What did we learn from the 2026 elections?

Thirteen talking points from the local, Scottish, and Welsh elections

Here are some of the key issues around the May local, Scottish, and Welsh elections.

To keep things from getting overly long I’m going to try to limit myself to discussion of (just) 13 main themes.

England’s embrace of the extreme-right

It’s hardly surprising that Reform have made massive gains given the fact they’re the Thailand-based crypto billionaire who is bankrolling their operation has turned them into by far the richest party in Britain, that’s before we even get the tens of millions of pounds in losses that GB News are making each year, on pumping out what is essentially just Reform TV now.

Do Reform voters care about Reform policies beyond anti-immigrant rabble rousing? From all of my interactions with them so far, the answer is a resounding no.

Their stock responses are parroting "stop the boats" and overtly stating "I don’t care" when pressed on policy issues.

Do they care they’ve just elected a bunch of absolute vermin, including a guy who celebrates race-rapists; calls white people "the master race"; and denies genocide?

It really doesn’t seem so.

It’s deeply dispiriting to see poor working class communities like Hartlepool, that have been eviscerated by Thatcherism, turning to Farage’s brand of Thatcherism on steroids because they’re so enchanted by xenophobic blame-shifting.

Labour shellacking

Keir Starmer has led Labour into their worst local election shellacking in living memory, yet he still insists that he’s staying on. Apparently the country will be "plunged into chaos" without his wise and wonderful leadership!

This is the guy who spurned the chance to use a historic 170 seat majority to deliver something good for the British people; decided to performatively beat up pensioners instead; then goaded his own party’s traditional voters into leaving if they didn’t like it!

People have abandoned Labour in their droves, exactly like he instructed them to, yet he’s surrounded himself with such vacuous and cowardly sycophants, that they’re still not pushing him to go before the damage is irrecoverable!

Continued Tory collapse

The Tories were the ones to take the absolute electoral battering last year, but they clearly haven’t reached their nadir yet. Kemi Badenoch can, and will, drive them lower.

It’s remarkable watching Badenoch trying so hard to out-Reform Reform.

Okay, the Tories successfully absorbed the extreme-right ultranationalist vote in 2017 and 2019, when the faragists tactically stood aside to let them win in Tory-held constituencies across the country, but Farage and his billionaire crypto backer have got their eyes on the main prize now, so it’s never going to work again.

If the Tories hadn’t ideologically purged their liberal conservative wing, maybe they’d be able to appeal to them. You know, the kind of right-winger who sees themselves as sensible and pragmatic, rather than rabid and extremist?

The Tories are never going to win standing on the exact same territory as the faragists, because what kind of far-right extremist votes for ersatz fascism, when they can have the genuine thing?

Greens on the rise

The Greens are a few years behind Reform in establishing themselves as a party that can potentially win a huge amount of seats, and they’re tens of £millions behind them in funding, as they’re not bankrolled by a shady offshore crypto billionaire.

The Greens have won big though, with Zoe Garbett winning their first ever mayoral contest in Hackney, and Green councillors picking up more new seats so far than any party except Reform.

Given the furious intensity of the anti-Green propaganda war during election week, in which a single Retweet by Zack Polanski was given more airtime and column inches than Farage’s undeclared £5 million handout from his overseas backer, they’ve done reasonably well.

Lib-Dems holding firm

The Lib-Dems have held every council they’re defending so far, and they’ve won control of Stockport Council, bringing to an end the No Overall Control stalemate that’s existed there since 2011.

Nobody can say the Lib-Dems have done badly, but it’s surprising that they’re not doing far better under the circumstances.

The liberal conservatives were purged by Boris Johnson in 2019, and they’re still clearly unwelcome under Kemi Badenoch’s deranged leadership, so their Lib-Dem bedfellows from the 2010-15 austerity coalition should make an appealing new home for them, right?

It’s not just the left that Keir Starmer has driven away with his shenanigans. Liberally-minded Labour voters are aghast at stuff like abolishing jury trials; misusing terrorism legislation to repress criticism of British genocide complicity; Internet anonymity crackdowns; and Starmer’s reanimation of the Blairite zombie policy of mandatory ID cards.

You have to imagine the Lib-Dems would be doing significantly better if they were led by a real conviction politician, who stood up for real liberal values, rather than an austerity coalition compromised clown like Ed Davey.

Scotland

The results aren’t in yet, but it’s looking terrible for Labour and the Tories, who have tag-teamed the role of 'leading voice of unionism' for years.

The SNP will win. The Greens will make gains. There will be a pro-independence majority in the Scottish parliament once again.

Thing may well be very different this time, with the English nationalist faragists assuming the position of unionism cheerleaders, complete with all their racism, bigotry, corruption, and undisguised contempt for Scotland.

Having that unappealing rabble as the main ideological opponents to the SNP-led Scottish government, and to Scottish independence, is sure to be a boon for them, right?

Wales

Labour are absolutely cooked in Wales, which is remarkable since they’ve been the biggest party there ever since devolution in 1999.

