Voters are tired of Broken Britain. Labour has no answers

Originally published by the Telegraph.

Every devolved administration in the United Kingdom is now led by a party hostile to it: the SNP in Edinburgh, Plaid Cymru in Cardiff, Sinn Féin in Belfast. Does it mean the end of the world’s greatest country, the country that defeated Bonaparte and Hitler, that ended slavery, that planted law and liberty on every continent? You might think that our media would be consumed by the question – as, indeed, some overseas commentators are. Here, though, we seem more interested by whether Keir Starmer can cling on.

In fact, the Starmer dégringolade and the resurgence of Celtic nationalism are two sides of the same coin. That coin is British state failure. Michelle O’Neill, the First Minister of Northern Ireland (where there were no elections this year) responded to the results in Great Britain by declaring that Welsh and Scottish voters were “tired of the shackles of Westminster”, and promising to work with her fellow nationalist premiers. “More and more people are looking towards a future beyond the constraints of the Union,” announced the Sinn Féin leader. Well, maybe. But there are still pro-Union majorities in all four constituent nations.

Local elections are not referendums on separation. Around half of Plaid voters oppose Welsh independence, but backed the party for other reasons: to punish Labour, stop Reform, or “send a message to Westminster”. The equivalent proportion of SNP voters is lower. Nicola Sturgeon used to appeal explicitly to Unionists by telling them that independence would be decided separately in a referendum. John Swinney, her current successor, was more honest, explicitly asking Scots to give him a majority to break away. That change of tactics helps explain why the SNP lost ground.

What we are seeing is not a determination to throw off “the shackles of Westminster”. The UK is one of the few polities whose constituent regions can simply vote to leave – a point that Irish nationalists, in particular, hate acknowledging.

Instead, voters are fatigued at the administrative failings of the state. Taxes rise and public services decay. We give more to idle working-age adults than we take in income tax from working adults. Our young entrepreneurs are relocating to Dallas, Dubai, even Dublin, their places taken by illegal entrants from backward lands.

English voters expressed their frustration by switching to Reform and (to a lesser extent) the Greens. Reform also advanced in Wales and Scotland, but the clearest way to signal contempt for the administrative machine there was to vote for candidates who wanted to break away from it.

The consequences were catastrophic for Labour, which used to treat Wales and Scotland as dependable batteries. Keir Hardie, the party’s founder, was a Lanarkshire trade unionist who sat for Merthyr Tydfil. Urban Scotland gave Labour its majorities for half a century until the 2014 independence referendum. In Wales, although the seats were fewer, the dominance was longer. Labour had won every election there since 1922 – until this week.

While Reform was the overall winner in the elections, other opposition parties could find bright spots. The Greens recorded their best-ever result, as did the assorted anti-Israel independents. The Lib Dems, who had feared losing ground to the Greens, instead made small gains for the eighth year in a row.

The Conservatives, who were at their post-vaccination high point when these seats were last contested, and who had feared a wipe-out, came back in their old London strongholds of Wandsworth, Westminster and Bexley, and recovered in equivalent suburbs elsewhere, such as Trafford.

As this column never ceases to point out, the Tories and Reform have complementary electoral geographies, the former being strong in southern England and commuter towns, the latter – after Thursday, more than ever – dominating the old Red Wall. Only in eastern England are both parties competitive, especially in Essex, where Kemi Badenoch and other senior Tories have their seats, but where Reform is now ahead.

Labour’s policy of neglecting its old electorate to court minority voters has resulted in the loss of both groups. The party’s failure is embodied in the person of Starmer: flat-footed, robotic, incapable of either outlining his vision or adapting to circumstances.

The party could, on paper, recover. In 2019, the Conservatives came back from 8.8 per cent at the June European election under Theresa May to win 42.3 per cent of the vote at the December general election under Boris Johnson. It is plain, though, that Labour will not recover under Starmer.

If the party’s MPs have any instinct for self-preservation, they will dispatch their leader now, with all the coldness and efficiency of so many abattoir workers. But a combination of dim-wittedness, optimism bias, game-playing about the likely successor, foot-dragging by Andy Burnham’s supporters and sheer cowardice means that they may well miss their moment.

The remaining Starmer loyalists protest that the electorate’s gripes predate their man’s leadership, and they have a point. Even before the 2024 election we were taxing, spending and borrowing too much, a consequence of the lockdown (which Starmer, never forget, wanted to deepen and prolong). While the Prime Minister has exacerbated these problems, increasing taxes in order to hike spending on benefits, it is fair to say that the same challenges would confront any successor.

Britain’s lockdown was more strictly observed than most, and our furlough scheme more generous. The consequence was a series of malign and so far irreversible social changes – not just rises in prices, tax and debt, but rises in truancy, anti-social behaviour and welfarism. Long Lockdown explains why public services don’t work, and why we are falling behind our competitors.

It is hard to see any alternative Labour leader addressing these problems. On the contrary, the dynamics of a Labour leadership contest would almost certainly encourage every candidate to make vast new spending commitments, as well as expensive concessions to the EU. The return of Gordon Brown is a symptom of everything that is going wrong. For Starmer, determined to buy himself time as leader, it represents a return to Labour’s comfort zone. For the rest of the country, it represents a return to the profligacy that left us destitute by 2010, the policies that ended with a note in the Treasury saying that there was no money left.

We treat local elections as miniature referendums on the central government. The parties themselves encourage it. Reform candidates talk about immigration, Greens about Gaza, all the opposition parties about “getting Starmer out”.

An obvious solution is to give local authorities real powers, so that elections attract a higher calibre of candidate and a higher turnout. A proper link between taxation, representation and expenditure at local level (at present, three quarters of council budgets come from the Treasury) would improve the quality of local services as well as the quality of local democracy.

Genuine localism, of the kind taken for granted in other advanced democracies, is also the most effective response to separatism. Yes, Scottish and Welsh voters feel disempowered; but so do English voters. They feel this way, not because their MPs “just don’t get it”, but because those MPs have little power over the things they care about.

Whether your issue is immigration or building an extension to your house, the policy is effectively determined by a series of administrative and judicial bodies that have been designed to be immune to public opinion. Shift those powers back to our elected representatives, especially at local level, and you tackle the root cause of our discontents.

Even Starmer seems, far too late, to have grasped the problem. He complains regularly about unresponsive state agencies, about quangos that pursue their own agendas (most recently ticking off the Arts Council for funding anti-Semitic works). Yet he is the ultimate creature of procedure, a politician who would never dream of disputing a civil service review, let alone challenging a court decision. Nothing will get better while he remains in office.