On May 7, voters across the United Kingdom will elect new local councils, municipal authorities, and devolved national governments. These elections\u2014don\u2019t call them the British midterms\u2014could be seismic.<\/p>\n
It is starting to look as if the two-party Westminster system, the Labour Party and Conservative Party duopoly that has dominated U.K. politics for more than a century, is coming apart. Anti-establishment sentiment takes on a slightly different form in each constituent part of the U.K.; collectively, these trends could weaken British political unity.<\/p>\n
On May 7, voters across the United Kingdom will elect new local councils, municipal authorities, and devolved national governments. These elections\u2014don\u2019t call them the British midterms\u2014could be seismic.<\/p>\n
It is starting to look as if the two-party Westminster system, the Labour Party and Conservative Party duopoly that has dominated U.K. politics for more than a century, is coming apart. Anti-establishment sentiment takes on a slightly different form in each constituent part of the U.K.; collectively, these trends could weaken British political unity.<\/p>\n
In England, Labour and the Tories are losing support\u00a0on the right<\/a>\u00a0to Nigel Farage\u2019s Reform UK and on the left<\/a>\u00a0to Zack Polanski\u2019s ecosocialist Green Party.\u00a0The separatist Scottish National Party (SNP) is on course for a\u00a0fifth consecutive victory<\/a>\u00a0at Holyrood, Scotland\u2019s semi-autonomous parliament, while Reform could push Labour, once the dominant party,\u00a0into third place<\/a>. Finally, in Wales, the center-left nationalist Plaid Cymru is\u00a0surging alongside Reform<\/a>.<\/p>\n It\u2019s worth putting all of this in perspective. In the 1997 general election, the Labour Party and the Conservatives secured more than 23 million votes between them, or 74 percent of all votes across the U.K.\u2014leaving smaller parties, including the SNP and Plaid, with barely more than one-quarter of the vote. (At the time, the far-right Reform didn\u2019t exist, and the Greens were marginal.) Today, Labour and the Tories are polling at just\u00a015 and 16 percent<\/a>,\u00a0respectively. Meanwhile, Reform clocks in at 25 percent and the Greens at 21 percent.<\/p>\n In other words, nearly three decades after Tony Blair\u2019s era-defining Labour victory in the late 1990s, British voting patterns have altered beyond recognition. The principal political casualty of this shift will be incumbent Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose public standing has collapsed at\u00a0lightning speed<\/a>.<\/p>\n Starmer entered Downing Street in July 2024 on a pledge to \u201crenew<\/a>\u201d the U.K. after 14 years of Conservative misrule. Compared with his exhausted Tory counterparts\u2014who in that time had imposed on the country austerity<\/a>, Brexit, and\u00a0Boris Johnson<\/a> and\u00a0Liz Truss<\/a> as prime ministers\u2014the Labour leader looked fresh. A centrist lawyer with establishment credentials and a reputation for institutional competence, Starmer promised to restore stability<\/a> and to rule in a way that would, in his words, \u201ctread more lightly<\/a>\u201d on the lives of ordinary citizens. Instead, his administration has blundered from one crisis to the next.<\/p>\n Shortly after Starmer took office, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves announced plans to\u00a0strip some British pensioners<\/a>\u00a0of their state-funded winter fuel allowances, seeking to slash a multibillion-pound budget deficit. Labour lawmakers revolted, and Reeves backed down<\/a>. But by that point, Reeves was in another fight with her own party, this time over her\u00a0refusal<\/a>\u00a0to scrap the two-child benefit cap,\u00a0a Tory-era reform that restricted the access of British families with more than two children to supplementary welfare support. Again, Reeves\u2019s party colleagues protested, and she\u00a0demurred<\/a>\u2014weakening Starmer, who had authorized these cuts.<\/p>\n Starmer\u2019s prospects deteriorated<\/a> further at the start of this year, as the full scale of the Peter Mandelson affair unfurled before the public. In December 2024, Starmer appointed<\/a>\u00a0Mandelson, a long-term fixer in the Blairite contingent, to the country\u2019s most prestigious diplomatic position: the U.K. ambassador to the United States. Starmer made the decision fully knowing<\/a> that Mandelson was once friends with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Last year, new messages<\/a>\u00a0revealed the extent<\/a> of that friendship, and Mandelson was sacked.<\/p>\n When subsequent reports\u00a0suggested<\/a>\u00a0that Mandelson shared sensitive government information with Epstein, potentially compromising national security, public anger turned on Starmer, who issued a faltering apology in Parliament for the appointment. It came too late: The scandal ripped through Starmer\u2019s government, prompting key figures to resign, including Downing Street Chief of Staff\u00a0Morgan McSweeney<\/a>, a Mandelson protege who had orchestrated<\/a>\u00a0Starmer\u2019s rise from back-bench Labour parliamentarian in 2015 to leader of the opposition in 2020.