Last week’s local and regional elections across much of the United Kingdom — inevitably described as the “British midterms,” although the parallel is imprecise — delivered a world of hurt to Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the Labour Party, less than two years after they won a supposed landslide victory in the last national election. Labour lost nearly 1,200 seats across England’s chaotic mixture of county councils, municipal boroughs and metropolitan districts, and also suffered punishing defeats in regional parliamentary elections in Scotland and Wales. (That reversal was especially dramatic in the latter case; more on that below.)
This was a shock to the system, but not exactly a huge surprise. It was widely understood that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party — a shambolic right-wing populist movement with Trumpian overtones that barely existed five years ago — would score big wins this year, at the expense of both Labour and the center-right Conservatives (better known as the Tories). That’s certainly what happened, and Reform will end up as the largest party in local government by far, after winning roughly 1,400 seats. But it’s not the only thing that happened.
