Last week’s local and regional elections across much of the United Kingdom — inevitably described as the “British midterms,” although the parallel is imprecise — delivered a world of hurt to Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the Labour Party, less than two years after they won a supposed landslide victory in the last national election. Labour lost nearly 1,200 seats across England’s chaotic mixture of county councils, municipal boroughs and metropolitan districts, and also suffered punishing defeats in regional parliamentary elections in Scotland and Wales. (That reversal was especially dramatic in the latter case; more on that below.)
This was a shock to the system, but not exactly a huge surprise. It was widely understood that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party — a shambolic right-wing populist movement with Trumpian overtones that barely existed five years ago — would score big wins this year, at the expense of both Labour and the center-right Conservatives (better known as the Tories). That’s certainly what happened, and Reform will end up as the largest party in local government by far, after winning roughly 1,400 seats. But it’s not the only thing that happened.
The Tories lost nearly as badly as Labour did, while the centrist Liberal Democrats continued their relentlessly boring climb and will now hold the third-largest seat total in local government. Arguably this election’s most surprising turn of events — and perhaps the most hopeful, depending on your point of view — was the sudden emergence of the Green Party as a potentially viable left-wing alternative. After a gain of 376 seats, nearly all of them at Labour’s expense, the Greens are players on the U.K.’s political map for the first time. Their role in the larger political ecosystem, furthermore, strongly resembles that of the Bernie/AOC faction within the Democratic Party.
You could even argue that Reform didn’t do quite as well is it hoped to, since the insurgent far-right party’s vote share was down slightly from last year’s local elections. (Only the Greens and the Tories saw their shares of the national vote total increase — in the latter case, recovering slightly from an all-time low.) In short, this election was a massive mess of mixed signals, but one that shattered Britain’s two-party political system, probably for good, and raised a series of unanswerable questions about the future of liberal democracy, not just in the U.K. but everywhere. In the same week when fans of centrist, consensus-based political normalcy celebrated the inauguration of Péter Magyar in Hungary, following his decisive victory over Viktor Orbán, embittered voters in the world’s most venerable democracy chucked all semblance of normalcy overboard.
Another reason this outcome was no surprise is because Starmer’s brief tenure at 10 Downing Street has been an unmitigated disaster by almost any standard. He is often compared to Joe Biden, in the sense that he’s a well-intentioned transitional figure battling the onrushing tide at the edge of a political abyss. But in many ways the comparison is unfair — to Biden, that is, whose administration accomplished a great deal in a short time despite its abysmal communications skills. I’m not sure Starmer’s closest advisers, or his wife, could tell you what his core principles are or why they’ve led to so much indecision, muddled or mismanaged policy and low-grade scandal.
In the same week when fans of centrist liberal democracy celebrated the inauguration of Péter Magyar in Hungary, angry voters in the world’s most venerable democracy chucked all semblance of normalcy overboard.
There are lessons for American politics in what just happened across the pond, I suspect, even beyond the unfortunate resemblance between Labour and the Democrats as diverse center-left parties that can’t figure out whom they represent or what they stand for. But it might take some time to decode them. While the circumstances are quite different in the two nation-states that most enjoy lecturing others about democracy, and the long-running parallel between them has gotten slightly out of sync, both are undeniably in crisis: Is Britain now experiencing its MAGA comeback several years late, or experiencing the final implosion of liberal democracy a few years early? Time will tell.
In both countries, the fundamentally undemocratic or anti-democratic nature of the political system has been exposed, with increasingly dire consequences. America has relentless gerrymandering and the Electoral College; Britain has “first past the post” elections that deliberately distort outcomes to create imaginary majorities. (Consider the astonishing fact that in 2024 Labour won nearly two-thirds of the seats in Parliament on just over one-third of the national vote.)
If the two-party system hard-wired into American politics now seems to have been demolished in Britain, below the surface similar dynamics are at work: Mainstream political figures of the center-right and center-left have been banished, conquered or overthrown, or at least have lost much of their legitimacy. (I’m old enough to remember when people actually liked Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.)
