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The Teal Tide Washes Over Britain
Local elections show Reform surging and the establishment parties receding.
This week’s English local elections are nothing short of revolutionary. The right-populist Reform UK has not simply gained ground in the Labour Party’s former heartlands—it is swallowing them up wholesale. The populist juggernaut is routing the mainstream, establishment parties.
In normal times, most people in the UK would pay very little attention to their local-council elections. Turnout tends to be embarrassingly low. Debates tend to focus on subjects as riveting as refuse collection and traffic-calming measures. Indeed, the phrase “historic local elections” would once have sounded like an oxymoron. But these are not normal times. In these elections, we can see the crumbling of the old Labour–Tory duopoly. And in its place, a surging Reform and, to a lesser extent, the Green Party and assorted Islamic independents.
English local elections are often compared to U.S. midterms, in that they’re an important gauge of the national mood and that incumbents tend to do badly. Certainly, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s press team are spinning that governments always fare badly a few years into their terms, but they can still go on to be reelected. But this is nonsense. Starmer’s Labour has endured the worst performance in local elections in the past 30 years. As results continue to come in, Starmer’s party is losing half of the seats it’s defending. This is almost, but not quite, the worst-ever rate of loss for a governing party. That dishonour belongs to, er, Starmer’s Labour Party, which performed slightly worse in the local elections in May 2025.
These elections, unlike U.S. midterms, do not change the balance of power in the House of Commons. But they will certainly increase the volume of the calls on Starmer to resign from within his own party. These demands had already become deafening in the wake of the Peter Mandelson scandal, in which the PM appointed a known associate of Jeffrey Epstein as the UK’s ambassador to Washington. This, coupled with Starmer’s unprecedentedly poor approval ratings and his astonishing lack of achievements in office, had effectively sealed his fate. If the Labour Party has any sense (though I see no evidence that it does), these local elections ought to be the final nail in Starmer’s coffin.
Of course, what really makes these elections historic is not just that a poor prime minister and his hated party have received a drubbing. What matters most is where voters are flocking—namely, towards Reform.
Ironically, some of Labour’s most devastating losses have been in the party’s traditional, working-class northern heartlands. Almost every seat contested in councils like Hartlepool in the north east, and Tameside and Wigan in Greater Manchester (both held by Labour for half a century), has fallen to Reform. The so-called red wall of formerly ultra-safe Labour seats has been washed away by the teal tide.
Labour is also vulnerable on its left flank. Although the Green Party seems so far to have underperformed the media’s expectations (or wishful thinking), it has undeniably done serious damage to Labour in urban areas populated by students and especially those with large Muslim areas. “Palestine is on the ballot,” declared the Green leader Zack Polanski, in a not-so-subtle bid to court the Islamic sectarian vote.
Unsurprisingly, there are many socially conservative British Muslims who do not see eye to eye with the Greens on a host of social issues. Polanski’s party is a big believer in trans ideology, in legalizing all drugs, and decriminalizing sex work. In Birmingham, Britain’s second city, candidates calling themselves “Muslim independents” ran directly in opposition to the “gay” Green Party. After decades of multiculturalism and failed integration, voting now takes the form of an ethnic headcount. Northern Ireland–style sectarianism has reached the British mainland.
What these elections ultimately reveal is a Britain in the midst of a fundamental political realignment—one that is easily as significant as the rise of Labour itself a century ago. The old certainties are gone. The two-party system that defined British democracy for generations has been irreparably shattered. The teal tide is not receding.
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