Is London burning? Britain's sudden political meltdown — and ours

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’s second presidency. The world is watching too, and in broad strokes the news from abroad reads like a rejection of Trumpism: As I and others have observed, the MAGA-sphere’s clumsy efforts to boost overseas far-right parties seem to have backfired, fueling victories for “centrist” mainstream forces in Canada, Australia, Germany and elsewhere.

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’s paramilitary forces of masked kidnappers, his will-he-or-won’t-he dance with the federal courts (eventually you know he will) and Qatar’s so-called gift of a $400 million jumbo jet — is it a Trojan horse or a white elephant? — the storied and deeply weird democracy of the United Kingdom has been quietly sliding into the abyss. 

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

Let’s back up a few steps, because there’s a lot to unpack here: As you may recall (although it seems like a thousand years ago), Labour won a massive parliamentary majority in last July’s 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. But here’s 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 — on just 33.7 percent of the national vote. 

Seriously, that’s 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’s “first past the post” electoral system. Things get even weirder when you consider that Labour candidates actually got 500,000 fewer votes than they did in 2019 — 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. 

So that election was less a Labour win than a collective “nope” on the existing government, which didn’t 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’s 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’t happened and didn’t matter.

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 “Little England” racists, but it pretty much swept the board in this month’s local elections and has a plausible claim to be Britain’s most popular party (if only by default). But hang on; that’s 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.

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’s Reform party. 

Those circumstances would have tested any political leader, but I don’t think Starmer’s most avid supporters — if he still has any — would argue that he aced the test. Labour’s 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 to most “pensioners” (or retirees), a policy maintained under governments of both parties since 1997. 

Given all that, nobody expected this month's local elections for about 1,600 seats on 23 local councils across rural and suburban England — Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have different systems — 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’s worth noting that English local councils have little political power — they’re more like county supervisors in the U.S. than state legislatures — and until recently most have been Tory strongholds. Furthermore, these elections are typically low-turnout affairs contested between grassroots party loyalists — but their symbolism, as with special elections for U.S. House seats, is often seen as important.

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’t. 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’s UK Independence Party of the early 2010s) gained 677 seats — a literally infinite increase from its previous total, which was zero. Those numbers make clear that Reform’s biggest gains came at the Tories’ expense, but Reform also swept seats in working-class areas like Durham in northeastern England, formerly Labour’s heartland. 

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. 

One plausible reading holds that Britain’s 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: “The two main parties have been served notice of a potential eviction from their 100-year tenures of Downing Street.”

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A more optimistic view, to which Starmer and most of the Labour Party cling for the moment, is that they’re still in charge and have several years to recharge, recalibrate and convince the voters that they're not incompetent losers with no principles. Farage’s 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.

That may be the plan, or at least a plan, but it hasn’t gotten off to a rousing start. American liberals and progressives will, unfortunately, recognize Labour’s 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’s unctuous Hollywood looks, but he has a similar shape-shifting quality.)

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 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 defended it through almost audibly gritted teeth, writing that Starmer aides “believe that border control isn’t an optional extra for a social-democratic party but fundamental to it.” (Eaton did not, however, suggest that Starmer's proposals were any good or would work.)

However Britain’s 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 “mainstream” coalition can just barely win the next election against Donald Trump or Nigel Farage or Germany’s AfD or whomever else. We tried that, remember? It didn’t work.

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’t vote its way out of its deepening crisis — especially when fewer and fewer people bother to vote at all — and neither can we.