Keir Starmer has accused Reform UK of “fawning over Putin” as the prime minister used the launch of Labour’s local election campaign to attack Nigel Farage repeatedly over his past comments about the Russian leader.

With Labour viewing Reform as potentially its greatest rival in next month’s elections, Starmer devoted more time to attacking the rightwing populist party than criticising the Conservatives.

Labour chose an area of Derbyshire with a reputation for having the worst pothole problem in England as the location for the launch, in which Starmer accused the Conservative-controlled Derbyshire county council of being responsible for the poor state of the roads and anti-social behaviour. The council is a key Labour target.

However, the prime minister devoted most of his political attack lines to Reform, zeroing in on a number of areas on which Labour hopes Farage’s party is particularly vulnerable. These included the NHS, workers’ rights and national security. Polling and focus groups show the British public is firmly pro-Ukraine and against Vladimir Putin.

Referring to Reform’s internal war involving Farage and the MP Rupert Lowe, Starmer said the party “says it wants to run the country” but “can’t even run itself”.

Turning to the voting record of Reform MPs, he said: “They talk the language of workers’ rights. They talk it all right online, sometimes on the doorstep. But what did they do? They voted against banning fire-and-rehire, they voted against scrapping exploitative zero-hours contracts, they voted against sick leave and maternity pay.

“And what about the NHS? They want to charge people for using our NHS.”

In a line that Starmer repeated a number of times at the event, he added: “They claim to be the party of patriotism. I’ll tell you this, there’s nothing patriotic about fawning over Putin.”

The Reform leader appears to have become more critical of Russia in recent years but Labour is eager to seize on how Farage has often still appeared to be less hostile to Putin than many of his political opponents.

Farage made 17 appearances on the Russian state-funded RT between 2010 and 2014, and while he was an MEP for Ukip and the Brexit party his parties several times aligned with hard-right parties in the European parliament to vote against EU motions critical of Russia.