Elections across Britain on May 7 delivered a political earthquake on multiple fronts. The far-right Reform U.K. party recorded sweeping gains in England, Wales, and Scotland, while the Labour Party of Prime Minister Keir Starmer suffered devastating losses across the board.
Many constituencies in England’s local council elections have not yet reported results, but the numbers in as of now show a massive win for Donald Trump’s British allies. Reform U.K., led by right-wing anti-immigrant nativist Nigel Farage went from two seats to nearly 1,000 as of press time, with the numbers still climbing. Farage rightfully declared it “a truly historic shift in British politics.”
The Labour Party, by contrast, has so far lost more than 800 seats, dropping to third place in the nationwide local counts. The defeats were even felt in the party’s traditional northern working-class strongholds like Sunderland, Barnsley, and Wigan, communities that had been Labour’s electoral backbone for generations.
The Conservative Party saw a similar collapse, chopping more than 450 seats from its total and coming in fourth. The centrist Liberal Democrats are currently in second, with over 660 seats, while the Greens have gained, putting them more than 300.
In parliamentary elections in Wales and Scotland, results still coming in Friday pointed to historic collapses in Labour support in both those places, as well. The earthquake from the right is set to reshape British politics from top to bottom ahead of the next general election.
England’s right-wing surge
Reform U.K. is no ordinary conservative party. Running on the slogan of “Restoring Britain’s Power and Prosperity,” it pushes the equivalent of a Make Britain Great Again agenda, adapted from its MAGA cousins.
Its platform calls for a total freeze on non-essential immigration, a mass deportation program modeled on the U.S. ICE agency, and withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights.
Behind the nationalist veneer and racist positions is a program of class warfare waged on behalf of Britain’s wealthy elite. Farage and his party—bankrolled heavily by millionaire donors from the finance and fossil fuel industries—propose abolishing inheritance tax, cutting the top rate of income tax, and eliminating capital gains tax altogether, redistributing wealth upward on a staggering scale.
At the same time, Reform would gut Britain’s public National Health Service through privatization by stealth, repeal hard-won workers’ rights, and scrap environmental regulations that constrain corporate profit. Its anti-immigrant rhetoric, while genuinely held, also serves a calculated economic function: directing the anger of economically dispossessed working-class communities away from the landlords, hedge fund managers, and energy executives responsible for their conditions, and toward migrant workers who share those conditions.
It is a politics with deep historical precedent stretching back to Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and Nick Griffin’s British National Party—using race and nation to bind working people to a program that exploits them, while the financial ruling class that funds Reform quietly pockets the gains.
The party plans to repeal Britain’s newly passed Employment Rights Act—stripping workers of protections including day-one sick pay and bans on exploitative zero-hours contracts. This is matched with handouts to the wealthiest in the country, with £70 billion ($95 billion USD) in annual tax cuts, funded partly by abandoning Britain’s climate commitments.
The U.K.’s largest trade union, UNISON, has warned these proposals amount to an American-style dismantling of the public sector. General Secretary Andrea Egan said Friday morning that Labour “faces political oblivion because it’s simply not delivering for the majority of people.” She berated the party, saying “only a Labour government which unashamedly puts the interests of workers before the wealthy can succeed…. That means taxing the super-rich to repair public services, guaranteeing workers are paid their fair share, and ending the outsourcing racket by bringing public services back under public ownership.”
UNISON had sharp critiques of a different kind for Farage’s party. “Reform claims to oppose the elite, but all that’s offered is more of the same: Attacks on workers and migrants, backed by billionaire funders.”
For Starmer—who swept to power in a landslide general election less than two years ago, winning 63% of seats in the House of Commons—the results are damning. Labour’s national support in polls collapsed from around 35% to roughly 20% just before the current elections, but it may not even end up capturing a fifth of the council seats. Public backing for the Labour Party has eroded due to the government’s failure to address the ongoing cost-of-living crisis, as pointed to by Egan and UNISON.
Voters blame Labour and the other main party, the Conservatives, for a seemingly endless economic crisis. Wages across the country have generally stagnated since the 2008 financial crisis, and years of budget cuts have left public services dilapidated. More than a quarter of public sector jobs have been cut in the same period of time.