Plaid Cymru and Reform will be the biggest two parties, while Labour duke it out with the also-rans for third place.

Plaid will form the Welsh government, because there simply won’t be enough far-right seats between Reform and the Tories to make up the numbers.

It’s quite remarkable that Reform are going to win so many Welsh seats, even though they won’t actually win, given their leader mocked Welsh people as "foreign speakers", and they were the only party in the Senedd to vote in favour of allowing politicians to lie to the public earlier this year.

Who do we want? English nationalists who ridicule us, and insist that they should be allowed to lie to us!

When do we want them? Now!

Multi-party politics

The general election of 2017 seems a long time ago now, when the combined Tory-Labour vote was 82%.

The two-party system is completely done, and the combined Tory-Labour vote share in the local elections is set to be below 40% when the counting is done!

England is now a five party system, and it’s even more complicated in Scotland and Wales, where the strong performances of the SNP and Plaid Cymru make them six party systems.

Proportional representation

Britain’s archaic and profoundly unrepresentative voting system hardly worked well when it was a two party system. It’s completely unworkable now that it’s splitting into five/six party contests.

2024 was bonkers enough, when Labour won a mega-majority of 63% of the MPs on 34% of the vote, despite losing half a million voters since they lost loads of seats in 2019!

The UK need proportional representation, not just in Westminster politics, but in local elections too.

Inaction on this will deliver absolute chaos.

Foreign influence

There have been many complaints of foreign influence in British politics in recent years, often aimed at the Russians.

We’ve just seen a Thailand-based crypto billionaire bankroll a political party into control of hundreds of council seats, and full control of even more councils.

Public dissatisfaction with Keir Starmer is being exacerbated by Donald Trump’s economic assaults on the UK, and by Starmer’s slavish subservience to the interests of the genocidal racist apartheid state of Israel.

Add in the mass privatisation of core UK infrastructure and services into the hands of overseas corporations and foreign governments; the role of US tech companies in the disemination of news and information; and Elon Musk’s overt threats to interfere in British politics, and it’s obvious that British sovereignty is under greater threat now than it has been in centuries.

So much for Brexit winning us our sovereignty back, eh?

Ruling the ashes

Keir Starmer has been quick to insist that he’s not going to resign. His loyalty is to himself and his right-wing faction of the Labour Party; not to the Labour Party in general; not to Britain; and not to the British people.

His faction would rather burn the Labour Party to the ground and then rule over the ashes, and let the faragists take over the country in the process, than relinquish power and give someone else a shot of doing a better job, before it’s too late.

Swing analysis

There’s a lot of talk about where Labour voters have gone. Whether they’ve mainly deserted the party for the Greens and Lib-Dems, or directly switched to Reform.

Of course many ex-Labour voters will have switched in these ways, but there’s something missing from a lot of the analysis though, which is abstainers and newcomers.

How many traditional Labour voters simply didn’t bother to turn out this time? And how many of the many new Reform and Green voters are newly motivated participants who hadn’t generally voted in local elections before?

Is the slightly over 30% who voted this time around the exact same slightly over 30% who voted at this point in the local election cycle four years ago?

I’d argue that it’s a big assumption to say that they are, and to deny the possibility that disillusionment and new political motivations have played a role in what’s happened.

Demographics

This topic always provokes fury from the "not all boomers" brigade, but it’s absolutely undeniable now.

The biggest determining factor in how people used to vote in the 20th Century was social class. The biggest determining factor in how people vote these days is age.

If only the votes of working age people were counted, the results would be very different, with the Greens, Labour, and the Lib-Dems faring dramatically better.

If only pensioners votes were counted, we’d be looking at even more massive Reform gains.

It’s been this way for a while now. In general the younger generations voted Remain, and in general the boomers ("not all boomers") voted Leave.

The working age generations would’ve given Corbyn’s Labour a shot at government, the boomers voted for Theresa May’s "strong and stable government" and for the diamond-hard Brexit shambles she concocted, then had plagiarised by Boris Johnson.

The working age population want some hope; and affordable housing; and decent wages; and workers rights; and investment economics. The boomers want a faragist demolition job on the last remnants of the post-war settlement. You know, the mixed economy economic conditions that made them the richest generation ever.

Their parents’ generation fought in WWII to stop the extreme-right, now they’re absolutely gagging for the extreme-right to tear down the last remnants of the post-war legacy that their parents’ generation left them.

It’s not all of them, but it’s a huge percentage of them. It’s hard to say what’s making them like this, but being endlessly drip-fed extreme-right populism by massive loss-making right-wing propaganda outlets like GB News and the tabloid rags can’t be discounted, can it?

Conclusion

It’s deeply depressing, but there are a few small glimmers of light.

The SNP and Plaid Cymru are providing effective shields from the extreme right for the Scottish and Welsh people, and even though the Green gains are moderate in comparison, they’re still in a much stronger position than they were before Zack Polanski took over.