Britain’s political pundits are enjoying themselves commenting on the shock results of municipal elections which have seen the governing Labour Party’s candidates humiliated.

More than 1,000 of Sir Keir Starmer’s men and women running local councils across the country have been voted out of office.

Two big winners

The first big winner is Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform Party with its classic anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-European lines.

The second big winner is the far-left Green Party which has almost completely departed from traditional classic Green environmental and ecology issues.

It has turned into an anti-Israel party, promoting every modish and/or fringe identity and socio-cultural demand, including legalizing men paying for sex with vulnerable women or the complete liberalization of all hard drugs.

A serious political moment 

Despite their local focus, local council elections in UK have always been a giant opinion poll with real voters casting real votes on whatever the national government of the day might be.

Thus, the news for Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, is devastating. Calls from inside the Labour Party for another leader are only going to intensify.

Notably, such calls are no longer coming mostly from people who want their party to pursue a more leftist course than Starmer’s pragmatic one.

The Starmer wager

The reason why he should go are hard to detect from abroad.  After all, Starmer became prime minister in 2024 , on the back of a giant majority of 411 Labour MPs out of the 650 MPs in the House of Commons.

And no doubt, he has turned out to be good on the international stage.  He has, for example, stood up to Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu on the war with Iran which is causing global economic havoc. He also rejected Trump’s claim to annex Greenland and has stood firm on giving support to Ukraine while Trump panders to Putin.

An apprentice in high office

But as is now glaringly obvious, Starmer’s training as a human rights lawyer, after a brief flirtation with Trotskyism at university, and his period as a government bureaucrat in charge of running the state prosecution machinery did not provide him with the required set of domestic political skills.

Starmer has made endless unforced errors. Becoming prime minister in his 60s, after he retired a wealthy man from his legal career, meant that he never had to do the apprenticeship most politicians do in their twenties, giving them many years of learning up close what voters want and communicating what a nation needs, and can and can’t do.

The biggest irony: All in on European politics now

Britain may have left the European Union.  And despite the clear economic failure of Brexit, for all of the UK’s party leaders there is no question of returning to the fold in Brussels, even if to take a seat at the top table of European policy decisions.

However, following this round of local council elections, it is clear that Britain now has rejoined the continent in a spectacular manner.

Due to the election results, the UK now features a fully continentalized political system.

The UK’s two-party system: A goner

The old verities of two centuries of Anglo-Saxon politics with just two parties taking turns at government under a so-called “first-past-the-post” majority system of winning power are over.

British politics today look as messy (or as lively, if you will) as Italy or Greece or Belgium.  Virtually overnight, the UK has to contend  with a multi-party system, obliging parties to enter into coalitions with other groups in order to have a majority to govern.

When will the UK media hear the shot?

Sadly, the establishment journalists who report on politics for the BBC and other elite media don’t really know what all of this means for what’s ahead.

One reason for their lack of knowledge is that most of them are mono-lingual (and mono-cultural!) denizens of Britain – a country which, vacations in sunny environs aside, has lost all interest in and knowledge of the rest of Europe.

The BBC managed to devote its flagship hour-long Sunday morning program to the UK elections without once mentioning the new British political landscape.

With the newly powerful parties of the far right and far left, and no party getting much above 20 per cent of votes cast, as well as an electoral system that promotes instability, anyone who takes part in or follows continental European politics would instantly recognize the challenges ahead.

Across the UK, regionalism is alive and well

The voting publics of the nations within the United Kingdom – the Welsh, the Scots and the Catholic nationalist-separatists of Northern Ireland – have all given majorities to parties rejecting a single state United Kingdom ruled from London and governed by an English elite.

Given the mess the UK is in as a country, it is no surprise whatsoever that these voters want their nations to slip free of London control and assert their identity as small independent nations within the EU.

Britain’s “post-communist” moment

Come to think of it, it is a moment quite similar to the end of communism in central, Eastern and Balkan Europe.

It, too, gave birth to renewed national identities that had been oppressed but clearly not forgotten.

At wit’s end?

It is difficult to see the British electoral clock being turned back. The five Brexit-era Tory prime ministers 2015-2024 all failed to win political support for their Brexit experiment.

Nigel Farage may be keen on his opening close links with Jordan Bradella, the presidential candidate of the French far-right. However, he should not get ahead of himself in his Brexit-mania.

The Europe question continues to plague British politics

Farage would do well to remember that two tough and experienced politicians, Marine Le Pen and Georgia Meloni, the at times Mussolini-nostalgic prime minister of Italy, have made it clear that the continental far right has made its peace with their countries remaining members of the EU.  They will certainly not follow Britain out of Europe.

The Europe question will continue to plague British politics.  The arrival of new populist identity parties and a suddenly emerged, very un-British leader cult of personalities like Nigel Farage and the Greens’ chief Zack Polanksi, who in an earlier life made money by claiming he could use hypnotism to enlarge women’s breasts, represent breaks with the country’s traditional past.

But that will ultimately add up to no more than a musical interlude.

Conclusion

It doesn’t help that the more global London’s population and the country’s other cities have become, the British media has never been more introverted and mono-lingual, with reporting of Europe at an all-time low.

King Charles who will soon be 80 presides over a kingdom that is unhappy and has no road map to a better future.

And, despite Keir Starmer’s many shortcomings, and Labour’s fears that he is now a proven political loser, nobody should expect another political leader to do much better with the steep challenges the United(?) Kingdom faces.

Former UK Minister for Europe & Contributing Editor at The Globalist

[United Kingdom]

Denis MacShane, a Contributing Editor at The Globalist, was the United Kingdom’s Minister for Europe from 2002 to 2005. He is the author of “Brexit: How Britain Will Leave Europe,” “Brexit No Exit. Why (in the end) Britain Won’t Leave Europe,” and “Brexiternity. The Uncertain Fate of Britain.” He is also the author of the 2007 Book “Globalizing Hatred, The New Antisemitism.”

Denis MacShane was the Member of Parliament for the UK’s Rotherham constituency, in South Yorkshire, from 1994 to 2012. In 2001, he was named a minister at the Foreign Office by Prime Minister Tony Blair.

In the early 2000s, he served as Minister at the Foreign Office in charge of relations with North and South America, Minister for the Balkans, Minister for Asia Pacific (Japan, China, Hong Kong, Korea, Australia) and subsequently as Minister for Europe.

He began his career as a BBC reporter. Before becoming an MP, he worked for the international trade union movement promoting trade union rights and wrote books on the steel industry and on global political issues. He set up and was first chairman of the Steel Group of MPs in the House of Commons and worked closely with the steel industry and trade unions in South Yorkshire.

Mr. MacShane was born in Glasgow, Scotland. He holds a Master’s degree from Oxford University and a Ph.D. from the University of London.