I begin with a few numbers in tables 1, 2 and 3 below. They show that the May 2026 elections for many local authorities in England and for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments were disastrous for Labour, which saw its support base disintegrate throughout the country.

TABLE 1: ENGLISH LOCAL ELECTION RESULTS

Note: Electoral system: First-Past-the-Post. Not all English local authorities were up for election.

Source: BBC

TABLE 2: SCOTTISH PARLIAMENT ELECTION RESULTS

Note: Electoral system: Mixed Member Proportional.

Source: BBC

TABLE 3: WELSH PARLIAMENT (SENEDD) ELECTION RESULTS

Note: Electoral system: Proportional Representation. Number of seats in Senedd increased.

Source: BBC

A couple of points stand out. The result in Wales (table 3) was catastrophic. Labour has been the largest party in Wales for over a century and has run the nation since devolution’s inception in 1999. Voters deserted the party en masse for Plaid Cymru, a left-leaning party which now forms the Welsh government. In Scotland (table 2), the Scottish National Party has continued its long run of electoral success since it first won an election in 2007 and, though it lost some ground, will once more form the Scottish government. Once the dominant party north of the border, Labour limped home tied for second with Reform. In England (table 1), in its strongholds in the north and the West Midlands, Labour lost votes hand over fist both to the Greens and to Reform, a party of the populist radical right led by the masterful if demagogic Nigel Farage, who also led its previous incarnations as the United Kingdom Independence Party and the Brexit Party.

The total vote won by the two (former) main parties, Labour and the Conservatives, has shrunk to a previously unimaginable level under 40 per cent of the electorate. Party allegiances are now in a molten state, with switching between parties a regular occurrence. The result is a multiparty system with support widely dispersed among the various parties – five in England, six in Scotland and Wales.

The “loveless landslide” and its aftermath

These election results constituted Labour’s poorest performance in countrywide elections in over a century. This is extraordinary given that less than two years earlier, in July 2024, Labour had won a national election landslide with a crashing majority of more than 170 seats, the second largest in the post–World War II era. What happened?

The answer lies first in the fact that the 2024 election was by no means a ringing endorsement; it was a “loveless landslide.” Labour received little more than a third of the vote on a very low turnout. When the more than eight million people eligible to vote but not on the electoral register are taken into account, it turns out that only one in five voters had chosen Labour. Furthermore, research showed that many voters had backed Labour because they were desperate to get rid of the Tories rather than because of positive enthusiasm. Labour’s rule, in short, rested on fragile foundations.¹

The seeds of Labour’s fall were sown in opposition when it adopted the so-called “Ming Vase” strategy, a highly risk-averse strategy consisting of two main precepts: opinion alignment and power accommodation. The first prescribed aligning policy as closely as possible to perceived public opinion, while the second involved avoiding any policy commitments which might provoke or alienate key power holders such as the City, global corporations and the (very predominately right-wing) press.²

This led to the party adopting two key policy postures. The first was “nonnegotiable” fiscal rules whose effect was to reduce the amount a Labour government could borrow. The Starmer government inherited a huge load of public debt, and these rules were designed to reassure the all-powerful financial markets that it would practise the utmost fiscal discipline. Second, and probably even more important, to abate voters’ (perceived) fears of higher taxation, the Starmer leadership bound itself to “cast-iron” pledges not to increase taxation on “working people”: specifically, not to raise income tax, employee National Insurance Contributions (NICs, a charge on employees and employers) and Value Added Tax. To appease big business and the wealthy (and the media they controlled), it also promised that there would be no increases in taxes on the corporate sector (corporation tax), only limited ones on wealthy individuals (e.g. capital gains tax) and no additional levies on wealth.

The combination of the fiscal rules and tax pledges had the effect of greatly narrowing a future Labour government’s room for manoeuvre. But there was also an inherent contradiction in the Ming Vase strategy. Labour had lambasted the Tory government for the impoverished state of the National Health Service (NHS) and other public services, for the acute housing shortage and for stagnation in living standards and the major increase in poverty and deprivation: all deep-seated and endemic problems. Though the party confined its “policy offer” to a few “fully costed” commitments, it had raised expectations that a Starmer government would take on these problems. But hamstrung by its self-imposed fiscal rules and tax pledges, it lacked the means to do so.³

As soon as Labour arrived in government, the chickens came home to roost. An injection of funds into the NHS was desperately needed at a time when Starmer agreed to a major boost in defence spending. The government had no option to raise taxes beyond those to which it had been committed, most notably higher employer NICs, but that still left very significant shortfalls. Keen to keep to its fiscal targets and to retain a margin of “fiscal headroom,” rather than break its pledges over taxation the government looked to cuts in the welfare budget. It came up with two proposals. The first was to means-test winter fuel payment, a universal benefit to all over 65 to help with fuel bills; the second was to restrict eligibility for benefits for the long-term sick and disabled and cut the amount available.

