The latest local elections confirmed what opinion polls had been suggesting for a good while: the collapse of the Labour Party and the extraordinary unpopularity of its leader, Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Up and down the country, from urban to rural, metropolitan to suburban, or Celtic to Saxon, the British people turned their backs on the Labour Party less than two years after it won a landslide victory at the last general election.  Reform UK will be able to claim a victory – though perhaps less dominant than they hoped – the Conservative Party continued to suffer losses throughout the country, and the ascendant Green Party have emerged as a real force on British left, albeit not as strongly as some expected. Since the results, shell-shocked Labour MPs have started agitating against Starmer, with a growing number demanding he resign. However, at the time of writing, his ministers appear to be staying loyal. The prime minister is resorting to desperate measures to win back internal support, including bringing Gordon Brown back to government for the first time since he lost the 2010 General Election. There are no questions to which Gordon Brown is the answer in British politics today. His appointment as the prime minister’s envoy for global finance – whatever that is – cements the impression that Starmer is incapable of seeing or understanding why the public are angry with Labour and why they voted the way they did.  Nigel Farage is the overall winner of these elections. His Reform UK party has become a truly national party, and the default option for working class and many middle-class voters, especially white men. Reform continued its successes at last year’s local elections, taking more councils up and down the country. It won just under 1,500 council seats of the 4,000 or so available in England, and in doing so, it secured control of Conservative strongholds like Essex and Suffolk, won its first London Borough in Havering, and also essentially replaced the Labour Party in many places that it considered its heartlands: Wakefield, Barnsley and Kirklees in Yorkshire, Wigan in Greater Manchester, Tyneside in the North East, and Knowsley in Merseyside, for example. As well as this, Reform has become the second party in Wales, winning 37 seats of the 96 available in the Welsh Assembly elections, and also secured second place in Scotland, albeit in a very hard-fought, four-way fight against the Scottish National Party, Scottish Labour, and the Scottish Conservatives.  Encouragingly for Reform, it has been able to get to parts of the country that no other party has done before. Reform might be a Thatcherite party with a populist hue and a leader who speaks with a Kentish bark, but it has a unique ability to win supporters in areas which were once historically Tory and Labour simultaneously. The party is becoming distinctly northern in votes and character. This will be an interesting development, as northern political culture and identity has been bound up with the Labour Party for a century. No more. Reform is bringing together the broad coalition of voters who voted for Brexit in 2016 and for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in 2019.  However, this victory is not as total as it might have been. Reform was unable to dislodge the Conservatives to the extent that they might have hoped in outer London boroughs like Bexley, Bromley, and Croydon. In many parts of Scotland, Reform and the Scottish Tories fought each other to a standstill, to the benefit of the SNP. Looking ahead to the general election, Reform needs to fortify its support among a broad base of working class and patriotic middle class voters and make inroads to more affluent voters in the professional middle class. These people will never be the bedrock of a Reform-voting coalition, but they are necessary in the pursuit of victory. What of X’s favourite right wing party, Restore Britain? They did not stand in these elections. Only a small, affiliate party did: Great Yarmouth First, which won handsome victories in its hometown on the Norfolk coast, thanks to the local popularity of MP Rupert Lowe.  Turning to the Conservatives, they remain in a strange place. They lost another 500 or so council seats, and are vanishing from public consciousness in many parts of the country. However, they maintained important footholds in certain areas, and even made some notable gains, taking back Westminster and Wandsworth councils in London from Labour, who had mismanaged both to an extraordinary degree since 2022. Many Conservative activists appear more cheerful than one would expect for a party which is facing yet another continuous year of losses at the ballot box, but such is the way of expectation management in Britain. The future of the Tories is worth pondering: If they are not the national force they once were, they remain the choice for a subset of affluent professionals and homeowners, upwardly mobile ethnic minorities – especially Hindus – and the slice of bourgeois Britain which might agree with Reform on many issues, but does not gel with Reform’s culture or its leader. These results suggest they may be able to deny Reform a majority at the general election. This is going to be a dominant theme in the coming years and one with huge questions: Should Reform fight the Tories to the death, should they cooperate, or should they agree to non-aggression pacts at local levels? We remain many miles from an answer. The two-party duopoly is not just being challenged by Reform. It is also being attacked from the left. The Green Party has turned into a left-wing force to contend with. Under the leadership of Zack Polanski, it has moved away from being a fundamentally ecological party and has embraced Millennial and Zoomer leftism of a kind familiar to American readers. Polanski has taken explicit inspiration from New York’s Zohran Mamdani – though he is rather less well presented – and has harnessed a coalition of young women, poorer ethnic minorities with a huge focus on Muslims, and old-school green activists to do serious damage to Labour. The Greens did best in progressive-left urban strongholds like Leeds, Hackney, Lewisham, Lambeth, Southwark, and Haringey. They won Lewisham outright, ending 55 years of Labour rule there, and took other London boroughs to “no overall control.”  While the Green surge is real and a huge threat to Labour in the future – especially as Labour appears to have lost its support among Britain’s Muslim population – the Greens did not live up to the heady expectations from before the election. A fierce political campaign against Polanski has been raging in the last three weeks or so, exposing many of his flaws. Polanski’s Greens have taken the baton from Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, embracing left-wing economic radicalism, diversity and anti-white, anti-male politics, and the sort of Israel-scepticism which blurs into antisemitism that has taken over so many parts of the Western left in recent years. There is ultimately a ceiling on this agenda in Britain. Even voters on Britain’s center left, particularly those with mortgages to pay, are likely thinking twice about the economic consequences of a Green victory.  Britain’s beleaguered second city, Birmingham, offers a cautionary tale of where the country’s fractured politics could end up. Birmingham has become one of the beating hearts of Britain’s rising Muslim politics, with characters like Akmed Yakoob – a criminal lawyer known for advertising his services with the strapline “remember, there is a defense for every offence” – becoming a power broker in the city, corralling local Muslims to run for office on an explicitly pro-Gaza political platform. Birmingham’s political map acts like a census: White areas have voted Reform and Conservative, diverse and student neighbourhoods have supported the Greens, and its heavily Muslim postcodes have voted in the so-called Muslim Independents. The arithmetic of the council does not suggest any sort of plausible governing coalition, and the city will likely remain mired in the same dysfunction and uncollected bins which have characterised it for the last few years. Such is the reality of a democratic politics in a multicultural city where people vote in line with their ethnic interest. For now, Birmingham remains an outlier. Reform stands in pole position and is the only truly national party in Great Britain, securing votes in every corner of the island. However, it is a long way to the election and questions remain. The prime minister is in peril. Even though he may be replaced, the political class is still wrestling with questions it cannot answer whether Starmer is in Downing Street or not. If these elections show one thing, it is what happens to democratic politics in an age of mass immigration and multiculturalism. Questions of taxation, spending, and public services fall behind those of identity, culture, and immigration. Until the age of mass immigration is ended, its politics – with all its inherent chaos – is here to stay. The post The British Turn Their Backs on Labour appeared first on The American Conservative.