The Steel Town Shiver: Why Brumby Should Haunt Westminster

It may not quite be the Ides of March, but it certainly doesn’t bode well for the mainstream parties.

Reform UK has taken a ward in the heart of a key Red Wall town as Labour support continues to slip, in what will be seen as a bad by-election night for Keir Starmer.

Starting in the British Steel town of Scunthorpe, Reform candidate Ellen Dew won the Brumby ward by-election, taking the seat from Labour.

The by-election was triggered by the death of long-serving councillor and former Mayor of North Lincolnshire, Sue Armitage.

Ellen Dew becomes the first Reform councillor on North Lincolnshire Council, winning with 769 votes, a majority of 359.

Labour came second with 410 votes, followed by the Greens on 133, the Conservatives on 110, and the Liberal Democrats on 47.

Turnout was just 17.36%, which in itself tells a story about voter disengagement and dissatisfaction.

But the bigger political story is what this might mean nationally.

The result will ring alarm bells for Labour MPs across the Red Wall. Labour MP Nic Dakin won Scunthorpe in 2024 with a majority of 3,542, which is not an unassailable margin if votes begin to shift in local elections and by-elections like this.

Scunthorpe is not just any town. It is a place defined by industry, by the steelworks that have dominated its skyline and its economy for more than a century. It is a place where Labour, for generations, could count on the loyalty of working-class voters who saw the party as the defender of their jobs, their communities, their futures.

That loyalty has been eroding for years. The 2016 Brexit referendum cracked it open. The 2019 general election shattered it further. In 2024, Labour MP Nic Dakin won Scunthorpe back with a majority of 3,542, but that margin, while comfortable, was not unassailable. It was built on a coalition of voters who were willing to give Labour another chance, not voters who were convinced the party had changed.

What the Brumby by-election suggests is that the coalition is fracturing again. And this time, the beneficiaries are not the Tories, who have controlled North Lincolnshire Council since 2011 after taking it from Labour, but Reform UK.

The result will ring alarm bells for Labour MPs across the Red Wall. Scunthorpe is not an outlier. It is a bellwether. If Reform can take a ward in the heart of a town like Scunthorpe, with a candidate who has no national profile and no party machine to speak of, then there is no Red Wall seat that can be considered safe.

But the deeper significance is not simply electoral. It is about what the result represents.

Voters in Brumby did not turn out in large numbers for Reform. They turned out in small numbers against Labour. The Reform vote was 769. The Labour vote was 410. The difference was 359. But the number of voters who stayed home was 4,500.

This is not a surge of enthusiasm for Reform. It is a collapse of enthusiasm for Labour. And that collapse has been building for months, driven not by policy disagreements alone, but by a growing sense that the political class, Labour included, is not on the side of ordinary people.

The think tanks in Westminster will be crunching their numbers tonight, rereading the data, running the models. They will produce reports with titles like Understanding the Red Wall Re-alignment and Voter Disengagement in Post-Industrial Britain. But not one of them has taken that proverbial road to Wigan Pier. Not one of them has stood in the drizzle outside a steelworks at shift change and asked a man coming off a twelve-hour night shift what he thinks of Keir Starmer.

If they did, believe you me, the smell of the working class would turn them nauseous. Not because of anything the working class has done, but because they would finally understand the depth of contempt those voters hold for the people in Westminster who have spent decades talking about them, analysing them, but never once listening to them.

THE GREEN WAVE THAT WASN’T

It is worth pausing on the Greens’ result: 133 votes. For all the talk of a Green wave sweeping the Red Wall, of an environmental awakening that would transform Labour heartlands, the reality in Brumby was a distant third place, behind Labour and Reform.

The Green Party has made significant gains in some parts of the country, particularly in affluent urban constituencies where environmental concerns rank highly. But in towns like Scunthorpe, where the immediate concern is not the global climate but the local economy, where people are more worried about whether their steelworks will close than about whether the government will meet its net-zero targets, the Green message has not yet found an audience.

That may change. But for now, the real challenge to Labour in the Red Wall comes from the right, not the left. And it comes not from a party with a detailed policy platform, but from a movement built on abandonment and anger at a system that voters believe has failed them.

For MPs like Nic Dakin, who holds a modest majority of 3,542, these results should be chilling. The Red Wall was not “won back” in 2024; it was merely lent on a trial basis. If Labour continues to prioritise the sensibilities of the City over the survival of industries and the steelworks, that loan will be called in.

The Brumby result proves that identity and industry are inseparable. When a party loses its connection to the latter, it inevitably loses its right to represent the former.

What this result suggests is not simply a Reform surge, but something more important:

Voters are moving again. And when voters start moving in Red Wall towns, Westminster eventually feels it.

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Sources: North Lincolnshire Council by-election results (March 2026); LabourHeartlands.com previous reporting on Mandelson, McSweeney, and Epstein files; House of Commons Library briefing on Red Wall constituencies.