If all politics is local, as the old truism holds, political conflict in both the U.S. and U.K. has increasingly become a form of regional warfare. “Red” and “blue” states frantically redistrict themselves into political monoliths, and no presidential candidate from either party bothers to campaign in Texas or California. In Britain, each of the five mini-major parties visible on this week’s electoral map has a distinct geographical and cultural identity. It’s only stretching the point slightly to say that Labour is now the party for middle-class, multiracial Londoners, the Tories are for rich people in the leafy southern suburbs and Reform is for disgruntled older white folks across Middle England. (I’m genuinely not sure who the Lib Dems are for — the Brit equivalent of Pete Buttigieg voters?)
As expected, the Scottish National Party retained control of Scotland’s regional parliament, and given the chaos in London it’s likely to push for another referendum on independence. (The first one failed in 2014.) But what happened in Wales amounted to a political earthquake: Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, won control of the Cardiff legislature known as the Senedd for the first time, ending a century of uninterrupted Labour dominance. With Sinn Féin, the party formerly associated with the IRA’s guerrilla war, already in power in Northern Ireland and eager to push for Irish reunification, an unprecedented trifecta of “Celtic nationalism” is in place. No one thinks the long-threatened breakup of the United Kingdom will happen next year or the year after that, but it now looms as a genuine possibility.
Keir Starmer probably won’t be forced from power in the near future, mostly because no viable replacement with a lick of sense would want his job.
If the Labour Party is up the creek without a paddle after last week, to revert to Yank lingo, it also finds itself in an anomalous position. Starmer faces widespread internal discontent bordering on open rebellion, especially among the not-entirely-purged Labour left, which has disliked him since he drove out former leader Jeremy Corbyn in 2020. But he probably won’t be forced from power in the near future, mostly because no viable replacement with a lick of sense would want his job. Becoming Labour leader now — which, under Britain’s parliamentary system, also means becoming prime minister — would amount to drinking from the proverbial poisoned chalice.
Labour and the Tories, the only two parties to have held government power in Westminster since 1922, are now roughly tied for third place, at best, in most public opinion polls. But Labour still holds a commanding majority in the House of Commons, and Kemi Badenoch’s diminished band of Conservatives still sit across from them as His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Both are no doubt grateful that the next national election doesn’t have to happen before the summer of 2029. (The prime minister is free to call an election whenever he wants, but he certainly doesn’t want one anytime soon.) Labour insiders and Starmer loyalists appear to believe, or at least hope, that if they close their eyes and hold on for dear life, something will happen by then to defuse the national mood of anti-government rage, anti-immigrant hostility and overall unhappiness.
That may explain Starmer’s insistence this weekend that he has no intention of quitting, even with members of his own party lining up to call him out. “This electoral disaster seems existential for Labour,” said MP Apsana Begum, “yet it appears even now that some don’t want to admit what’s wrong.” Sharon Graham, leader of one of Britain’s biggest unions, struck a similar note, saying this election “could be the beginning of the end for the party itself. The working class have been abandoned and have delivered their verdict.”
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At least so far, Starmer isn’t having it. “I’m not going to walk away from this,” he said on Saturday. “That would plunge the country into chaos.”
That’s a genuinely hilarious response, although I don’t imagine many British listeners were laughing. Americans may be reminded, in trigger-warning fashion, of Democratic assurances, circa 2020, that Donald Trump and the “MAGA Republicans” were a transitory phenomenon and would soon be gone forever.
Like Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer and so many others before him, Starmer has the willful blindness of the harbor official in every Godzilla movie who refuses to admit that a giant lizard is coming to destroy the city, even as he sees it emerging from the waves. To resort to another Americanism, if this ain’t chaos, Prime Minister, it’ll do till the real chaos gets here.
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from Andrew O’Hehir
