On May 7, elections were held in England, Scotland, and Wales. These were for some of the local council spots in England as well as for electing the devolved governments in Scotland and Wales.
Thanks in part to its lack of a written constitution, there is no formal, or judicially-overseen, model of federalism in the UK. Parliamentary sovereignty lies at the heart of the Westminster constitutional model, which means that any powers that Scotland or Wales (or Northern Ireland) exercises, they exercise at the pleasure of the national legislature.
That is not to say that the local elections are without significant national importance. Yes, national elections in Britain are more important: the ones to choose a new government, which must be held at least every five years, but before that, whenever the prime minister chooses. Americans and Canadians can think of the recent May elections, more or less, as the rough equivalent of State or Provincial elections.
So let me begin with England’s local council elections. To start, only some of these council spots were being contested this year. In last year’s similar elections, the governing Labour Party of Prime Minister Keir Starmer had performed poorly. For that reason, under the pretense that the government was reorganizing local councils and that they wanted a delay, the prime minister had tried to stall this May’s elections. But significant political pressure against this would-be assault on democratic decision-making (not least a campaign led by the London Telegraph newspaper and the initiation of judicial review proceedings) saw Starmer and Labour back down. The local council elections went ahead last month. And Labour suffered a historically all-time worst result. Conversely, it was a massive victory for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, a political party only founded five years ago. (Just let that sink in and consider what it tells you about overall voter dissatisfaction with the status quo.)
Reform won an incredible 1,451 English local council seats. The Labour Party, by contrast, suffered by far the biggest losses ever, by any party in local council elections, losing just shy of 1,500 councillors. And the bulk of the damage came in the north of England, with working-class voters deserting Labour in vast droves for Farage’s Reform Party. Indeed, it was such a damaging result that it set the stage for the current chaos in the Labour Party and the attempts by other senior Cabinet Ministers to unseat and replace Keir Starmer as prime minister. Nor did the right-of-centre Conservative Party do well, though it did better than Labour. The UK’s Conservative Party is the world’s oldest continually operating political party and was in power for fourteen consecutive years until July of 2024.
The Reform Party was formed largely because many voters on the right believed the Conservatives—often referred to as the Tories—had governed throughout all that time as “Labour-lite,” continuing to cater to woke and progressive sensibilities, rather than pursuing any actual conservative policies. Think of Reform as the party the New York Times would instinctively label “populist.” The Tories lost 563 council seats, mostly to Reform. Again, a terrible result unless you compare it to how Labour did, which was far worse. A motley collection of other small parties also fared rather well. The lovey-dovey, softer-left Liberal Democrats picked up 155 seats to take their overall tally to 844. The hard left (noticeably to the left of the Labour Party) Green Party picked up 441 council seats, mostly in the university towns and in London. Oddly, this party has abandoned any pretence of being an environmental party and seems now to be devoted to the Palestinian cause. The Green Party leader even said before these English local council elections that Gaza was on the ballot. (To date, the polls in Gaza have yet to report their results.)
The Conservatives are bleeding their conservative voters to Reform and some of their centrist support to the Liberal Democrats. Labour now faces something similar.
As for Scotland and Wales, the Conservative Party did so badly there that it has largely been driven out of these Celtic parts of the United Kingdom. Consider that the official name of the Tories is the “Conservative and Unionist Party”—a signal of its historic support for the Union of England with Wales and Scotland—and you will understand the joke doing the rounds that the Tory party had better be leery of any “truth in advertising” lawsuits. The simple fact is that Reform is now the right-of-centre unionist (or “opposed to separation and independence”) party in Scotland and Wales.
What then of Labour? These Celtic hinterlands have for some time now been a core and reliable voting bloc for Labour. Yet in these May elections, and for the first time in the history of devolved Welsh governments, Labour lost power. The separatists who want independence for Wales won 43 of the 96 seats on offer, more than any other party. Reform came next with 34 seats. In Scotland, the separatists, who were already in power, also won. But they lost their majority, again, largely because of Reform.
On all fronts, therefore, this May 7 election delivered massive wins for the Reform Party. Nigel Farage is now the clear favourite to become the next prime minister of Britain. Meantime, Labour joins the Tories in facing an existential crisis. Both of the two long-established parties that have ruled the UK for over a century between them are being attacked on both flanks. The Conservatives are bleeding their conservative voters to Reform and some of their centrist support to the Liberal Democrats. Labour now faces something similar.
At the last national general election in 2024, Labour won a sweeping victory, in large part by winning virtually the entire north-east working-class vote. Myriad Labour MPs hold seats there. Now, though, Reform is obliterating Labour in these working-class areas as voters have moved en masse to Reform, shunning the human rights lawyer types seemingly in charge of Starmer’s government. If Labour refuses to curb immigration numbers massively, to stop the Net Zero puritanism, and to end its support for the transgender lobby and identity politics in general, then it is clear that almost all those northern English seats will go at the next general election. At the same time, down in the south of England, Labour is losing to the socialist, pro-Gaza Greens from the other side of the spectrum. Like the Tories, Labour are wedged: they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. It is not too fanciful to think that one or both of these political parties could cease to be important players within the next decade or two.
In that sense, the political architecture of the United Kingdom differs from that of the United States. Think of it this way. In a Westminster parliamentary set-up, there is next to no scope for an insurgent candidate to challenge for the leadership of one of the main established parties. And even if he or she somehow wins, there would be no scope to remake the party in his own image, a la Mr. Trump. That particular playbook really does not exist in parliamentary systems. What can happen, though it was long judged to be a once-in-a-century type of event, is that a new political party can be formed and can become so successful that it pushes out one of the main long-standing parties. This happened over a century ago in Britain when the Labour Party was born and then pushed out the Liberal Party of Gladstone, Asquith, and Lloyd George to become the main party of the left.
We all may be seeing it again soon in Britain with the spectacular rise of Farage’s Reform Party. Offering up a menu Americans will readily recognise, Reform wants big limits on inward immigration and the enforcement of existing immigration laws. Yet it is more pro-free speech than either Labour or the Tories (meaning the Tories in their recent fourteen years in office, not what they are now mouthing). Reform shuns hard-line Thatcherite economics. And it is very much opposed to DEI and the transgender lobby. That combination right now in Britain looks to be electoral gold. Indeed, in just the last half year, something similar can now be said of Australia, where a Farage-like party has come from nowhere to lead the polls. Interesting times.
Do political parties centrally focused on free markets have much of a future in Britain, or indeed anywhere in the Anglosphere? In the short term, at least, the answer seems to be “no.” A half-century ago there was a shared set of cultural assumptions under which debates about comparative advantage and economic efficiency could take centre stage. When the shared culture is seen to be under attack, directly in schools and universities or indirectly through mass-scale, non-selective immigration that shuns assimilation attempts, voters on both sides focus on that. It is hard to debate the benefits of small government, or merit-based hiring and incentives, if students are taught to believe that all outcomes are the result of power relations and oppression and privilege. Or that subjective feelings should trump truth claims about the world. In Britain and Australia, political parties that have come from nowhere are responding to what concerns the voters and are leading in the polls. That is how democracy is supposed to work, of course.