Polls closed across the UK on Thursday 7 May 2026 for local elections across the UK. In England, around 5,000 local councillors across 136 councils (including all London boroughs) as well as six mayors were up for election. These councillors are responsible for day‑to‑day local services such as housing, planning and social care. The same day also saw voters in Scotland elect a new Scottish Parliament and voters in Wales elect the Senedd, making it an important election day across the UK.
Local councillors in the UK are members of national political parties, meaning the local elections are generally a real indicator of the political mood of the country, and this election marked a real test for the unpopular ruling Labour Party and its leader, Keir Starmer. Given the dreadful polling of Labour ahead of the vote, it is no surprise that they have done terribly. Starmer has pledged to stay on as Prime Minister, but with such bad results and MPs calling for his resignation, his future looks more uncertain than ever.
The end of two party Politics
At the time of writing, it is looking like Labour will have suffered one of their worst ever electoral defeats, only two years after Starmer came to power in a wide but shallow landslide general election victory in July 2024. By Friday morning, Labour had lost around half of the council seats it was contesting, losing big in its former industrial heartlands.
In government, Labour has struggled to create visible improvements to peoples’ lives. Starmer’s overly cautious, centrist government has shown little sense of purpose or ambition. Restraint on public spending and lack of progress on cost of living issues, as well as more recent scandals such as his appointment of Epstein associate Peter Madelson as ambassador to the US, have drained energy from the party, weakened grassroots loyalty, and shown Labour to be completely out of touch with the everyday frustrations of working people.
Early analyses of the results thus far show that decline in the Labour vote share correlated with the rising vote share for the Greens, led by Zack Polanski. The Greens are outperforming their expectations in target urban communities such as Hackney. In Manchester, they hoped to take six council seats, but instead won 17. They made gains in Sheffield and in Newcastle and they increased their vote share in Stockport, Oxford, and Exeter. In recent weeks Labour’s leadership have run a dishonest smear campaign against the Greens, reminiscent of the post-2016 Corbyn years, hoping to lower their vote. However, rather than being crushed, Zack Polanski’s Greens look well positioned to replace Labour in areas of its urban heartland.
On the right, the Conservatives performed similarly poorly, losing control of councils such as Essex County Council (which they have controlled for 25 years) to the far right party, Reform UK. Reform look to be the real winners of the night, and having swept through small-town England and winning more than 1400 council seats, they look as though they will confirm their place as England’s most popular party.
In the two home nations, nationalist parties took the lion’s share of the votes. In Wales, Plaid Cymru is tipped to be the largest party in the Senedd, ending 100 years of Labour control, and in Scotland, Labour have been comprehensively beaten by the Scottish National Party.
What all of this underlines is that the already struggling two-party domination of British Politics is in terminal decline.
What comes next?
Certainty about the future is hard to come by in 2026, meaning predictions will be subject to change more than ever, but here are some key developments I will be paying close attention to:
The rise of Reform: Reform have solidified their position as the most popular party in the UK and it is a very real possibility that Nigel Farage could become Prime Minister of the UK in 2029. Needless to say this would be a disaster. Reform’s platform focuses on hardline immigration controls, opposition to climate policies, support for privatisation, austerity, and further suppression of the left. Rather than offering an alternative to the status quo, their politics represent an intensification of all the forces that have systematically reduced living standards for the working class over the last 30 years. The fact that Nigel Farage was recently found to have accepted a personal gift of £5m from a crypto billionaire speaks volumes about the class of people this party represents. Interestingly, Reform seem to have achieved a lot of success at this election without the traditional ‘ground game’ characteristic of major parties. A party winning on an ‘digital first’ strategy would be significant, and says something about the way in which people are interacting with politics and becoming mobilized in 2026.
A new Labour leader: Voters across England, Scotland and Wales have given a clear verdict on this Labour government. If it doesn’t change course and change leaders, it risks total wipeout in three years’ time. Labour activists have talked about how unpopular Keir Starmer was with voters on the doorstep and with the growing popularity of alternatives such as Andy Burnham, we’ll have to see who might be ready to make the first move and whether it all might be too little too late.
The need for coalition building: The electorate is fragmented across several parties, posing challenges for all parties in the first-past-the-post system. Both Labour and the Conservatives are losing votes to parties on their left and right and are clearly concerned that turning to either risks losing votes on their other side. However, a coalition government may be inevitable and politicians on the left should get wise to this if they are to stop the far right. Vital to forging an effective coalition is finding a politics that really speaks to the mass workers and the historical moment in which we find ourselves. The shape of these coalitions may become more apparent over the coming months, but what’s clear is that Starmer’s ‘politics from nowhere’ isn’t going to cut it.
The rise of petit-bourgeois politics: Reform have been positioning themselves for some time as a pro-business party, targeting self-employed people, freelancers, and small business owners with the promise of tax cuts, deregulation, and the abolition of off-payroll working rules. Indeed, the petit-bougeois-ization of British politics can be traced all the way back to Thatcher, but on the left it has been interesting to notice the pitch of Greens towards the non-unionized and self-employed workers of the UK. For example, the Green Party’s winning candidate in February’s high profile Gorton and Denton by-election, Hannah Spencer, is a plumber, and her credentials as a tradesperson were in some ways her biggest selling point. This is very different to the ranks of trade unionists that Labour have traditionally drawn from, such as the former Home Secretary Alan Johnson, who started his working life as a postman and climbed up the union ranks from shop steward to union prominence to eventual nomination for Parliament. This is not to say that tradespeople are not also working people, but in an era where stable income and unionized jobs feel further and further away, especially for young people, it is important to take notice of this shift in where parties might see their base of support being and understand the change in class dynamics that surround it.
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