{"id":111728,"date":"2025-05-18T12:58:12","date_gmt":"2025-05-18T12:58:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/111728\/"},"modified":"2025-05-18T12:58:12","modified_gmt":"2025-05-18T12:58:12","slug":"is-london-burning-britains-sudden-political-meltdown-and-ours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/111728\/","title":{"rendered":"Is London burning? Britain’s sudden political meltdown \u2014 and ours"},"content":{"rendered":"

As warm spring weather and effusions of greenery spread across our disordered continent, Americans are understandably mesmerized by the widening chaos, unresolved conflict and bottomless corruption of Donald Trump\u2019s<\/a> second presidency. The world is watching too, and in broad strokes the news from abroad reads like a rejection of Trumpism<\/a>: As I and others<\/a> have observed, the MAGA-sphere\u2019s clumsy efforts to boost overseas far-right parties seem to have backfired, fueling victories for \u201ccentrist\u201d mainstream forces in Canada<\/a>, Australia, Germany<\/a> and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Yeah, not so fast: The new dawn of global democracy may be less glorious than advertised, not to mention a lot more confusing. While we were preoccupied with Trump\u2019s paramilitary forces of masked kidnappers, his will-he-or-won\u2019t-he dance with the federal courts (eventually you know he will) and Qatar\u2019s so-called gift<\/a> of a $400 million jumbo jet \u2014 is it a Trojan horse or a white elephant? \u2014 the storied and deeply weird democracy of the United Kingdom<\/a> has been quietly sliding into the abyss.<\/p>\n

Or maybe it has: Whether the shocking results of Britain\u2019s local elections<\/a> on May 2 \u2014 and the subsequent Democrat-style dithering of the governing center-left Labour Party \u2014 amount to the first stage of political Armageddon or just a disconcerting blip on the global radar screen remains to be seen.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s back up a few steps, because there\u2019s a lot to unpack here: As you may recall (although it seems like a thousand years ago), Labour won a massive parliamentary majority<\/a> in last July\u2019s British general election. That ended 14 years of increasingly shambolic rule by the Conservative Party, which had itself won a whopping victory in 2019 under the since-disgraced Boris Johnson<\/a>. But here\u2019s the thing: That big win was a largely illusory artifact of the increasing fragmentation of British politics. Yes, Labour captured 411 of the 650 seats in Parliament \u2014 on just 33.7 percent of the national vote.<\/p>\n

Seriously, that\u2019s extraordinary: One-third of the vote and nearly two-thirds of the seats. That distorted outcome has no clear precedent, not just in the U.K. but in any other parliamentary democracy, and underscores the baked-in anti-democratic character of Britain\u2019s \u201cfirst past the post\u201d electoral system. Things get even weirder when you consider that Labour candidates actually got 500,000 fewer votes than they did in 2019 \u2014 an election the party lost badly. They won all those seats last year thanks to historically low voter turnout, and because support for the widely-despised Tories (i.e., Conservatives) collapsed by more than half, falling from almost 14 million votes to fewer than 7 million.<\/p>\n

So that election was less a Labour win than a collective \u201cnope\u201d on the existing government, which didn\u2019t coalesce into support for anyone in particular. But the writing on the wall was visible, for those willing to read it: Right-wing firebrand Nigel Farage\u2019s<\/a> Trump-inflected Reform UK party got 14.3 percent of the national vote (the third-highest total) but won just five seats in Parliament. In other words, Reform candidates placed a close second or a respectable third in a whole bunch of races won by Labour or the Tories. That came as a huge relief to both major parties and the mainstream media, who essentially all agreed to pretend it hadn\u2019t happened and didn\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n

They can quit pretending now. Reform may indeed be a clown show in many respects, an incoherent and distasteful grouping of youngish hard-right ideologues and old-school \u201cLittle England\u201d racists, but it pretty much swept the board in this month\u2019s local elections and has a plausible claim to be Britain\u2019s most popular party (if only by default). But hang on; that\u2019s skipping too far ahead. In order for that to happen, the incoming Labour government had to fail, rapidly and spectacularly, which is precisely what it did.<\/p>\n

After that bizarre election outcome last July, incoming Prime Minister Keir Starmer, a bluff, lawyerly person with no evident ideological convictions, arrived at 10 Downing Street with an unassailable majority but essentially no popular mandate. Starmer was the neither-fish-nor-fowl compromise candidate chosen to lead Labour after left-wing former leader Jeremy Corbyn was purged in 2020, and he turned out to be singularly unprepared to face either the dire economic crisis left behind by the Tories or the wave of far-right anti-immigration violence exacerbated, if not actually encouraged, by Farage\u2019s Reform party.<\/p>\n

Those circumstances would have tested any political leader, but I don\u2019t think Starmer\u2019s most avid supporters \u2014 if he still has any \u2014 would argue that he aced the test. Labour\u2019s government has fumbled through 10 months of increasingly harsh immigration policies and awkward fiscal belt-tightening that have managed to alienate the left without placating the right, symbolized by the disastrous decision to end winter fuel payments<\/a> to most \u201cpensioners\u201d (or retirees), a policy maintained under governments of both parties since 1997.<\/p>\n

