The UK had a few mostly-local elections a couple of weeks ago. The Guardian charted some of the results.
The grand story is an upsettingly huge shift in councillor numbers from the big two - Conservative and Labour - towards Reform. For the uninitiated , Reform is Nigel Farage’s company that masquerades as a British political party. Its politics could be described as right-wing populism, if one was being generous.
A few of the other smaller parties made gains too.
There was also one parliamentary byelection - Runcorn and Helsby. Which Reform also won, overcoming a huge 15,000 Labour majority by an astonishingly thin 6 votes.
To be fair the reason the by-election was needed was because the previous Labour incumbent was arrested for assault.
Sure, this doesn’t tell us too much about any future national result, let alone one that’s years away. But it can’t be a good sign, at least for for those of us who believe Reform is the polar opposite of a force for good. And who knows what damage they might do to the dwindling fragments of local services that just about remain in the mean time. Services people depend on to lead an effective life. Literally life-and-death services in some cases.
We need to figure out how to stop this onslaught.
I don’t have any great ideas.
There were also 6 elections for mayor, of which were for new mayorships that hadn’t existed before. Those two, Greater Lincolnshire and Hull & East Yorkshire, went to Reform. One of the existing ones switched from Labour to Conservative, and the other 3 stayed with Labour.