely scrapes double digits, and the result is as predictable as the price of a pint going up. This is the first proper showdown between Starmer’s Labour and Reform UK in a head-to-head fight for the voters Labour used to think of as family. And it’s a contest that should have Labour sweating.

Because if Starmer’s party struggles here, in the sort of place that once wouldn’t have even needed a campaign to stay red, then the unthinkable might already be happening, Labour’s once-loyal working-class base could be turning its back for good.

Labour should win this comfortably, at least on paper. But Runcorn isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. It’s made up of a solidly working-class industrial core, the sort of place that once would have elected a red rosette pinned to a wheelie bin, but it’s also surrounded by more affluent areas that could shift the dynamics of the result.

The town, like so many communities outside the M25, was built on hard graft, proper jobs, and a sense of community that wasn’t something politicians talked about in focus groups but an actual way of life.

Labour was the party of workers — the ones who made things, fixed things, built things. But the Labour Party of today? It seems to have replaced the factory floor with the podcast studio. The party that once fought for the steelworker and the miner now seems more at home discussing microaggressions over an oat milk flat white.

And that’s the problem. The working class — actual working-class people, not the distant ones certain MPs invoke when reminiscing about their great-grandad who worked down a pit — feel abandoned.

They see a Labour Party that talks endlessly about diversity and inclusion but never seems to mention the price of fuel, or the fact that their kids can’t get a decent apprenticeship anymore. Enter Reform UK, which, for all its bombast, at least sounds like it gives a toss.

Nigel Farage, the cockroach of British politics, has spent decades perfecting the art of looking like he’s on your side. He’s the bloke at the bar who tells you what you already think, just louder, with an extra dash of anti-immigration rhetoric for flavour.

The by-election in Runcorn is shaping up to be a straight fight between Labour and Reform, and that should be keeping Starmer up at night. The Tories? Forget it. Rishi Sunak managed to alienate both the traditional Conservative base and the disillusioned Brexit-backing working class that Boris Johnson once charmed with his bumbling, faux-blokeish appeal.

They might still cobble together enough votes to save face, but this isn’t their fight. This is Labour vs Reform, and for the first time in decades, Labour is having to defend itself on home turf.

But here’s where it gets even trickier. The by-election won’t be the only test of Labour’s support in Runcorn. It’s likely that on the same day, local council elections will also be taking place — but crucially, these elections are happening in exclusively working-class towns, not just areas like Runcorn with wealthier suburbs.

That means we’re not just looking at whether Labour can hold onto its parliamentary seat — we’re about to get a real-time verdict on whether the party is still trusted in the very communities that built it.

And unlike the by-election, where national party branding and big-name visits can muddy the waters, the local elections will offer a much purer measure of where working-class voters stand.

These aren’t votes based on TV debates or slick messaging from HQ — these are the elections where people are voting on their doorstep experiences, on the state of their roads, on whether their kids’ schools are falling apart, on whether they feel their voices are actually being heard.

If Labour starts haemorrhaging council seats here, it’s a much bigger crisis than losing a single MP. It means the erosion of Labour’s working-class base isn’t theoretical, it’s happening in front of our eyes.

If Starmer’s Labour loses here, or even just scrapes through with a narrow win, it’ll be the canary in the coal mine for a much bigger problem. Reform UK is no longer just a protest vote for grumpy old men who want the 1950s back.

It’s tapping into something real — a profound frustration with an establishment that working-class voters believe doesn’t understand them, doesn’t listen to them, and doesn’t care about them.

If Labour can’t win convincingly in places like Runcorn, the party may soon wake up to find that its entire working-class base has quietly walked out the door.

Starmer’s challenge is both simple and monumental: he needs to prove that Labour still represents the people it was built to serve. That doesn’t mean rolling out another half-baked policy about retraining shipbuilders as software engineers or unveiling a flashy infrastructure project that nobody asked for.

It means talking about things people actually care about: wages, rent, crime, the NHS. It means looking like someone who understands day-to-day life, not a consultant delivering a TED Talk.

The worst mistake Labour could make is trying to out-Farage Farage. Nobody buys an imitation of Nigel. If voters want a pint-swilling, anti-establishment rabble-rouser, they’ll go straight to the original.

Labour needs to fight this election as itself, if it can still remember what that looks like. Because the reason people once voted Labour wasn’t nostalgia or fear of the Tories, but because Labour actually made their lives better.

It built council houses. It fought for better wages. It made sure working-class kids could get an education without signing away their future in student debt.

Runcorn is Labour’s warning shot. If the party wins big, it means the wolves are still at the gate. If it’s close, it means the foundation is cracking. If it loses, then the old political order is well and truly broken, and the working class has decided it’s had enough of Labour’s new identity crisis.

And with the local elections running alongside, there’s nowhere to hide. Even if Labour holds the seat, losing council seats in the working-class areas that were once its backbone would be a devastating signal that change is already underway.

What happens in Runcorn won’t stay in Runcorn. This is Labour’s moment of reckoning. And if the party doesn’t start listening — really listening — to the people who built it in the first place, that future might not have a place for them at all.