Not a penny more on your council tax – not a penny more than the bill you paid last year,” raved Keir Starmer as he whipped up supporters at Labour’s local election campaign launch in Swindon in 2023.
As he addressed members holding signs that read “Build a better Britain”, Starmer’s promise to freeze council tax the following year – though arguably irrelevant, as Labour was not in power – matched the ambition of other key pledges, to cut energy bills and revive the high street.
Soon-to-be chancellor Rachel Reeves even said there were no plans to increase capital gains tax. But three years is a long time in politics.
Gone are the heady days of a 17-point lead in the polls. Now is a critical moment for Starmer, who, while struggling to maintain UK-US relations during a war in the Middle East, is facing his own fight – to save his government, and his job.
And in the bellwether town of Swindon – which, since 1983, has consistently voted in MPs from the party that ends up in government – the battle lines are being drawn for a local election on 7 May that could give the clearest indication yet of what the future holds for Starmer, as well as the prospects of Reform UK and the Green Party.
But on a visit to the former railway town last month, the outlook for Starmer and his party seemed bleak.
“I’ll be voting for Reform – it can’t get any worse,” said pensioner John Doult, until now a lifelong Labour voter, who was among the thousands employed in the town’s once-famous car industry.
The 86-year-old bemoaned the “terrible” state of the town centre, attributing it to the loss of Debenhams and Marks & Spencer, while also hitting out at Reeves’s decision to freeze income tax thresholds, which he said creates a “two-tier” pension system by punishing those who have saved for retirement.
Immigration – a subject not far from the lips of many people – is out of control, he added.
Eddy, sitting on a bench near to several boarded-up shops in the town centre, also suggested he would vote for Reform. “You can’t do any worse than what we’re getting today,” he said. “I think the ordinary person has seen we’ve had the Conservatives in charge here, and then Labour, and nothing has changed.
“We still have roads full of potholes, the town centre is only getting worse. We need new ideas, new people.”
During the six hours The Independent spent talking to people in Swindon, not one person said they would vote Labour, although not everyone was backing Reform.
Jennifer Selwood said: “This is the first time I won’t vote for Labour, or not at all even. I wouldn’t vote Green, or Reform. We’ll look at stuff that comes through the door.”
She said that she and her husband Antony are unhappy about being “stung” by Labour for tax on their savings, as well as NHS waiting times and a lack of housing for their grandchildren. She said the town centre is “tired and old” and that she avoids it unless she has to visit for an appointment.
The town centre has been a focus of the Labour-controlled borough council.
Work has finished on a new transport gateway, and artwork is going up along closed shop fronts at the site of the former outdoor market. There are also plans in the pipeline, as part of a long-term strategy, to build a new entertainment venue and thousands of affordable homes.
The town centre is also home to the headquarters of Zurich Insurance, which opened two years ago. But many areas clearly require investment, like the huge former Debenhams store, still abandoned six years after it closed. Regent Circus, a shopping complex opened just 13 years ago, sits empty apart from a Nando’s restaurant.
A council report last year said the town centre required “reinvention”.
Away from the town centre is the former Oasis leisure centre, which has been closed for five years. Vegetation has grown around its famous glass dome. On the northern outskirts of the town, the former speedway and greyhound track closed last year, and the site appears destined for housing.
The town’s outlying retail parks – Orbital Shopping Park and Greenbridge Retail and Leisure Park – appear busy, and there is major work ongoing to regenerate the closed-down plants left by Honda when it ceased production in 2021 with the loss of thousands of jobs.
For some, the state of Swindon reflects the state of the country.
“Everyone is feeling it, everywhere in the country,” said Carol Richardson. She and her partner moved down the M4 corridor from Reading to Swindon to be closer to her daugher. Standing in the shadow of the closed speedway track, the 74-year-old added: “Cost of living, the building of houses without care and thought, the demise of our town centres. It has been a failure of promises to build a better country.”
In February, Swindon South MP and transport minister Heidi Alexander helped launch Labour’s local election campaign. The party won 41 of the 57 councillor seats in 2024, but has since seen that number fall to 34, with four councillors defecting to the Green Party last year.
Tellingly, Alexander used almost half of her 488-word social media post – in which she pleaded with residents of Swindon to “stick with us” – to attack Reform, calling its members “a brunch of cranks and pound shop nationalists”. On Thursday night, Nigel Farage brought Reform’s local election campaign tour to Swindon.
Meanwhile, the Green Party, buoyed by its success at the Gorton and Denton by-election, has been flexing its muscles locally, with leader Zack Polanski telling supporters during a visit in October that he was confident of more ex-Labour voters turning Green.
Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party has also said it will have a presence at the election.
Leading pollster Robert Hayward said the lack of party loyalty from voters in Swindon makes the area a credible target for Reform. At the last election in Swindon South and Swindon North, the Tories lost 25 per cent and 27 per cent of their vote share respectively, with Labour increasing their own by 8 and 10 per cent.
Hayward said: “Swindon is that sort of area that became disenchanted with the Conservatives, which didn’t necessarily vote for Labour, but they just wouldn’t vote for the Conservatives any longer. So you’ve got people who are disenchanted with politics, and certainly they are the sort of people that Reform would play to very well.”
Asked what it would mean if Labour lost control of the council, Hayward said it would be too early to predict the next general election, but that it would “confirm the problem that Labour have got with their white working-class voters”.