Sheffield MP urges Keir Starmer to "rip up tax rules" & avoid moving to right after Reform UK election success
Former Transport Secretary Louise Haigh has called on Prime Minister Keir Starmer to rip up Labour’s “self-imposed tax rules” and avoid a lurch to the right in the wake of Reform’s recent election success.
Thursday’s elections saw Reform UK win a fifth seat in Parliament, take control of 10 local councils and emerge victorious in two mayoral races.
Speaking today (Monday, May 5, 2025), as the country’s biggest political parties strategise on how to respond to Reform’s growing success, Louise Haigh branded the election results “alarming.”
Ms Haigh also suggested Sir Keir and The Labour Party need to be “confident” in their values.
Writing in The Times, the Sheffield Heeley MP said: "The government's response on Friday was alarming.
“It failed to acknowledge any need to change course but simply committed itself to double down on the plan, whilst haemorrhaging votes to the parties of our left and right."
"Ultimately, we must be more confident in our own values, not chased off the pitch by Reform."
Ms Haigh also said voters on the doorstep have told her they feel Labour has turned its back on pensioners and the disabled, over plans to cut the Winter Fuel Payment and disability benefits.
She claimed the only way Labour would be able to hold its "perilous coalition" together is "through an economic reset, through ripping up our selfimposed tax rules and by a serious programme of investment and reindustrialisation".
Her editorial comes six months after she resigned as Secretary of State for Transport over a previous fraud conviction relating to an incorrect statement provided to police over the theft of a work mobile phone.
Ms Haigh was appointed to the role in July 2024, after Labour swept to power with a landslide general election victory.
In a separate interview with The Guardian, Ms Haigh said Labour need to show voters “whose side we’re on.”
“Conflict clarifies whose side you’re on. I think the strategy at the moment that is around delivery, which is necessary, but frankly, not sufficient,” Haigh said.
“What kind of government wouldn’t want to demonstrate delivery for their policy priorities? We need clarifying language, and we need to pick some battles and show by defining those battles whose side we’re on.”
She warned that the party had to stop prioritising Reform-inclined voters at the expense of those on the left, saying Labour won the last election because it held together a broad coalition of voters from left wing progressives to social conservatives by promising change.
“We have an absolute imperative to maintain the balance as we govern. It simply won’t be enough to go back to people at the next general election and ask them to vote for us purely so we can keep the Tories or Reform out,” said Ms Haigh.
She also suggested chancellor Rachel Reeves putting up taxes, in a bid to meet her fiscal rules and avoid more unpopular spending cuts, is an “inevitability.”