The prime minister has also been dragged over the coals in the media thanks to a scandal involving former ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson’s documented ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Having appointed Mandelson, Starmer contributed further to public sentiments that he was not up to the job.
Starmer acknowledged the Thursday losses were “very tough” but is refusing calls to resign as Labour leader and prime minister.
Wales: Historic collapse for Labour
In Wales, where voters were also electing members to the Welsh Parliament (the Senedd) under a new proportional voting system, early results Friday pointed to a catastrophic result for the Welsh Labour Party.
The party, which has governed Wales continuously since its parliament was established in 1999, appeared on course to be reduced from 30 to around 10 seats. Plaid Cymru—the Welsh nationalist party—and Reform U.K. emerged as the two leading forces in a three-way race that could end Labour’s unbroken 27-year grip on Welsh government.
In a rally in Wales on Tuesday night, Farage declared that his party would “make history.” He railed against what he called an “invasion” of undocumented immigrants, drawing shouts from the crowd of “Get them out!”
The Welsh Labour deputy leader conceded defeat Friday morning, with the party saying it was “deeply disappointed.”
Scotland: SNP holds, but Reform could break through
In Scotland, where voters elected a new Scottish Parliament (Holyrood), the Scottish National Party (SNP), a social democratic party, appeared on track for a fifth consecutive term in government, though likely short of an outright majority.
The more striking story may end up being Reform U.K.’s breakthrough north of the border. The party, which held zero seats in the Scottish Parliament just five years ago, was projected to win around 18–19 seats based on pre-election polling. The count is still underway, but if this prediction is fulfilled, Reform will be competing with Labour for second place.
Support for Farage’s party appears to be concentrated in post-industrial and semi-rural communities where economic precarity has deepened. Steel, coal mining, and heavy manufacturing industries once dominated these areas, but with the jobs long gone, Reform has found success with a “left behind” message among voters who feel the Labour Party hasn’t done anything for them in a generation.
Warnings from the left
For the left, the results illustrate the dangers that come when the Labour Party governs in the interests of the ruling class rather than the working class. The Communist Party of Britain (CPB) has sounded the alarm for months that a political crisis was coming and that Labour’s embrace of austerity and its abandonment of workers created a vaccum that the far right would fill.
Former CPB leader Robert Griffiths warned in December 2025 that “people’s anger and frustration at the Labour central government’s failure to control energy and housing bills, improve local services, and tackle Britain’s chronic housing crisis is enabling Reform U.K. to peddle its bogus agenda.”
The CPB has argued repeatedly that the far right can only be defeated if the labor movement reclaims its role as the genuine challenger to vested power and a failing economic system—rather than managing it on behalf of the powerful, as Starmer has done.
A year ago, Johnnie Hunter, a member of the party’s executive committee, said that Starmer’s—and by extension, the Labour Party’s—unpopularity was linked to “austerity and a failure to invest in public services” while funding war and militarism abroad. Reform U.K., Hunter said, “clearly represent the naked big business interests of finance both here and in the United States, and seek to mislead working people with typical anti-immigrant rhetoric.”
However, the CPB has said that Reform’s rise can’t be explained by appeals to racism alone. “Their success lies in presenting themselves as an anti-Establishment force,” according to Hunter. The further shift of social democratic parties’ agendas away from working-class concerns is facilitating the rise of the right, according to the party.
“The response of the left and trade union movement can’t be to write off all working people duped into voting Reform as knuckle-dragging racists,” Hunter said.
Bad signs ahead
The results carry profound implications for the next U.K. general election, which must be held by 2029. Farage called Thursday’s elections “the single most important event” before that vote.
Reform’s ability to compete across England, Wales, and now Scotland—from rural counties to urban working-class neighborhoods—signals that the traditional Labour–Conservative two-party system is fracturing.
Whether the broader left can offer a compelling alternative before Reform consolidates its hold on dispossessed working-class communities remains the defining question for British politics over the next few crucial years.
CONTRIBUTOR
