British politics has been transformed, but not by last week’s elections and their rout of Labour. The political fragmentation manifest in the 2024 general election, which propelled Labour to its “landslide” win, was only the harbinger of what has come.
Keir Starmer’s victory then was enabled by the country’s dysfunctional electoral system, which continued to protect the old duopoly. Labour won a massive parliamentary majority on only one third of the vote. Nigel Farage made it into the Commons for the first time but with only five seats, muttering about the need for electoral reform.
But the danger signs were there. Small swings under “first past the post” (FPTP) can result in massive, unpredictable swings in seats and wildly unrepresentative results. So Reform, whose national vote share has been extrapolated to 26 per cent (up from 14 per cent in 2024), is now able to present itself as a credible alternative government. Farage, crossing an invisible FPTP threshold and winning over 1,200 council seats, is, unsurprisingly, no longer demanding electoral reform.
Extrapolating to national elections is, however, a risky business. One respected pollster suggests Reform may in fact have peaked and its route to power now depends on building bridges with the depleted Tories.
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Labour suffered heavily across England, losing ground to left and right for its worst local election on record. With rumblings of an internal challenge over the weekend, Starmer’s fate hangs in the balance.
Just as significantly, Wales and Scotland are to be ruled by nationalist parties, with Plaid Cymru displacing Labour completely and the Scottish National Party shaking off the usual incumbency penalty to retain power for a fifth term in Edinburgh.
What is far from clear is whether the new order is permanent. It is likely that in a general election FPTP and its brutal logic will reassert themselves, driving the multiplicity of parties back into two main alliances, a warring duopoly revived.
