Local elections across England delivered dire results for Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Labour Party, as they lost over six hundred council seats, with many of them flipping to Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform Party. But the results showed that, remarkably, five parties were capable of getting more than fifteen per cent of the total votes cast: Reform, which captured the most seats and leads national polls; Labour; the Conservatives; the left-wing Green Party, which added hundreds of seats under its new leader, Zack Polanski; and the left-of-center Liberal Democrats. (Nationalist parties also did well in parliamentary elections in Scotland and Wales.) The next general election needn’t be held until the summer of 2029, but the Labour Party has to decide before then whether it wants to replace the extremely unpopular Starmer as leader, and the left-of-center parties need to decide what, if anything, they can do to prevent Farage from entering Downing Street.
I recently spoke with David Runciman, an honorary professor of politics at Cambridge University and the host of the “Past, Present, Future” podcast. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the fundamental changes we are witnessing in British politics, the reasons Keir Starmer is unlikely to ever recover politically, and why it may be impossible to keep Nigel Farage from being the next Prime Minister.
Do you think this is likely to end up being a really important election for the United Kingdom?
Yeah, I think it will seem like a watershed election because it’s part of a trend that goes back quite some way in the fragmentation of a two-party political system into a multi-party system. Seven parties competed seriously for votes: two nationalist parties, and five national parties, and they all got a chunky vote share. That’s never happened before in British politics. There have been turbulent periods. There have been periods where one of the main parties has been supplanted. But a seven-way party contest in a first-pass-the-post political system has never happened before here, or maybe anywhere, actually. Certainly never in the U.S.
A first-past-the-post system means that you win the seat if you’ve got the most votes. So if it splits five ways, you could win the seat with twenty-one per cent of the vote, if your opponents get just under that. National opinion polls look a little like this at the moment. So you get these very skewed results. You can win quite a lot of seats, as Reform has done in these elections, with twenty-six per cent of the vote or some small share like that.
The easiest way to summarize this is that, in the 2024 general election, Starmer got fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn did in the 2019 general election. In that election, Corbyn was wiped out by Boris Johnson. But Starmer won almost the biggest majority in British political history with thirty-three per cent of the vote. If the opposition is split and you come out on top under this kind of system, you can do extraordinarily well on relatively few votes, but it creates a lot of instability. And I think part of the reason the Labour government is a fragile government, and has been from Day One, is that voters recognize there’s a mismatch between the power they have in Parliament, and the fact that almost no one voted for them.
And this also explains some of the fear that Reform, which is hovering around the twenties in national polls, could potentially lead the next government, whereas the German far-right party, the AfD, is also polling in the twenties but has no chance to form the next government.
Yeah. Under the German system, the other parties can govern with each other, and agree among themselves that they won’t let the AfD into government. Under the British system, it’s up to the voters to work this out. If you don’t want a Reform government, you have to decide in your individual constituency who is most likely to beat them. And the voters are pretty good at this. They’re pretty shrewd. But it’s not a foolproof system at all. And of course, not all voters are thinking in those terms when they vote. So there is a real fear that with an even lower share of votes than Labour got last time, Reform could win a large majority.
What is the Reform Party right now? Farage has had different incarnations in his career and has led different types of political parties, but where do you see Reform on the spectrum of other right-wing nationalist parties?
Farage has been through various guises. But like all of Farage’s parties, Reform is very much his party. He absolutely dominates it. In the earlier guises, his parties had a single issue: Get Britain out of the European Union. Once that was successful, he then pivoted to Reform, making it essentially an anti-immigration party. That’s complicated now in Britain because net migration has fallen dramatically, and although that fact hasn’t quite filtered through to the electorate, it’s starting to filter through. It’s much harder to make the anti-immigration case now. And so he’s pivoted to turning Reform into a climate-skeptic party. It’s still an anti-immigration party for sure. It’s also an anti-welfare party; there’s quite a lot of rhetoric about paring back the welfare state.
But the really interesting thing with Reform is that about six months ago, they clearly thought they had a chance of replacing the Conservatives. They were riding high in the polls. The Conservatives looked very weak. Kemi Badenoch, their leader, had had a very rocky start after succeeding former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. And Farage started doing the thing he said he’d never do, which is recruiting former Tory politicians into his ranks, and it damaged him. These were people associated with the failed governments of Theresa May and Boris Johnson and, God forbid, Liz Truss. And it made Reform look like a sort of warmed-up, or not even warmed-up, Conservative party. And I think he’s recognized that was a mistake. And in these elections, he’s gone back to what he does best, which is making it about Farage and a kind of rabble-rousing populist politics.
And it’s very effective, but it has a ceiling. If he could replace the Conservative Party and get forty per cent of the vote, he would be Prime Minister. And this kind of populism probably takes him maximally to thirty per cent of the vote, which could be enough.
