The South East woke up on Friday to a political map almost unrecognisable from the one Brighton has lived inside for the past two decades. The Conservatives have lost control of West Sussex County Council. Reform UK is now the largest party on East Sussex County Council, though short of a majority. The Greens have taken outright control of Hastings Borough Council. Labour held Crawley and Adur but lost Worthing. The Liberal Democrats held Tunbridge Wells and are positioned to run both new Surrey unitaries from next year.
Brighton and Hove did not vote on Thursday. The city’s next full council election is on 6 May 2027. But the political climate that election will be fought in has just shifted decisively — and not in favour of Bella Sankey’s Labour administration.
A Sussex broken into four colours
West Sussex moves to no overall control after a generation of unbroken Conservative rule — a result that has more in common with a rural English realignment than with anything Brighton voters typically pay attention to. East Sussex tells a different story: a Reform UK surge in coastal and inland market towns has displaced the Tories as the dominant force without producing a working majority. Hastings is the standout for the left-of-centre vote — an outright Green majority on a borough council is rare, and it gives the party its first sustained executive platform in the South East outside Brighton Pavilion.
Labour’s Brighton problem just got harder
Brighton and Hove City Council is run by Labour with a 38-seat majority won in May 2023. That majority is currently among the largest of any Labour administration in the country and was secured against a Green incumbency the party had spent years dismantling. Two years in, the political weather has turned. National polling has Labour bleeding to Reform on the right and to the Greens on the left simultaneously — the same pincer that delivered Hastings to the Greens and Worthing to no overall control on Thursday.
Sankey’s group has spent the past year managing exactly the kind of unpopular decisions — school closures, library reductions, the long-running aftermath of the i360 collapse — that mid-term Labour councils elsewhere are now being punished for at the ballot box. Brighton voters have proved willing to switch decisively before. They will likely do so again.
The Green opportunity
The Hastings result is the one Brighton’s Greens will study most closely. The party already holds Brighton Pavilion at Westminster through Siân Berry and retains seven seats at City Hall. A combined narrative of competent Green administration up the coast and a national Labour government losing altitude is, for Pavilion-leaning wards, the most coherent pitch the Greens have had since 2015. Hastings gives them a working case study to point at.
Reform’s coastal beachhead
Reform’s emergence as the largest single party on East Sussex County Council is the more uncomfortable development for the city’s two Labour MPs, Chris Ward in Kemptown and Peter Kyle in Hove. Reform has historically struggled to make headway in central Brighton, where the demographic and cultural profile is hostile. The outer wards — Rottingdean, Woodingdean, Hangleton — are a different proposition, and the Sussex-wide vote share now sets a baseline Reform will try to convert at the city level in 2027 and at the Sussex Mayoral election in May 2028.
Goldsmid is the first test
Before any of this plays out at scale, Brighton has a Goldsmid ward by-election on 25 June. Goldsmid is a Labour-held ward in a part of Hove where Lib Dem and Green challenges have historically been competitive. With turnout likely low and the political atmosphere febrile, the result will be over-interpreted in every direction. Labour will need to defend it firmly to insulate against the narrative that the Sussex pattern has reached the city limits.
The Sussex of 2027 will be a four-party contest. Brighton’s 2027 election now sits at the centre of it.
Related Reading
- The Bella Sankey Administration Two Years In: A Brighton Journal Review
- Goldsmid By-Election: The Brighton Vote That Could Reshape City Hall
- The Sussex Mayor Race: Everything Brighton Needs to Know Before 2028
