UK politics descends into chaos: Is there a lesson for Democrats?

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UK politics descends into chaos: Is there a lesson for Democrats?
Two years after the British Labour Party’s “landslide” win, a crushing defeat threatens its future

By Andrew O'Hehir
Executive Editor
Published May 10, 2026 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) 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.

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There are lessons for American politics in what just happened across the pond, I suspect, even beyond the unfortunate resemblance between Labour and the Democrats as diverse center-left parties that can’t figure out whom they represent or what they stand for. But it might take some time to decode them. While the circumstances are quite different in the two nation-states that most enjoy lecturing others about democracy, and the long-running parallel between them has gotten slightly out of sync, both are undeniably in crisis: Is Britain now experiencing its MAGA comeback several years late, or experiencing the final implosion of liberal democracy a few years early? Time will tell.

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If the two-party system hard-wired into American politics now seems to have been demolished in Britain, below the surface similar dynamics are at work: Mainstream political figures of the center-right and center-left have been banished, conquered or overthrown, or at least have lost much of their legitimacy. (I’m old enough to remember when people actually liked Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.)

If all politics is local, as the old truism holds, political conflict in both the U.S. and U.K. has increasingly become a form of regional warfare. “Red” and “blue” states frantically redistrict themselves into political monoliths, and no presidential candidate from either party bothers to campaign in Texas or California. In Britain, each of the five mini-major parties visible on this week’s electoral map has a distinct geographical and cultural identity. It’s only stretching the point slightly to say that Labour is now the party for middle-class, multiracial Londoners, the Tories are for rich people in the leafy southern suburbs and Reform is for disgruntled older white folks across Middle England. (I’m genuinely not sure who the Lib Dems are for — the Brit equivalent of Pete Buttigieg voters?) ....................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/05/10/uk-politics-descends-into-chaos-is-there-a-lesson-for-democrats/