There’s a greasy, fluorescent light that hits you the morning after a loss like Runcorn. Labour didn’t just lose a random seat. They got mugged. Six votes. Not six hundred. Not six percent. Six. That’s a single family. A group chat. The amount of work friends that you go to the pub with after a late shift. And they didn’t lose it to the Tories. They lost it to Reform, a Frankenstein outfit cobbled together from the detritus of UKIP, questionable Tories, YouTube nationalists, and WhatsApp conspiracy merchants. The worst part? They out-organised us. They outplayed us.

While Labour stayed clean, stayed polite, and stayed almost invisible online, Reform have been building a content pipeline of rage and identity, direct into the phones of the angry and ignored. It was cheap, fast, and furious – and it worked. The Left can talk all we want about turnout or messaging discipline, but the truth is this: while we were arguing about who gets to speak on behalf of the party, Reform was already speaking to the country. And now they’ve got another parliamentary seat to prove it.

The Left has spent too long trapped in rooms that really don’t matter to anybody normal. North London dining rooms, WhatsApp groups full of staffers, X echo chambers that think quote-tweeting a Tory with a sick burn is political work. But outside those rooms, people are making up their minds without us.

Reform’s got an entire machine geared towards Facebook mums, WhatsApp dads, angry grandads, and alienated young men stuck in a spiral of flat beer, flat wages, and flat expectations. They’re not campaigning in the traditional sense.

They’re branding themselves – as the voice of straight talk, common sense, no-nonsense Britain. And it’s all crap. But it’s crap that sticks.

Labour’s still trying to win hearts with PDFs and infographics. Reform’s winning identity. We’re drafting manifestos. They’re flooding Telegram with red meat. We post a grainy clip of Keir with a hi-vis and a handshake.

The Left has got to stop thinking we’re above this fight. We’re not. We’re in it whether we like it or not. And while we’ve kept ourselves clean, they've been crawling through the pipes, whispering to Britain’s forgotten towns that someone finally sees them, finally hears them – even if it’s through the mouth of a man who once praised Bashar al-Assad.

Yes, that actually happened. Reform’s head of candidate vetting, the person tasked with checking the character and values of the people they put on ballots, said the murderous dicator of Syria was "gentle by nature". They thought that was fine. One of their MPs, before his political career, was jailed for assaulting his then-girlfriend. That’s not just a personnel issue. That’s moral decay. And we let them take Runcorn.

It should never have been close. It should have been a walk for the Labour Party. But while they were tinkering with their message and briefing journalists about factional grievances within the PLP, Reform were riling people up in Facebook comments, slapping their content in front of voters faster than we could draft a press release.

The answer isn’t to retreat into metropolitan focus groups or keep soft-pedalling for fear of offending someone. It’s to turn up and fight. Labour should be sending its backbenchers onto GB News – yes, GB News. Like it or loathe it, that’s where a huge chunk of Britain is getting its news, its outrage and its marching orders.

Reform’s officials are already there, night after night, seeding their poison without any form of consistent pushback from Labour’s MPs. If we’re not in that studio, challenging them, calling out their nonsense, we’re not just absent – we’re irrelevant.

We just need to show up and take them on. Say it plain: we’re angry too, and we’re going to fix the mess, not blame it on people at the bottom.

And the Left needs to get serious about digital. Not just a new Twitter account or a couple more reels on Instagram. We need a machine. A digital strike force with the freedom to be funny, sharp, emotional and direct – not sanitised by four layers of sign-off.

We need clips that travel. Messaging that hits like a punch to the gut. Stuff that makes people stop scrolling and think: “Yeah. That’s what I’ve been feeling.”

If Labour is serious about winning the country back, it has to learn how to fight in the world as it is, not the one we’d prefer to live in. That means tearing down the walls we’ve built around our campaigning.

It means flooding TikTok with soul and fury. It means answering Facebook mums who’ve been sold a lie with something better, something that feels like truth. It means calling Reform what they are: a party laced with dangerous people, rotten to its core, dressed in red, white and blue but stinking of bile and broken promises.

Runcorn is the moment. The line in the tarmac. Lose by six today, and it’s six hundred next time. Six thousand the time after. Until we wake up in a country we don’t recognise, run by people who never deserved power in the first place. The digital war is on. We either fight it like we mean it, or we lose.