What does Reform UK's council by-election win in Stoke-on-Trent mean for politics in the city?
Stoke-on-Trent has its first Reform UK councillor following Luke Shenton's victory in the Birches Head and Northwood by-election.
Nigel Farage's party has now secured a beachhead on Stoke-on-Trent City Council, which they will be hoping to build on in future elections.
The seat was previously won by Labour in the 2023 council elections, with the result showing a major swing to Reform.
While it would be wrong to read too much into a single by-election result, Cllr Shenton's win can clearly be seen as part of a pattern.
Just two weeks ago Reform won an historic landslide victory in the Staffordshire County Council elections, taking 49 out of 62 seat.
Labour councillors, who have been in control of the city council since 2023, are rightly concerned that something similar could happen in Stoke-on-Trent.
While most of the headlines following the Staffordshire elections focused on Reform utterly smashing the Conservatives' grip on the county council, it must be remembered that they also gained four seats from Labour, reducing them to a single representative on the authority.
And the scale of Cllr Shenton's win in Birches Head and Northwood, with 59 per cent of the vote on a relatively high turnout, suggests the Reform surge is as real in Stoke-on-Trent as it is in Staffordshire.
But this is far from the first time that Labour's grip on power in Stoke-on-Trent has been threatened by parties and politicians from outside the mainstream.
In 2002, Labour lost its majority on the city council for the first time in decades when 23 independents were elected, with independent candidate Mike Wolfe becoming Stoke-on-Trent's first elected mayor later that year.
The BNP won its first council seat in Stoke-on-Trent in 2003, and by 2008 the far right party had nine city councillors and looked poised to win the next mayoral election.
As it happened, the deeply unpopular mayoralty was abolished in 2009, and the BNP's star rapidly faded soon after. In the 2011 council elections they were completely wiped out in Stoke-on-Trent, with Labour regaining a majority.
But many voters in Stoke-on-Trent had clearly got into the habit of voting against Labour. The City Independents gained enough seats from Labour in 2015 to be able to form a ruling coalition with the Conservatives.
The City Independents came into power proposing to do things differently to the mainstream parties, who they claimed did not have Stoke-on-Trent's interests at heart.
But being in power and part of a coalition necessarily meant making compromises, something that clearly irked some of the group's members. It also came at a time when the anti-Labour vote in Stoke-on-Trent was coalescing behind the Tories.
These factors culminated in 2020 when a number of City Independent councillors, including deputy council leader Ann James, voted against their coalition's own budget.
Following several defections, the Tories were subsequently able to eject the City Independents from their partnership and run the council on their own as a minority administration.
In the 2023 local elections, as Labour swept back into power, the City Independents were reduced to just one councillor, and it appeared that traditional two-party politics had returned to Stoke-on-Trent. But just two years later, that that is clearly no longer the case.
The rise of non-mainstream parties in Stoke-on-Trent, both in the early 2000s and now, has coincided with Labour being in power nationally. At the moment, the anti-Labour vote in the city is all the stronger due to the widespread discontent with Keir Starmer's government.
The Conservatives also remain unpopular across the country, as demonstrated by the county council elections, leaving the door wide open for a party like Reform.
Unless the economic situation improves or Labour does something else to make voters start to feel better about the status quo, it seems likely that Reform's success will continue into the next scheduled city council elections in 2027.
Perhaps the only thing that will prevent Reform taking over the city council is the possibility that the city council may no longer exist in a few years' time. Local government reorganisation could see the creation of a new North Staffordshire unitary authority – which could affect the 2027 elections.
But whenever the next elections take place in Stoke-on-Trent, and whatever council exists, on their current trajectory it seems certain that Reform will be a force to be reckoned with.
It remains to be seen if Reform's rise will end like previous anti-mainstream surges have done, or whether this signals a permanent shift in Stoke-on-Trent politics.
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