OCTOBER 26, 2025
On the same day as Labour’s crushing defeat in the Caerphilly by-election, which ended a Labour reign of 107 years in that seat, a local council by-election took place In Colchester. Bryn Griffiths, a local Labour activist, reports on a wave of relief in the East of England, but suggests there is little cause for celebration.
The Colchester City Council by-election was not as significant as the Senedd by-election in Wales but it can still give us a strong indication of what is going on in British electoral politics. The New Town and Christ Church ward by-election was called because our Labour Member of Parliament, Pam Cox, stood down as a local councillor having become Colchester’s first Labour MP since 1945.
Setting the scene
The New Town and Christ Church ward is both interesting and a trend-setter seat for numerous reasons. The ward is part of the wider Colchester constituency which was on Labour’s target list in the 2024 General Election. The ward contains one of the constituency’s biggest concentrations of Labour votes. The Labour Party Branch, chaired by myself, has the biggest Labour membership in the city. To add to the notable local factors, the ward is adjacent to the Castle ward Green Party stronghold. Reform had no local presence so we were about to discover the strength of the populist right as they had not stood here before. So, it is fair to say that all eyes in Colchester were on this hotly contested by-election.
City Council wards have three councillors with elections for each in turn taking place annually, with a year off for the County Council elections. The first ever ward election, after a recent boundary change, took place in 2016 and the Liberal Democrats won with 36.8% of the vote, leaving the Labour and the Tory candidates to vie for second place with around 22% of the vote each.
In 2017 there were no Colchester City elections due to the Essex County Council elections taking place. In May 2018, with Labour benefiting from Corbyn’s creditable 2017 General Election performance, Lorcan Whitehead, a prominent supporter of Momentum, delivered an outstanding result when he took Labour from 22.9% to a massive 41.7%. To put some numbers on that, Labour’s vote went up from 710 to 1,319 and Lorcan’s swing was 19.4%, one of the highest in the country!
Though subsequently we usually returned Labour candidates, in the ‘Get Brexit Done’ nadir of 2019, the Liberal Democrats held a seat. By 2024, Pam Cox, already our parliamentary candidate, retained the seat with a massive 1,639 votes, with the Tories trailing in second place with a derisory 468 votes. Colchester Labour had made New Town and Christ Church a rock-solid Labour seat.
You can find the full record of New Town and Christ Church elections here in Andrew Teale’s excellent local elections archive.
The result
So, with the ‘Starmer effect’ in full swing, how did we do in our by-election on 23rd October 2025 when Pam Cox MP stood down as our local councillor? The good news and the cause of a massive wave of relief all around Colchester is that Labour’s Richard Bourne saved the seat for Labour. So, congratulations to Cllr Richard Bourne. But as the result below suggests, there is no good reason to celebrate.
| New Town and Christ Church ward Colchester by-election Thursday 23 October 2025 | ||
| Party | Vote | Percentage (change in brackets). |
| Labour ELECTED | 800 | 29.7% (- 27.6) |
| Liberal Democrat | 657 | 24.4% (+12.1) |
| Reform | 600 | 22.3% (new) |
| Green | 401 | 14.9% (+5.3) |
| Tory | 200 | 7.4% (-8.9) |
| Independent | 38 | 1.4% (-3.1) |
| Turnout 24.01% compared to 29.71% in 2024 | ||
The turnout was 24.01% compared to 29.71% in last year’s city-wide elections. According to the Local Government Association, the average local by-election turnout across the country in 2024 was 30.8%, so our turn out was low. The weather on the day was horrible so this factor, combined with the electorate’s dissatisfaction with the two main parties, seems to have suppressed voter enthusiasm.
Moving onto the actual votes, the ‘Starmer effect’ lost us more than half of Labour’s vote as we dropped from 1,639 to 800. Some of the drop can be explained by the slightly lower turnout but most of it can be explained only by a flight from Labour. Labour’s vote dropped by 27.6% – so nothing to celebrate here!
Reform came from nowhere to reach 22.3% and third place, slightly behind the Liberal Democrats. We did not know what the Reform vote would be, so the local response is relief that they have not secured a foothold on the council. But given that New Town and Christ Church is a Colchester Labour citadel, it should give us no reason whatsoever for complacency.
So, what could all this mean for the General Election in 2029? The Electoral Calculus poll of polls projection (see picture below) suggests that Colchester as a whole will be a two-way fight between Labour and Reform. Given this daunting prospect, the last thing Labour wants to see is buoyant Green and Liberal Democrat performances. So, it is bad news indeed to see the Liberal Democrats up by 12% to 24% of the vote and the Greens hitting their national opinion poll percentage of around 15%!
