Such times! In England now we will have no fewer than five parties that have more than 500 councillors. Labour will have lost 60 per cent of its seats compared with 2021; the Tories 40 per cent. The big victor of course is Reform. Lots of people will now have Reform councils where previously there were no Reform councillors. And the best of luck to local inhabitants, because judging by the performance of the Reform councils elected a year ago, they are going to need it.
What does it all mean? Forget “Labour has lost the working class”. You might just as well say that the Tories have lost the middle class. Both things are true, but they are but a fragment of the complete picture.
In fact, there hasn’t been a realignment in British politics but a total dealignment in which the only safe bet is that almost everyone hates the government of the day. Except in Scotland, where the government also blames the government. There are working-class people in London, but they don’t vote Reform. There are middle-class people in Newcastle, but they don’t vote Tory.
The further away you feel yourself to be from the big cities and from London, the more likely you are to vote Reform, whatever your class. Unless you are young in which case you will be more likely to vote Green. The data suggests that if you’re university educated and suburban you’ll give Farage a miss, as you may also do if you are a woman.
In the Western Isles of Scotland, against the trend, they gave Labour a handsome victory in Scottish parliamentary elections in which otherwise the SNP swept the board. The reason? Ferries apparently. In Suffolk County Council, recently Tory ruled, the opposition to the new Reform leadership will be the Greens. Meanwhile, there’s not a single Reform councillor in Reading, no-one at all in Richmond (on Thames) except fifty-plus Liberal Democrats. There are no Tories in Labour Lincoln, and no Greens in Sunderland, where Reform all but wiped Labour out.
The great psephologists of Britain (oh okay, Sir John Curtice) has looked at the national vote shares indicated by the results and has not come up with a Reform victory in the next election, as prematurely claimed by an increasingly bronzed Nigel Farage. Polling at 32 per cent last year, his party, despite its gains, is now on 26 per cent, Labour and the Tories on 19 per cent each, the Lib Dems (who journalists fall over themselves not to talk about) on around 18 per cent and the Greens on 16 per cent.
You can look for precedents in the last century and find two, perhaps: the great SNP capture of Scotland and Labour’s astounding defeat in the London local elections in 1968 – two years after their general election landslide of 1966. But they don’t quite map on to what we’re seeing now.
However, almost no one on the continent would be surprised by this. In France in the last 20 years, the two great parties of the postwar era – the Socialists and the Gaullists – both more or less disappeared to be replaced by a patchwork of political affiliations. In the last German federal elections five parties won over forty seats, and three won over 100. The shares of the votes for the top three parties in Sweden were 30 per cent, 20 per cent, 20 cent, in the Netherlands no party received over 24 per cent, in Belgium the leading party won just under 17 per cent.
In some of those countries the divisions are regional, some linguistic, others urban vs rural, or culturally conservative versus liberal and very rarely expressed in terms of class. But the point is that the great, stifling coalitions of the Anglosphere world are not the usual way for electoral politics to be expressed. In this country would it be so fanciful to imagine a Party of the North? A London Party?
Is that so bad? With our system, yes. The problem for us is that just as we elected a Labour government with 63 per cent of the seats on a vote share of less than 34 per cent, we could conceivably end up with a 28 per cent Reform administration, currently committed to spending billions on tearing around a country that didn’t vote for them looking for illegals to put in detention centres and then deport.
It’s a prospectus which we know the majority of people in this country wouldn’t sign up to, but which they could conceivably get anyway as a consequence of the electoral system. And if you think you’re unhappy now…
