Saturday 2 May. The day after I lost the election to become the Labour Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, Grimsby Town FC, the club I co-own, lost 0-1, falling short of the League Two playoffs by two points. Statistically speaking, not my luckiest 24 hours. I skipped buying a lottery ticket on the way home. Before kickoff, I spent time near the turnstiles at Blundell Park talking to voters and supporters. What I took away wasn’t despair, it was hope. That we’re making progress together, and that next season might just be better.
When I started this campaign, I thought I understood politics. But campaigning opened my eyes in new ways. It taught me how little we are actually hearing each other, and how urgently we need to change that. I was stunned by some of what I encountered. In Boston, residents spoke openly about feeling like foreigners in a changing town. They worried about people day-drinking in the park around St Botolph’s (known locally as The Stump) or the proliferation of vape shops on a diminished high street. Not all of it was easy to see or hear. Some of it was uncomfortable. In chorus, they were echoing the nightmare rhetoric of Reform UK, social problems old and new lumped into one increasingly miserable tableau.
I spoke to groups of potential Reform voters. Those conversations, sometimes difficult, reflected a deeper emotional reality, people trying to make sense of rapid change, often without the language or support to process it. It jarred with my own progressive assumptions and challenged my belief in how multiculturalism is meant to work. Because we cannot just live alongside each other, we need everyone to participate if our communities are to be coherent. Confronting this discord is an increasingly existential obligation for my party. Fresh polling this week from YouGov has placed Reform at a record high of 29 per cent, and Labour at 22 per cent. If we cannot reach these voters and their anxieties, let alone persuade them, we will lose them and power for good.
The rise of Reform UK is not about policy. It is about emotion. The party offers very few real answers to the economic or institutional challenges we face. But it offers something else, a clear enemy, and a way to explain a confusing, fast changing world. As Jonathan Haidt argues in The Righteous Mind, our minds are like a rider on an elephant. The rational brain steers, but it is emotion that usually leads. So when people are scared, grieving or angry, it is emotion that drives the decision, not facts or policy detail. And in that state, clarity always beats nuance.
I came to see this again and again on the doorstep. People didn’t open with a critique of Labour’s economic policy or public service plans. They opened with something closer to pain, expressing anxieties about crime and social change:
“It doesn’t feel like my country anymore.”
“I grafted all my life and now I feel like a stranger in Aldi.”
“All the drug dealers in this town, everyone knows where they live. Why don’t the police?”
These feelings carry a diffuse sense of alienation and accumulated disquiet that has been exploited by Reform. One man in Lincoln, a welder, standing on his front step in a gym vest, began with the refrain I heard again and again, “I’m not racist but…” and proceeded to express real distress about immigration. He wasn’t shouting. He wasn’t trying to stir up hate. He was trying to understand what had happened to the town he knew. The feeling I experienced was complicated. On one hand, there was connection, a shared sense of loss or confusion. On the other, a deep despair at how divided and disoriented things have become. We shook hands and he said, “Nothing personal, I am just fed up.”
But these issues too readily become personal. Because five minutes later, just a few streets away, an Eastern European man asked me if Labour could help him get a larger council house because his family was growing and he needed space. These people weren’t enemies. They were neighbours. But they were also symbols of a tension that is stretching our communities to breaking point: working-class Brits feeling like they are competing with immigrants for scarce resources, all against the backdrop of continued cost of living pressures and an economy that isn’t rewarding their hard work.
And some of these tensions have been made worse by Labour’s silence. On issues like grooming gangs, the housing shortage, or the racialised nature of fear in some communities, we have too often ceded the conversation to others, leaving a vacuum that has been filled with suspicion, resentment and generalisation. People need to know we see what they see, even when it’s difficult to talk about. Ignoring the hardest issues doesn’t make them go away, it makes them fester. To rebuild trust, we have to be honest, not just about what we stand for, but what we have failed to confront.
When people say Labour has abandoned the working class, they don’t mean it in a Westminster think tank sense. They mean they don’t feel seen or heard. It’s not just about the content of policy, it’s about the tone of our actions, the sense that decisions are being made at a distance, without understanding or respect for what life feels like on the ground. We like to think of ourselves as driven by logic, but more often we are governed by fear and moral intuition. It’s a truth that Kurt Gray’s book Outraged captures well. People don’t just vote based on rational calculations, they vote based on what they feel is right or fair. As Gray writes, “Moral outrage is not just a bug of our minds, it is a feature of our psychology that helps bind groups together and punish those who betray our moral code.” He also notes that outrage can be sparked by both real and imagined threats. Once ignited, it shapes our perceptions, fuels our choices and hardens group boundaries, often before we have had a chance to reflect rationally.