The Electoral Calculus poll of pollsColchester constituency projection of Labour (45%) and Reform (40.1%) should create food for thought for those contemplating a left-wing electoral challenge in Colchester. In some areas of the United Kingdom, it will be nationalists, Greens, independent and leftists challenging Labour. But in Colchester a radical challenge to Labour could have the terrible outcome of landing Colchester with a Reform MP.
Electoral Calculus Colchester General Election Projection on the basis of the current poll of polls. Fourth column the Colchester General Election vote projection (25 October 2025). Source https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk
Fragmentation
So, what should we make of our Colchester result? I think one word captures the processes at work: Fragmentation, fragmentation, fragmentation.
Ever since the formation of the Labour Party and the near death of the old Liberal Party at the beginning of the last century, we have had a two-party system: that is, Labour versus the Conservatives. In the Colchester City Council by-election, the two main parties could muster only a total of 37.1% of the vote while back in 2018, when Momentum’s Lorcan Whitehead first won the seat, the two main parties commanded a total of 66.3% of the vote. A figure for the advocates of First Past the Post to think about is that this time Labour, the Party that won, only got 29.7% of the vote!
The fragmentation of United Kingdom electoral politics was very effectively mapped by Hannah Bunting, the Co-Director of the Elections Centre at the University of Exeter, when she wrote in The Conversation earlier this year that “UK local elections delivered record-breaking fragmentation of the vote”. In the 2025 local elections, the average two-party vote share was just 36.8%, so Colchester’s voter fragmentation is typical. In Hannah’s words “the 2025 council election broke records for the extent of fragmentation – a significant movement away from the dominance of the two parties that have dominated British politics for the past century.”
In a five-party (possibly soon to be six) fight, a First Past the Post system, which is premised on a two-party contest, is well and truly broken. Remember, the first-past-the-post electoral system only requires a plurality of votes, and not a majority.
McSweeney strategy failure
We can also see that Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney’s strategy of going for Reform votes while scaring people into voting for Labour is dangerous. Despite Labour running a local campaign that constantly focused on the need to vote Labour to defeat Reform, the Greens, as noted above, rose to their national level of about 15% and the Liberal Democrats surged by 12.1% to take second place. The threat of Reform did not seem to scare a large group of left of centre Colchester voters. The much-trailed arrival of a party created by Jeremy Corbyn will only further complicate matters.
The McSweeney scare strategy may work in the short term in places where we have a big majority but it will be shot through with holes where the contests are closer.
Get PR done!
Regular listeners to the Labour Left Podcast will be able to see where this argument is going. Labour has a policy of Proportional Representation backed by 79% of Conference delegates in 2021. If we are going to prevent Nigel Farage becoming Prime Minister, we need a Labour Leader who will embrace the Party’s policy. We cannot allow Nigel Farage to replicate our 2024 ‘wide but shallow’ Labour majority in 2029. Now is the time to get PR done!
Stop bleeding votes to the left
Compass have pointed out in their aptly named report Thin Ice – Why the UK’s progressive majority could stop Labour’s landslide melting away that an electoral strategy that leans heavily towards trying to out-Farage Farage on his own anti-migrant territory is fatally flawed as it undermines our own electoral base. Let me spell it out: when Lorcan Whitehead won the ward for Labour in 2018, we secured 41.7% of the vote and on 23rd October 2025 the vote was down to 29.7% of the vote.
A Labour Party which fails us on Gaza, child benefits, the winter fuel allowance and disability benefits is indeed skating on ‘thin ice’ and is running the risk under the First Past The Post electoral system of delivering a ‘wide but shallow majority’ but this time for Nigel Farage and the populist right.
John McDonnell MP suggested on the Labour Left Podcast that Labour is currently facing an existential threat to its very existence.
To our massive relief we beat Farage’s Reform in Colchester, for now, but the writing is on the wall for those that care to read it. Labour must embrace Proportional Representation and change course if we are to stop Nigel Farage winning!
Bryn Griffiths is an activist in the Colchester Labour Party. He is the Vice-Chair of Momentum and sits on the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy’s Executive. Everything he writes here is in his personal capacity.
Bryn hosts Labour Hub’s spin off – the Labour Left Podcast. Labour’s electoral performance has recently been the subject of much discussion with Richard Burgon MP, John McDonnell MP and Mark Perryman of Lewes Labour Party. You can find all the episodes of the podcast here or if you prefer audio platforms (for example Amazon, Audible Spotify, Apple etc,) go to your favourite podcast provider and just search for the Labour Left Podcast.
Image: Colchester Town Hall https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Colchester_Town_Hall_-_geograph.org.uk_-_188789.jpg Source: From geograph.org.uk. Author: David Hawgood. Attribution: David Hawgood / Colchester Town Hall, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
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