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The sweeping successes of Reform UK in the local elections mark a dangerous new stage in the decade-long struggle since Brexit in 2016, between those offering snake-oil remedies for Britain’s troubles and those – notably Sir Keir Starmer and Labour – who timidly and ineffectually tinker with a failing system.
The outcome of these elections is an ominous pointer towards a fragmented and divisive future for Britain. But the result is not an immediate change in the balance of power between parties. Britain’s grotesque administrative over-centralisation in the hands of the Treasury means that local authorities, desperately short of money and collectively owing some £122bn, have little real authority, whichever party controls them.
The elections just past are more like an opinion poll made flesh, with real people voting rather than telling their preferences to pollsters. Comparisons are made with the US midterm elections in November, but the outcome of these, such as the Democrats winning a majority in the House of Representatives, has a real impact on who holds power in Washington.
The Reform landslide, and the strong showing by the Green Party of England and Wales in votes if not in council seats, may be viewed by political scientists of the future as a decisive and irreversible transformation of the British political landscape.
But these changes are still in the making, as the old two-party politics is replaced by five-party politics which probably means a coalition before or after the next general election. What might be the relationship between Reform, Conservatives, Labour, Greens and Lib Dems, and will progressives and conservatives coalesce behind the candidate and party most likely to win in different parts of the country?
The election results are more like the snapshot of a horse race still under way, with the finishing post the next general election, still three years off. During this period, a Labour Government which has just suffered crippling defeats in every electoral battleground will cling to power but most likely be wracked by internal struggles for the leadership.
The 10-year-old British political crisis which began with the Brexit referendum will intensify. Apocalyptic expectations are not purely the stuff of nightmares, because exaggerated talk of “Broken Britain” is self-fulfilling. Reform and the Conservatives will indulge in threat-inflation against migrants and minorities, just as President Donald Trump used disaster-mongering to twice persuade American voters to put him into the White House. The playbook of nativist populist demagogues worldwide is to pose as saviour of the nation, rescuing it from ruin and betrayal.
Much about the consequences of Labour’s historic defeat is still in the future, but the verdict on Starmer and his two years in office is decidedly in. Evidence of his personal and political flaws, notably poor judgement about people and policies, combines with a track record of blaming and sacking others for his own mistakes. In an era when political leaders are either the focus of a worshipping personality cult or become a much despised national scapegoat, there was never much doubt about which category voters believed Starmer belonged to.
On becoming prime minister, he rejected the idea that there might be anything in the nature of “Starmer-ism”, an attitude that turned out to be less a sign of personal modesty and more a belief that nothing much needed to change. This conservatism is attributed to Starmer alone, but it accurately reflects the long-held policies of the right wing of the Labour Party, dating back decades.
These include keeping close to America and Israel, opposing Moscow vigorously, staying friendly with big business, and battling the left-wing radicalism within the party. Though Starmer was swept into office by the anti-Tory landslide in 2024 under the slogan “Change”, he intended no such thing. He apparently believed that all Britain needed was to avoid the comic opera absurdities of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss and all would come right.
Such acceptance of the social and economic status quo was very much against the zeitgeist of the post-Brexit era. Nigel Farage might be selling snake oil, but he is at least selling something, while the Government is directionless. The Brexit referendum had shown that a narrow majority rejected the status quo for a diversity of contradictory reasons – and these motives had not disappeared a decade later.
The Starmer Government was pre-programmed to disappoint but it also suffered from an electoral death wish, making elementary mistakes in tactics and strategy. Starmer had won the Labour leadership in 2020 on a platform not so different from that of Jeremy Corbyn, the previous Labour leader, but, on taking over, he had promptly purged the Corbynites from the party with the enthusiasm of an East European communist party in the 1950s purging “anti-party elements”. Tony Blair had never done this at the height of New Labour, for the good reason that the party was always a coalition of factions from right to left who jostled uneasily together.
Led by Morgan McSweeney, until recently Starmer’s chief of staff, this faction-fighting style persisted into government with disastrous results. Corbynites and left-wingers were always going to find a home elsewhere, which in the event turned out to be the Greens under Zack Polanski. The Greens may not win many seats in the present election, proportionate to their votes, but those votes are enough to make the difference between Labour winning or losing in local or national elections.
Moreover, come the next general election the Greens may appear to many progressive voters to be the best vehicle for defeating Reform in many constituencies. A poll by Persuasion before the local elections showed that for every 10 2024 Labour voters who defected to Reform or the Conservatives, Labour lost 16 to the Greens, Lib Dems, Plaid Cymru or the SNP.