So when the Labour Party makes difficult decisions, on National Insurance, or the winter fuel allowance, or disability benefits, it doesn’t matter if the policy is technically defensible. It can feel like cruelty. A betrayal of our Labour values. That matters. Likewise, we can point out that small boats account for a fraction of total immigration. But when people feel their community is changing rapidly and they have no say in it, the symbolic impact drowns out the numbers. It’s the feeling it leaves people with, that something is changing around them and they are no longer in control of it, that decisions are being made elsewhere about the places they call home. Lack of control, fear and hurt are driving our politics, not a lack of policy understanding.
During a BBC debate ahead of the election, I was asked whether I supported the so-called “solar goldrush on farmland”. On the face of it, no one wants to see the countryside covered in panels. But that’s not the whole story. Solar takes up less than 1 per cent of farmland, much of which isn’t even productive. It’s part of how we reduce bills and invest in energy independence. And fundamentally, farmers should be trusted to decide how best to use their land. But try explaining that nuance in a 10-second soundbite. The question “Do you support solar on farmland, yes or no?” is easy to answer emotionally and instantly. The real answer is harder and slower. But we have to make space for it.
One of the most damaging assumptions in progressive politics is that Reform voters are uneducated or irredeemably bigoted. This simply isn’t true. The people I met were welders, care workers, former Labour voters, union members and lifelong public servants. They are not left behind, they have been left out of the conversation. Their anger isn’t always rational, but it is often reasonable. Dismissing them only hardens their disillusionment. Door knocking becomes, in this light, not just a tactic but a tragedy. A transactional moment that opens a door we rarely walk back through. I want to go back and speak again to the welder in Lincoln. To finish the conversation. Because it is clear we have only just started.
Let’s be absolutely clear. Reform UK is not the answer. They offer no credible solutions to the housing crisis, the NHS backlog or Britain’s long term productivity decline. What they offer is outrage. And as I have said elsewhere, if you are trying to fight an emotional insurgency with facts and logic, you have brought the wrong weapon. But it’s not enough to say what we are against. We need to show what we are for, with honesty, humility and a sense of shared purpose. The irony of this moment is that Reform’s insurgency is evidence that democracy works. People are angry, and they are using the tools we gave them to say so. Now it’s our turn to respond, not with dismissal, but with a vision we can communicate with compassion.
Progressive capitalism isn’t abstract theory. It is about agency. Giving people a stake in their local economy through investment, ownership and the confidence that their contribution matters. That is what we tried to suggest with the Lincolnshire First Fund, my commitment to raise an additional £1billion from pension funds and private investors but with the dividends as least partially back to the community. Not redistribution, but reinvestment. Let’s build on that. So where do we go from here? I’d offer three things.
First, root every policy in a story of dignity. To return to Kurt Gray, outrage often comes when people feel others are being treated unfairly, not just when they disagree with a policy. The left must reclaim the moral language of fairness, security and belonging, not just for marginalised groups, but for the millions who feel invisible in their own communities. If Labour wants to reconnect with the places we have lost and earn the trust of those we still have, it needs to speak in a language that resonates, not just with facts and figures, but with feeling. People want to be seen, not managed. That means saying plainly, “Everyone deserves to feel proud of where they are from and hopeful about where they are going.” It means showing that we understand the sense of injustice many feel, “If you work hard and play by the rules, you should get a fair deal. Too many feel the system is stacked against them.”
Second, Labour must become a movement of proximity again. We have to get closer to people’s lives. That means fewer think tanks, more town halls. Fewer media clips, more doorsteps, and staying for the conversation, not just the canvass. We need to invest in grassroots listening structures that do not disappear between elections. Political capital is earned through presence, not just promises. Third, we should build institutions that people can belong to, not just vote for. From community owned football clubs to cooperative housing and youth services. The latter is especially important. We have lost two thirds of our youth centres over the last 20 years. We need more places “for young people to go, have something to do and someone to talk to”, like the Horizon Youth Zone in Grimsby, built in partnership with Onside. Our politics must offer more than representation. It must offer participation. If Reform trades in outrage, Labour should trade in ownership.
And maybe we need to remind ourselves, every so often, why we got into this in the first place. Not to win votes, or to dominate debates, but to serve and to listen. Meeting people in person always left me more optimistic than anything I read online. There is warmth out there, and decency, even when it is hidden beneath anger or fear. But there is also real worry in our communities, and it is not going away on its own. The campaign and season may be over. But our work has only just begun.
[See also: What is Nigel Farage thinking now?]
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