<\/p>\n The first controversy, over welfare reform, damaged Starmer\u2019s credibility. The second, over Mandelson, destroyed it. In recent weeks, Labour insiders have begun\u00a0mapping out<\/a>\u00a0Starmer\u2019s exit. In the party, the press, and the public at large, there is a growing expectation that his premiership will soon be over.<\/p>\n Assuming the polls hold\u2014and they have barely changed for weeks\u2014this week\u2019s elections will turn that expectation into reality. The Labour Party looks set to suffer at every level. It is on track for its worst-ever local election performance in England, with some\u00a0polls suggesting<\/a>\u00a0it could shed 74 percent of the roughly 2,500 council seats it is defending. In Scotland, the party is bracing for its\u00a0weakest result<\/a>\u00a0since the creation of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. It will almost certainly lose power in the Welsh Parliament, the Senedd, for the\u00a0first time in 27 years<\/a>.<\/p>\n Labour\u2019s defeat will carry constitutional implications for the U.K. as a whole. The SNP is moving into a third decade of political dominance at Holyrood. Under the leadership of John Swinney, the party is preparing the ground for a fresh tilt at independence. Swinney, who served as former Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon\u2019s deputy, wants a second referendum on self-government in 2028. Among Scottish voters, enthusiasm for independence regularly hits more than 50 percent<\/a>, up from 45 percent in 2014, when Scotland voted against separating from the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n Given the U.K. government\u2019s opposition to another referendum, Swinney\u2019s road to independence is yet unclear. Holyrood needs Westminster\u2019s consent to hold another politically binding vote, and the SNP\u2014keen to secure legitimacy from the European Union\u2014won\u2019t declare independence unilaterally. Still, the simple fact of a staunchly nationalist government in Edinburgh will further destabilize British politics in the coming years.<\/p>\n Add to this growing demands for greater autonomy<\/a> in Wales, highlighted by Plaid\u2019s polling surge<\/a>, and even the prospect of a border poll on Irish reunification\u2014the Irish Republican Sinn Fein became the largest party in Northern Ireland\u2019s devolved assembly in 2022\u2014and the unionist foundations of the British state start to look shaky. Notably, both Farage<\/a> and Polanski<\/a> are open to Scotland revisiting the question of independence; indeed, Polanski actively encourages it.<\/p>\n It\u2019s possible that Starmer\u2019s position would be more robust were the U.K. not haunted by a sense of social and economic stagnation.\u00a0Since the 2008 financial crisis, real incomes in Britain have grown slowly, weighed down by \u201cthe longest pay squeeze in modern history,\u201d according\u00a0to the Trades Union Congress.<\/a> At the same time, living standards have slumped under the weight of high inflation and sticky interest rates; public services, fragmented by decades of privatization, have become increasingly\u00a0dysfunctional<\/a>.<\/p>\n The sluggish economy has compounded public pessimism. In 2022, the year in which the U.K had three prime ministers, just 24 percent of Britons said they had confidence in the government. That\u00a0figure<\/a>\u00a0put Britain on par with historically unstable states such as Brazil and Italy in terms of public trust in political institutions. In reality, any prime minister would have struggled in the face of these challenges. But with his litany of scandals, rigid bureaucratic style, and\u00a0compulsive U-turning<\/a>, Starmer has turned out to be uniquely ill-suited to manage them.<\/p>\n The Conservative Party is also likely to\u00a0post heavy losses<\/a>\u00a0on May 7. Voters view the Tories, who held power between 2010 and 2024, as complicit in the country\u2019s decline. But it will be the pummeling of Labour that demonstrates the intensity of Britain\u2019s anger.<\/p>\n When Starmer was elected, many liberals initially embraced him as the savior of the British establishment. In the eyes of these enthusiasts,\u00a0Starmer would restore order following the compound disruptions of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, Brexit, Corbynism, and the COVID-19 pandemic.\u00a0He was\u00a0backed by Blair<\/a>, the high priest of British centrism, and\u00a0enjoyed widespread support<\/a>\u00a0among British finance luminaries. In a word, Starmer was moderate\u2014to a fault.<\/p>\n Yet here he stands, on the brink after less than two years in office. The truth is that Starmer\u2019s mandate was always fragile. Owing to the vagaries of Britain\u2019s first-past-the-post system<\/a>, the Labour Party won 63 percent of the seats in the House of Commons with just 34 percent of the vote in the 2024 general election\u2014the smallest-ever vote share for a prime minister taking office. Compared with 2019, turnout sank by nearly 8 percentage points and Labour shed half a million votes. Starmer was an instrument to dislodge the Tories. But he never connected with the electorate; this marriage of convenience has now run its course.<\/p>\n