The Real Story of the UK Local Elections

Thursday was the death of the two-party system and the birth of multiparty Britain.

Now that the dust has finally settled on Thursday’s local elections, a clearer picture is emerging of a political landscape caught in the flux of sizeable changes. The story of these locals may perhaps be the emergence of a truly multi-party Britain, as Labour and the Conservatives saw key battlegrounds slip from their grasp to insurgents on their right (Reform) and left (Greens and Independents).

While many, myself included, expected a large realignment given how increasingly unpopular the two establishment parties have become in recent months, not even the most sanguine could have predicted the sheer scale of the collapse that unfolded last Thursday. It wasn’t a light tremor, it was a seismic shift in the tectonic plates of British politics, breaking decades of entrenched loyalty for the two-party duopoly. The Conservatives lost more than half their seats while Labour recorded losses almost everywhere from an already pathetic starting position. Combined, the two main parties accounted for 35% of the popular vote, the lowest total for a local election in recorded history.

The establishment parties are firmly in retreat. None of this is new. We saw it in 2016, when the UK voted for Brexit and again in 2019 when voters used the perceived irrelevance of the EU elections to voice their disdain. Terminally complacent liberals mischaracterised these events as electoral accidents, the result of biased media reporting, or worse, of Russian intervention. There is always a story that politicians can tell themselves to avoid having to solve the problem. The surest sign of political decline is an obsession with who is to blame: as opposed to what needs to be done.

I’ve seen many commentators make the naive assumption that Reform is merely UKIP 2.0, that is to say, a protest party that will make a big scene on the political stage, make some grandstanding statements and then fizzle out just as quickly as it rose to power. But that would be a fundamental misunderstanding of the moment we are living through. UKIP was a spasm of anger, a blind rebuke of the establishment that lacked direction, discipline and organisation. Once its animating purpose had been achieved, it collapsed overnight. It was a structure built on tenuous foundations, a means to an end. Reform is a different beast entirely. It is a much more coherent movement, with defined parameters and a clear sense of purpose. It doesn’t just stand against immigration; it is a rejection of lenient judiciary sentences given to criminals, net-zero energy policies that defile the unique identity of quaint English villages, identity politics that seek to humiliate the English people, suffocating-high taxation, bloated bureaucracy and the establishment in general.

The moderate centre-right party used to be the big beast of politics. It was the party of small businesses and farmers, the party of small towns and villages, and affluent suburbia. Across the West, it was the champion of globalisation, free movement of capital, goods and people. It was the party of the Transatlantic Alliance. No longer. Last Thursday, the centre-right represented in Britain by the Conservatives suffered an electoral bloodbath in the local elections at the hands of Nigel Farage’s Right-wing Reform party.

When the Conservatives lost in 1997 to Tony Blair, they spent the next 13 years in the political wilderness, which gave them plenty of time for soul-searching. The reason they settled on for their failure was down to voters growing fatigued with a party that had held power uninterrupted since 1979. This time, there’s a feeling of betrayal, which Conservative MPs will find out is a much more powerful emotion than fatigue to overcome. When the voters’ faith in a political party is broken and an alternative willing to deliver on that broken promise presents itself, voters will flock to that alternative and once the exodus starts, it’s almost impossible to stop, let alone reverse.

Thursday’s election results made one thing abundantly clear: the Tories are a stinking, bloated carcass that will surely decompose over the coming years. Sure, perhaps someone like Jenrick can still swoop in and stem the bleeding, but any chances of restoring the party to its once dominant role in British politics is naivety bordering on delusion. Why would any conservative vote for the party of mass immigration, high taxes and high crime rates when there is another vessel to choose from? Those that are appalled by the inflammatory rhetoric and questionable closeness to Putin from Farage have a home in the now-recovering Liberal Democrats. The niche occupied by the Conservative Party in British politics is shrinking and soon there might not be any room left.

Probably the single biggest big mistake made by the centre-right was the failure to address the downsides of globalisation when voters stopped believing in that win-win fairy tale. The current system works well for those working in the service sectors of global cities, or in Silicon Valley. It also works for people who work in lithium mines or have manual skills that are currently high in demand. But it does not work for Ohio or Michigan; for Yorkshire or Lincolnshire; or Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia.

Britain attempted to disconnect itself from the current system with Brexit. But to work, that would have required a different economic model. The Conservatives did not deliver a new model. Labour isn’t either. The difference between the centre-left and the centre-right in the UK boils down to relatively minor shifts between spending and taxation, but there is no fundamental disagreement about the model.

While the inner workings of Durham county council might seem insignificant when compared to the tumultous tsunami raging across the world, its divorce from the Labour Party which once dominated its halls is a monumental paradigm shift in the dynamics of British politics. The two parties no longer seem invincible. FPTP, which once secured their dominance, is now their undoing. For the first time, other parties seem viable. Once that taboo is broken, once voters realise that other choices are available to them, its very difficult for them to return to their old voting habits.

If Labour does indeed pivot to the right, as party insiders seem to think it will to compete with Farage, then it may find itself vacating space to its left that can be filled by the Greens - who, if Zack Polanski is successful in his leadership bid, may challenge them with an eco-populist message. Or perhaps even by socialist-sympathetic independents, who are already finding strength through minority groups in inner cities to voice their grievances.

Within the coming years, it is possible that the British political landscape will look more like a mosaic, dozens of smaller parties representing incredibly niche grievances, fighting over consistencies and winning with offensively small majorities. FPTP strained to its limits. An ungovernable island.