Given all that, nobody expected this month’s local elections for about 1,600 seats on 23 local councils across rural and suburban England \u2014 Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have different systems \u2014 to go well for Labour. In general terms, the pendulum effect familiar from American politics, where the party in power tends to lose ground in off-year elections, also applies across the pond. It\u2019s worth noting that English local councils have little political power \u2014 they\u2019re more like county supervisors in the U.S. than state legislatures \u2014 and until recently most have been Tory strongholds. Furthermore, these elections are typically low-turnout affairs contested between grassroots party loyalists \u2014 but their symbolism, as with special elections for U.S. House seats, is often seen as important.<\/p>\n

Well, the symbolism this time around completely absolutely sucked, at least for the Labour Party. If anything, it was even worse for the Tories, which sounds contradictory but actually isn\u2019t. Labour lost 187 of its previous 285 seats to finish in a distant fourth place, while the Conservatives, who held nearly 1,000 council seats going in, lost a staggering 674 of them. Meanwhile, Reform UK (formerly known as the Brexit Party and the successor, more or less, to Farage\u2019s UK Independence Party of the early 2010s) gained 677 seats \u2014 a literally infinite increase from its previous total, which was zero. Those numbers make clear that Reform\u2019s biggest gains came at the Tories\u2019 expense, but Reform also swept seats in working-class areas like Durham in northeastern England, formerly Labour\u2019s heartland.<\/p>\n

As noted earlier, there are various ways to interpret those results, but no conceivable spin can make them look non-dreadful for the two mainstream parties that have dominated British politics for the past 100-plus years. Indeed, this election delivered another, somewhat less dramatic surprise: The centrist Liberal Democrats, a polite also-ran third party over the last four decades, gained 163 council seats to finish second to Reform.<\/p>\n

One plausible reading holds that Britain\u2019s two-party system is now in terminal collapse, with a chaotic reconfiguration to follow and a long, grinding war between three vaguely normal parties and the neofascist new right. Versions of that have already happened, allowing for national differences, in France, Italy and Germany, along with a bunch of smaller countries. British political scientist Robert Ford expressed this view to the New York Times<\/a>: \u201cThe two main parties have been served notice of a potential eviction from their 100-year tenures of Downing Street.\u201d<\/p>\n

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter<\/a>, Crash Course.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A more optimistic view, to which Starmer and most of the Labour Party cling for the moment, is that they\u2019re still in charge and have several years to recharge, recalibrate and convince the voters that they’re not incompetent losers with no principles. Farage\u2019s insurgents will either merge with the Tories or replace them entirely, in this narrative, and the next general election (in 2028 or 2029) will be a straight-up showdown between Labour Reloaded and Reform UK.<\/p>\n

That may be the plan, or at least a plan, but it hasn\u2019t gotten off to a rousing start. American liberals and progressives will, unfortunately, recognize Labour\u2019s trajectory over the last couple of traumatic weeks: Faced with an existential dilemma and the urgent need to redefine itself, the center-left party abruptly lurches rightward and adopts the rhetoric of its opponents. (Starmer lacks Gavin Newsom\u2019s unctuous Hollywood looks, but he has a similar shape-shifting quality.)<\/p>\n

Last week the Labour government coughed up a new proposal for tighter controls on legal immigration, which was of course denounced by Reform as not nearly enough. Starmer gave a brief accompanying speech that was almost universally hated. Gareth Watkins<\/a> of the socialist magazine Tribune described it as a combination of J.R.R. Tolkien-style nostalgia and the Great Replacement-style language of 1960s Tory racist Enoch Powell. New Statesman political editor George Eaton<\/a> defended it through almost audibly gritted teeth, writing that Starmer aides \u201cbelieve that border control isn\u2019t an optional extra for a social-democratic party but fundamental to it.\u201d (Eaton did not, however, suggest that Starmer’s proposals were any good or would work.)<\/p>\n

However Britain\u2019s drama unfolds from here, a larger, darker pattern is at work for which Starmer and the Labour Party, inept and underpowered as they may be, are not responsible. Redeeming democracy is not about whatever milquetoast \u201cmainstream\u201d coalition can just barely win the next election against Donald Trump or Nigel Farage or Germany\u2019s AfD or whomever else. We tried that, remember? It didn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

At some point, the massive power imbalance baked into the entire Western liberal-democratic polity, which drives so many people who feel voiceless and disenfranchised into consumerist apathy, fascist fantasy or both, will require radical readjustment. How long that will take, and how painful and difficult that may be, is unknowable. But Britain can\u2019t vote its way out of its deepening crisis \u2014 especially when fewer and fewer people bother to vote at all \u2014 and neither can we.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As warm spring weather and effusions of greenery spread across our disordered continent, Americans are understandably mesmerized by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":111729,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7757],"tags":[748,32,393,4884,807,528,10751,257,384,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-111728","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-london","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-donald-trump","10":"tag-england","11":"tag-great-britain","12":"tag-keir-starmer","13":"tag-labour-party","14":"tag-local-elections","15":"tag-london","16":"tag-nigel-farage","17":"tag-uk","18":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114528957454847991","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111728\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}