Squeezed from the right by Reform and from the left by the Greens, Starmer’s team devised a self-defeating strategy of moving to the right to steal some of Reform’s clothes, but never far enough to dent their vote, while prompting further defections to the Greens. Labour wobbled between being the last best hope of defeating Reform and at the next moment denouncing the Greens as a threat to all.
As relentlessly bad news for Labour rolled in on Friday, with the party losing between 70 and 80 per cent of its council seats, Starmer said: “I’m not going to walk away and plunge the country into chaos.” It is a cheeky pledge, given that as a weakened and wounded prime minister, he will be a major source of division and chaos.
In the face of an historic – and possibly unsurvivable – defeat for Labour, Starmer harked back nostalgically to the July 2024 general election when “I led our party to that victory, that is a five-year mandate to change the country”.
But he has already changed Britain – and for the worse. He has guaranteed that it will go on being mired in a semi-permanent political crisis which erodes faith in democracy and opens the door to autocratic solutions.
Further thoughts
On Tuesday, the US Secretary for War, Pete Hegseth, declared that US air and naval forces had established “a red, white and blue dome” over the Strait of Hormuz, enabling the escape of 1,550 ships trapped in the Gulf by the war. He said that this did not end the ceasefire with Iran, but if the Iranians interfered with “Project Freedom”, as the operation was called, the US would fire back. Hundreds of ships in the Gulf were said to be lining up to join the mass exodus. “We’re ensuring that we have control of that strait, which we do,” said the self-confident and belligerent Hegseth.
The great escape never happened. It was obvious from the beginning that if the US tried to take away Iran’s ace card – control of the Strait – then the Iranians would fight and the ceasefire end. Shipowners and insurers were dubious that the US navy was physically capable of guiding their vessels safely through the strait. And then, within a few hours, Trump called the whole thing off – claiming there was diplomatic progress with Iran.
What explains the humiliating American climbdown? The near impossibility of making the strait safe enough for shipping to transit was probably one motive. Another is the conflicting and ill-informed advice from the sycophantic and ignorant crew of senior officials who surround Trump in his second term. But any explanation for the “Project Freedom” debacle, ought to take into account Trump’s increasingly evident mental decline and inability to take rational decisions.
In a fascinating interview with The i Paper, Ty Cobb, who was Trump’s lawyer in 2017 during his first term in the White House, when he saw the President every day, says that at that time the President was open to reason. But Cobb now agrees with psychologists who believe the President is showing all the symptoms of frontal lobe decline and possible dementia. Cobb says: “The narcissism has always been an issue for him but in an absence of the impulse control the frontal lobe provides, it has unleashed furiously, which is why we see revenge, corruption, delusions of grandeur and [alleged] abuses of power.”
Cobb notes that Trump appears to be barely sleeping at night. Evidence for this is his late-night posts, sending out 18 of them on a single night during a three-hour long period up to 3 am. Cobb compares the possible onset of dementia in Trump’s case with that affecting Joe Biden, 83, during his final years in the White House. “Biden at the end of his presidency was not qualified to be president either and his deterioration was palpable.” But, Cobb argues, the ageing process is different for a normal person like Biden and a malignant narcissist like Trump: “When Biden’s controls faded he became a doddering old grandfather”, but Trump “thinks he is” Jesus Christ. In response, a White House spokesperson said “Ty Cobb should immediately seek psychiatric help to treat his severe case of Trump derangement syndrome.”
Beneath the radar
Sea power was one of the foundations of the British Empire for over 200 years. The same is true of US global hegemony since the Second World War. Both countries had powerful navies that could project their power anywhere in the world.
But one of the lessons of the wars in the Middle East since 2023 is that navies and sea power are no longer the threat they once were. The reason is the development of cheap but highly accurate missiles and drones. Vastly expensive naval vessels are vulnerable to them. This became evident when the Houthis in Yemen closed the Bab el-Mandeb chokepoint between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The same has been true of the Strait of Hormuz since the US-Israel attack on Iran on 28 February. The US navy keeps its distance, not wanting to risk becoming a target, vulnerable to a single missile battery or an underwater drone.
Distance no longer defends ships from land-based attack: the Chinese anti-ship missile, known as “the carrier killer”, now has a range of up to 2,500 miles. Today land powers equipped with high-precision missiles and drones hold the whip hand over navies, though Trump says he plans to build a fleet of Trump-class battleships for his “Golden Fleet”.
Cockburn’s picks
The collapse of the provincial press in Britain means that there is an absence of detailed eyewitness reporting in much of the country. This creates a news vacuum about local developments worse than at any time since the 18th century. It is therefore encouraging to come across a well-informed piece of serious reporting from – in this case – the Isle of Sheppey on the Thames Estuary in north Kent, which I know fairly well, and is one of the poorest places and most interesting places in the country.