Every day, millions of people endure the agonising consequences of the social care crisis.
After years of cuts and privatisation, our understaffed, overworked and unaffordable care system is leaving the elderly, sick and disabled without the vital support they need. Vast numbers of unpaid carers — predominantly women — end up filling the gap, sacrificing their careers and income to provide round-the-clock care.
In April 2025, Tower Hamlets Council did something that the UK government has refused to do: provide free, universal homecare for older and disabled residents. This rollout has helped people like Sam, whose wife had been providing him with full-time care after he suffered a stroke 15 years ago.
Supporting 1,300 residents in need, Tower Hamlets Council is financing the scheme by redistributing funds from wealthy parts of the borough like Canary Wharf.
Tower Hamlets Council is run by Lutfur Rahman’s ‘Aspire’, which defeated the incumbent Labour council in 2022. It is just one flank of a wider rebellion against the Labour machine building through local government.
Redbridge Independents have won a series of stunning by-elections from Labour. Last year, the Newham Independents Party achieved a crushing victory to win the Plaistow South seat on Newham Council.
These groups represent a growing and diverse movement, united in a belief that local councils exist to protect public services and support the most vulnerable in our society.
Of course, we cannot understand the situation facing local councils in isolation from the crises that have been fuelled at a national level. Successive governments have suffocated local councils by imposing austerity and privatisation.
Every library that has been closed, every elderly person left without proper care and every swimming pool with reduced opening hours can be traced back to the political choices of governments to deprive councils of the resources they need. As always, it is the poorest that end up paying the price.
At the same time, we cannot just sit back and accept the inevitability of austerity at a local level. Local councils can choose to bring services in house. They can choose to satisfy local needs over corporate greed.
They can choose to follow the example of Tower Hamlets: rolling out free school meals for all primary and secondary school students, re-establishing the Education Maintenance Allowance cut by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition; and reinstating the Winter Fuel Payment slashed by Labour.
The choices made by local councils matter. Local elections matter. Your vote matters.
Local council divestment from Israeli apartheid will be a core demand in our campaigns
The upcoming local elections come almost two years after Labour was elected on a loveless landslide. Since then, Labour has completely failed to bring about the change it promised: removing disability benefits, betraying the WASPI women, cutting winter fuel and - of course - participating in the genocide against the Palestinian people. Having also spent the past two years fuelling anti-migrant hatred, Labour has energised and mobilised the far-right - and put their votes on a silver platter for Reform.
We are at a critical juncture in British politics - and the local elections mark the beginning of a fightback against austerity, privatisation and fear. At Your Party’s founding conference in November, members voted to adopt a targeted strategy aimed at maximising our impact, including by backing community independents who have been organising in their communities.
From east London to Southport, from the West Midlands to Wakefield, local groups are already organising for an alternative to the despair of Labour and the division of Reform.
Elsewhere, we will be supporting individual candidates - running under the Your Party banner or as independents - who share our socialist, anti-austerity politics. Our candidates will be standing up for their communities in the name of redistribution, inclusion and peace.
In contrast to the snake-oil alternative of Reform, they will be campaigning for socialist policies that can transform people’s lives: free school meals, social housing, and the in-sourcing of public services. And they will be standing fearlessly against this government’s shameful complicity in genocide.
For many in our media, this last demand is difficult to swallow. Gaza is miles away, they say, so why are we talking about it during local elections? For starters, local government pension scheme funds invest more than £12.2 billion in companies complicit in Israel’s grave violations of international law, including in the arms companies that manufacture the bombs and bullets used to murder Palestinians.
That’s why local council divestment from Israeli apartheid will be a core demand in our campaigns. Ultimately, those who try to demean the importance of international solidarity fail to understand something fundamental: we do not want to be represented by people and parties who legitimise apartheid, genocide and inhumanity.
Your Party’s support for community independents is part and parcel of our foundational purpose: to build a new kind of community-based politics that empowers local people to fight for the future they deserve.
Defending a school against closure. Making sure vacant land is turned into a park. Making sure Uber Eats drivers are property paid and unionised. These are the kinds of the campaigns that we need to be fighting all year round - and should be part of the day-to-day operations of a political party built from below.
We are offering something different to the broken Westminster model: a politics rooted in and accountable to our communities, a politics that campaigns for radical change and a politics that has faith in the extraordinary power of ordinary people.
These elections will show what happens when the Left comes together. People in power underestimate the power of people at their peril - and arrogance in office always comes back to bite you in the end.
