There are moments in politics when the language of crisis – of existential threats – is overused. And then there are moments when it barely feels big enough.

For the Labour Party, this is the latter. 

The crisis is not just electoral; it is moral, institutional, and cultural. Labour lacks not just competence and governance, but purpose. We have a Prime Minister, who no one believes will fight the next General Election, responding to a devastating message of rejection from the public by telling the nation that he will go on for another decade. This is not resilience, it is denial. And it is politically untenable.

His speech on the morning of Monday 11th was devoid of big thinking and big ideas. Labour is losing everywhere to everyone and it is facing an existential crisis, but the best the Prime Minister could do was repeat cliches and disconnected policy thoughts.

The results of the 2026 Local Elections were not just a bad night for Labour. They were a message written in capital letters across Holyrood, the Senedd, and England’s council chambers: politics as usual is over. Two-party politics has morphed into two-bloc politics. Two different stories about Britain. Two futures.

One that could be hopeful or fearful, democratic or authoritarian.

One that believes the future must be negotiated or one that believes it can be imposed.

Many progressives will say that these results are only a problem for Labour. That after Labour’s timidity on the economy, punitive and divisive rhetoric on immigration, unnecessary decisions to damage social security, and moral failure on foreign policy, Labour deserve their plight, particularly with others ready and willing to step in.

We celebrate the Green Party’s astonishing rise that has made hope possible in places Labour had only made despair convincing. We celebrate the success the Lib Dems had in fighting off Reform, cementing their majorities and gaining new ground. We celebrate Plaid Cymru becoming the biggest party in the Senedd, and the many, many seats where progressive champions of their local area were re-elected.

But looking to the next General Election, progressives’ task goes beyond realigning parts of the left bloc of British politics to fight Reform in some places for some seats. We have to focus on how to build a vibrant, expansive, pluralist progressive movement capable of winning not 40 seats but 400 – with the mandate and the energy to remake Britain into a more equal, democratic, and sustainable society.

Our challenge is to build a shared progressive project across parties equal to the scale of the moment. So we are not just celebrating; we are building.

The BBC’s national vote projection calculates how these localised results would translate into a national result at a General Election. The outcome was stark:

• Reform – 26%
• Greens – 18%
• Labour – 17%
• Conservatives – 17%
• Lib Dems – 16%. 

In terms of the new bloc politics, it gives the Right 43% and the progressives 51% – comfortably ahead, even without considering the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales.

There is a progressive majority of voters that can be actively mobilised to fuel the progressive transformation of our country. This has been the case in every general election since 1979 (sans 2015). The problem is not the numbers. The problem is organisation, culture and political imagination.

Compass is in no doubt about the scale – nor the urgency – of the challenge. Nigel Farage is not shouting from the fringes, but from the first place podium. Without progressives changing course it is likely, even if Reform only win 26% of the vote, that Farage walks into Downing Street after the next General Election.

That would not mean another swing of the pendulum between left and right. Within the context of an unwritten constitution, it would mean the erosion of civil liberties and democratic norms.

If this comes to pass it will be a disaster of our own making. Because the numbers tell a different story than the headlines. If these elections showed the rise of Reform, they also showed a definitive progressive majority.

But this won’t be easy. And much of the blame for that difficulty lies with Labour. 

They have all too often treated other progressives as enemies rather than allies. Their disgraceful campaign against the Greens in Gorton and Denton – with lurid claims about the Greens’ promoting prostitution and hard drugs – was not an isolated mistake of poor politics. It is a deeper failure to understand the era we are living in while the populist right marches forward. That failure is not isolated to the Labour Party, with ever dodgier bar charts, smears on candidates’ characters, and vitriolic attacks between progressives reported to us by Compass members during this campaign. We will not solve the big crises this country faces with tribal politics this small. That culture has to end. More widely, Labour’s credibility has collapsed and its reputation as a “progressive” party is deeply damaged. 

Behind this lies Labour’s major strategic and democratic failure in refusing to change our archaic, broken voting system, despite support from its membership and conference and the Labour movement (this weekend, the CWU became the latest trade union to back PR).

The centrality of electoral reform is key – you cannot build a pluralist society in the 21st century on a winner-takes-all voting system designed for another century. That is why we have consistently campaigned for democratic reform alongside economic transformation. This is also why Compass has supported the creation of Mainstream, and why figures like Andy Burnham matter beyond personality or faction. Burnham understands something fundamental: democratic reform is not an optional extra to rewiring the economy. It is what makes long-term economic transformation possible.

A Labour government led in a genuinely different direction – committed to wealth taxes, democratic public ownership, and proportional representation – could galvanise the majority in the progressive bloc. That could create the conditions for cooperation, for momentum to beat back Farage, and for a majority capable of delivering systemic change.

Without that shift, changing the face at the top but not the political offer beneath it hands victory to the populist right. The country is crying out for transformation, not managerialism with better media training.

There are pinch points for this project, not least where Labour and the Greens compete for seats at a scale that Labour and the Liberal Democrats rarely have. Pressures on the union are growing with leadership in Northern Ireland, Wales in Scotland newly aligned on independence. But complexity is not an excuse for fatalism. Bloc politics is here whether we like it or not. The question is whether we respond strategically and democratically.

Progressives need to start galvanising the progressive majority on the basis of the values they share and the policies they support. Only by building trust around campaigns and shared policy development, will we create the relationships that can then underpin cross-party work in the future. That means building relationships now. Shared campaigns, dialogue, and patient alliance-building now. Not a few minutes before the election.

The right won’t find this easy either. Rivalries between Conservatives and Reform are real. But the right possesses strategic ruthlessness that progressives too often lack. Wealthy donors, right-wing newspapers and powerful political actors will exert immense pressure to unite the right however necessary. They know the numbers. In the last General Election the right lost 202 seats where Conservative and Reform votes combined exceeded the winning progressive total.

Compass analysis of last Thursday’s elections, to be released later this week, shows the same dynamic in reverse in hundreds of local races. In more than 800 contests, progressive parties collectively outpolled the right but still lost because votes fragmented under first-past-the-post. Sometimes by dozens of votes. Sometimes by a handful. This is the fate awaiting us at the next General Election unless we act now.

Back in 2011, our members voted to transform Compass from a Labour pressure group into a political home for progressives across all parties and none. It has become a home for socialists, liberals, environmentalists and people with no party allegiance at all – working together to build a Good Society.

Since then we have built the structures, organisation and culture to operate pluralistically in a multi-party politics. There is so much more to do. Our parties, Westminster and Whitehall remain poorly equipped for the fragmented landscape we now inhabit. But the prize is enormous. An alliance rooted not in fear, but shared purpose. A progressive government elected not to appease a few swing voters in a few swing seats, not in hock to millionaire or billionaire party donors, or media and tech platform barons – but answerable to and supported by the progressive majority in this country. Winning on a mandate to transform our country. 

That is the path to the Good Society. Not a slogan, but a horizon, lodestar and our direction of travel. And with your support, we will get there.