'Changing PM without changing policy isn’t going to do anything', Barnsley leader says as Labour face losses
“It’s the toughest I’ve ever seen it”
The leader of Barnsley Council has said the Government needs to start listening to northern voices as Labour prepare for defeat.
Sir Stephen Houghton has accepted that by the end of the day, he will be in opposition.
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He said the day has been incredibly difficult already, as Labour have maintained a handful of seats but are preparing to lose many more to Reform UK.
Sir Stephen Houghton said the Government needs to listen to regional leaders when assessing future economic plans, as he described a 'national tsunami of discontent' led to major Labour losses in Barnsley.
“It’s the toughest I’ve ever seen it,” he told The Star.
“We’ve had some difficult ones in the past, no getting away from it, but this has been really really challenging.
“And the hardest part has been [that] it’s not been about Barnsley, it’s been about the national government and we’ve been fighting that battle to try and say to people ‘judge us on our record in Barnsley’.
“Sadly many of them have been judging us on our colleagues down in Westminster and what they’ve been doing.”
Sir Houghton has been leader of Barnsley Council for around three decades, and is facing a major change when he returns to the town hall on Monday.
But he believes that this local election has been a ‘referendum on Keir Starmer’, and says that in future the government need to pay attention to what local communities are saying.
Sir Stephen Houghton hugged his fellow Labour candidates after he held his seat in the Cudworth Ward.
“Changing Prime Minister without changing policy isn’t going to do anything, you’ll just have another unpopular Prime Minister in 12 months time,” he added.
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When asked what the government needs to do moving forward, he said: “It gets people like me and other leaders or former leaders in some of those northern towns and other places and try to understand from us what the scale of that challenge is and come up with a new economic plan for those left behind places.
“Too many of those places have suffered 30 years of economic decline.
“It didn’t happen to us in Barnsley because we grabbed that agenda and changed it, unfortunately this national tsunami of discontent got us here.”