Whether under Starmer’s leadership or someone else’s, Labour is likely to move even further to the left.
Britain’s First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) voting system means that smaller/newer parties can find it easier to pile up votes than to win seats. In Britain’s 2024 general election, Nigel Farage’s populist-right Reform UK secured some 14.3 percent of the votes, but less than 1 percent of the House of Commons. Reform’s problem was that it had plenty of supporters spread across England (not so many elsewhere in the U.K.) but only very rarely were they concentrated enough (or organized enough) in a particular constituency for Reform to prevail.
Contrary to widespread assumptions/hopes in Britain’s establishment, 2024 did not represent some sort of peak for Reform, which has benefited from the failures of Labour in government and of the Conservatives in opposition.
Back in office, Labour has combined incompetence with vindictiveness. And with the country on the brink of adding a financial crisis to the increasingly toxic woes that mass immigration has left in its wake, it has sunk badly in the polls. This is not something it could afford to do. Thanks to FPTP, Labour enjoys an overwhelming majority in parliament. But this was on the back of only 34 percent of the vote, the lowest share enjoyed by a general election victor in the postwar era, reduced by inroads made by the Greens, a sectarian Islamist grouping, and apathy. The result was that Labour did not have much of a bulwark if sentiment turned against it, as it quickly did.
After a slow start, the new Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has begun to raise her game, but the Conservatives have a long, long way to go to extinguish memories of the failures of their period in office. The suspicion remains, not without justification, that too much of the parliamentary party, perhaps the Tories’ weakest link, remains, at “best” Merkelite. That is no way to consign memories of above all Boris Johnson and Theresa May to the past, where they need to be sent if there is to be a Conservative government again.
There is a limit to how much can be extrapolated nationally from a set of local elections, not least because they do not cover the whole country at any one time. This is particularly so at this stage in this parliament’s life (there does not have to be an election until 2029). Typically, local elections have been a good opportunity to cast a protest vote. Turnout is lower, and local elections’ granularity—all those little districts—goes some way to offsetting the FPTP effect seen in a national election.
Nevertheless, while the full results have yet to come in, it’s clear that Reform enjoyed a spectacular result, although arguably not so spectacular as last year. On the basis of what we know about these elections so far, Reform is on a course that would leave them as the largest party in parliament after 2029. For a majority it would need the help of the Tories, who once again performed poorly, but can cling to one or two good results as evidence that they can survive.
Reform’s (relative) success in Scotland helps underpin its claim to be the Conservatives’ successor as the standard-bearer of the right, as does its impressive performance in Wales. Whether either the Tories or Reform would agree to a deal ahead of an election is a question for another year, as is so much else. Squeezing what will be a multi-party contest into a structure traditionally based on — with regional exceptions — a duopoly makes forecasting difficult. Lowering the voting age to 16, as Labour cynically plans to do, will add another twist. And 2029 is a long time away.
Elsewhere on the political spectrum, the Greens, now mutating Greta Thunberg–style into a party of the radical omni-cause with a strong Islamist strain, made enough headway (if less than expected) to keep Labour eyeing both its left flank and its fraying support among Muslim voters. The faux centrist Liberal Democrats did respectably, benefitting in part (and again) from the support from the sort of leftish former Tories who did so much to wreck the Conservative party.
Labour’s defeat by nationalists (and Reform) in Wales was one of countless humiliations. The question for the party now is what next? Labour has no reason to call a national election, and so it will not. It seems as if Keir Starmer will try to persuade his party to stick by him. Let’s see how that goes.
Whether under his leadership or someone else’s, Labour is likely to move even further to the left, increasing the chances of a financial crunch sooner rather than later. Let’s see how that goes.