Focus groups apparently indicated that both moves would be popular. But they were not. They provoked a huge backlash both among Labour MPs and from the public. Disability charities, many with close links to the Labour Party, were outraged. After years of Tory-inspired cutbacks in benefits, a Labour government was reducing them yet further. The poor and the vulnerable, precisely the groups Labour was supposed to protect, were to bear the highest burdens. Labour’s standing in the polls plummeted. Starmer personally became a lightning rod for the sense of betrayal and soon obtained the unwanted status of the most unpopular prime minister on record.

Storm clouds brewing

These contextual factors helping to explain the Labour collapse combined with long-term trends in the pattern of voting. In the 1960s, the political scientist Peter Pulzer stated that “class is the basis of British party politics; all else is embellishment and detail.” Labour was the party of the working class, the Conservatives the party of the middle class.

This is no longer the case: the old class-based party system has disintegrated. Age and education have replaced social class as the key variables in voting choice; the younger and more highly educated a person is, the greater the propensity to vote for the left, and vice versa. Thus, the Labour vote has contracted, in some places drastically, in previous working-class heartlands in industrial areas in the north, the Midlands, Scotland and Wales – a trend also seen elsewhere in Europe, for example France, the Netherlands and Sweden. At the same time, the more prosperous and demographically more middle-class areas of the south have moved to the left, though the major gains from this shift in the recent elections were made by the Greens and the Liberal Democrats, often at Labour’s cost.

The radical right Reform Party has demonstrated its capacity to mobilize a large slice of what is now called “the White working class.” It is remarkable that a party run by the wealthy and funded by the extremely wealthy, whose policies on taxation and public spending will be seriously detrimental to their interests, is able to attract so many of the “left behinds.” Though we must await more data to do more than speculate, two major interrelated factors seem to be at work.

First, the social-liberal/social-conservative value cleavage is now a major factor structuring the vote. It largely overshadows the traditional left/right social and economic cleavage and correlates closely with the vote over European Union membership. Evidence from the recent elections shows that Reform did best in places that voted heavily for Brexit in 2016 and worst in areas which voted to stay in the EU.⁴ Many of these socially conservative voters greatly resent the growth in the size of the ethnic minority population, which they see as a major threat to British culture, customs and way of life.

Second, many working-class voters now view social and economic ills through an ethnonationalist lens. They attribute responsibility for a host of woes, including overstretched public services, housing shortages, stagnant wages and lack of jobs, to the influx of immigrants. Not least, the media have stoked anger and even rage against the so-called “boat people” – undocumented asylum-seekers trying to gain entry into the U.K. by crossing the channel.⁵

The elections suggest a real possibility that Reform, which at present has no more than a handful of MPs, will form the next government, with Farage as prime minister. Reform has displaced the Tories as the largest party on the right, and the “wasted vote” argument now operates in its favour. Many on the left and the centre of the political spectrum have been arguing for years that the U.K.’s first-past-the-post electoral system (which it shares with Canada) has become wholly dysfunctional, indeed a democratic travesty – seats can now be won with a mere quarter of the vote. But resistance by vested interests in the Labour Party to change to a fairer voting system remains strong.

Can Labour rebuild its shattered base? Should it seek to regain middle-class voters who have jumped ship for the Greens or working-class ones flocking to Reform? At present, such strategic debates have been eclipsed by questions of Keir Starmer’s future. His authority has been severely damaged by the election results for which, perhaps not entirely fairly, he has been given much of the blame. More fundamentally, he is widely seen as a politician without a compass, bereft of a clear set of values, uncertain of what he stands for and believing that problems can best be solved through managerial competence. It is a sentiment that diminishing numbers in the Labour Party share. The clock is ticking away for his premiership.

Notes

¹ Parth Patel and Viktor Valgarðsson, Half of Us: Turnout Patterns at the 2024 General Election (London: Institute for Public Policy Research, 2024); Will Jennings, Jamie Furlong, Gerry Stoker and Lawrence McKay, “Fragmented and Dealigned: The 2024 British General Election,” Political Quarterly, Vol. 96, No. 1 (2025).

² Eric Shaw, “Labour’s ‘Ming Vase Strategy’: The Operational Code of the Starmer Leadership,” British Politics, Vol. 21, No. 12 (2026).

³ Emmanuelle Avril and Eric Shaw, Order and Rebellion: Labour’s Managerial Politics from Miliband to Starmer (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2026), pp. 312–17.

⁴ John Curtice, “Election Results Show Politics in the UK Has Fragmented,” BBC, May 9, 2026.

⁵ Josiah Mortimer, “How Negative Media Headlines About Small Boat Crossings Are Turning Brits Against All Migrants,” Byline Times, June 19, 2025. Many voters grossly overesitamte the number of these “boat people.”