Britain is sullen. Last year the Labour Party won the general election in a landslide that was a mile wide but only an inch deep. That vote, which gave Labour a commanding majority on a vote share of 34 percent, reduced the Conservative Party to a rump of just 121 seats and, for the first time ever, elected five lawmakers from the far-right anti-immigration Reform U.K. party. Still, the outcome was widely viewed with relief: Britain had been granted a reprieve — five years to show Britons that the center could still work for them.
Almost a year in, Labour is flailing and unpopular. Britain’s struggling public services need vast amounts of spending, which the party had promised to finance not with higher taxes but with sustained growth that has proved elusive. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been warily triangulating an unpredictable American president with invitations from King Charles III and plans to increase spending on defense. Culture wars have continued to rage, groceries are still expensive and housing is costly and scarce. Aggrievement has settled over the land like dust.
Local elections on Thursday are an opportunity for voters to register their discontent, and Reform U.K., which is standing candidates in almost every contest, is polling ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives.If the party performs well, it will be a clear signal that 2024 was merely a reckoning postponed.
A few weeks ago I took a train from Cornwall, where I live, to the Midlands, to attend the launch of the Reform U.K. local election campaign in Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city. In 2023 the Birmingham local council effectively declared itself bankrupt and is now both raising taxes and cutting services — a paradigm of the nation and fertile soil for Reform U.K., which had the good fortune to be holding its conference during a garbage worker strike, as thousands of tons of rubbish piled up across the city. “Rats ‘bigger than cats’ are roaming Britain’s second-biggest city,” CNN reported.
In an aging sporting and entertainment arena, many party members and supporters wore its signature turquoise, which is slightly bluer than Tory blue. Nigel Farage, Reform U.K.’s leader, has suggested that the party could take over the Tories, and the turquoise is a tank on the lawn. In the greenish-blue sea of cocktail dresses and ties I spotted a red jacket emblazoned with “Make Britain Great Again” and a few union jack suits.
The stage was set with street furniture illustrative of various grievances: large trash cans and piles of uncollected garbage; a fake pub, the Royal Oak, with a “To Let” sign; a cinema showing a film called “Tax Me if You Can.” The number of unfilled potholes in Nottinghamshire, a nearby county, at one point flashed up on a large screen: an alleged 62,288!