The 2025 UK local elections have marked a significant shift in the nation’s political landscape, with an apparent breakdown in broad support for traditional parties and the far-right, racist Reform UK (previously the UK Independence Party and Brexit Party) emerging to fill the gap. Their impressive performance, including substantial gains in council seats and a notable by-election victory, is not only a sign of a potential realignment in British politics, but also signals Reform’s transformation from a single-issue party to a more electorally viable populist movement and potential realignment in British politics. The failure of centrist politics behind this upheaval may offer a warning to Canada—there is more turbulence to come.
UK Local Elections
Local elections in the UK determine the composition of local councils, who are responsible for essential services such as education, housing, and transportation. While they focus on local governance, these elections are a barometer for national political sentiment.
This year, 1,641 council seats across 24 local authorities were contested, alongside six directly elected mayoral positions.
Reform UK’s remarkable gains
Reform UK is a right-wing party known for its populist rhetoric and charged attacks on migration. After winning their first few seats in last year’s general election, Reform UK have just achieved a significant breakthrough in local elections, winning 31% of the vote across England and gaining a majority in 10 areas. The party took one council from Labour and eight other councils from the Conservatives.
Both Labour and the Conservatives lost two-thirds of their council seats, their worst local election performance on record. The Conservatives lost control of all 16 councils they held before the election. Although this was not a nationwide election, with elections being held in only 24 of England’s 317 councils, BBC projections estimate if local elections had been held nationwide, Labour and the Conservatives would have attracted only 35% of the vote between them, a historic low. Reform would have attracted 30% of the vote—the most votes out of any single party.
A highlight of Reform UK’s success was the Runcorn and Helsby by-election, where the party narrowly defeated Labour by six votes, overturning a previous Labour majority of 14,696 and gaining another MP in Parliament. This victory in what was considered a Labour stronghold underscores a larger shift in the UK’s political landscape.
National trends
The big takeaway is tentative but seems to be twofold. The first side is that Reform are popular nationally. An Ipsos survey recently revealed that 36% of respondents are likely to consider voting for Reform UK, compared to 31% for Labour, marking a significant decline for the latter since the 2024 general election. This is a concerning statistic.
Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, previously headed both the UK Independence Party and the Brexit Party. These were single-issue parties which focused on migration and the UK’s exit from the EU, but were not broadly electorally viable movements.
Reform UK, on the other hand, can be characterized as a far broader and electorally appealing far-right movement. Like other far-right parties, Reform capitalize on public frustration with traditional parties and attack migrants as scapegoats for various national issues. Most of this approach masks a thinly veiled platform of pro-business, anti-worker, and anti-migrant policies coupled with extreme government austerity that would lead to a further erosion of wages, working conditions, and social provision in the UK. This is all in a country which has already borne the brunt of aggressive forms of privatisation, neoliberalism, and austerity over the last 30 years, as well as the accompanying decline in living standards for the working class.
The other side is more evidence of English (and UK) politics moving further away from the longstanding duopoly of Labour and the Conservatives. Although Reform is now seeking to position itself as the main right-wing challenger to Labour, supplanting the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and Greens are also gaining support nationwide. It is important to note that only a portion of councils were up for election this year. The Green Party, for instance, maintains a substantial presence with 895 council seats and control of one council and delivered their best general election results ever just last year.
Thus, while Reform UK’s momentum is evident, the broader political landscape remains diverse and there is a significant movement fighting the right in the UK,. This includes organizations such as Stand Up To Racism, who campaigned against Reform UK across the country, distributing over 100,000 leaflets across England and campaigning in 13 county council elections as well as every mayoral election.
The failure of centre-left/right politics
This realignment away from the two traditional parties of the UK has not come from nowhere. Since coming to power last year in an election that was characterized by the failure of the Tories to address the cost of living crisis, the Labour government has shown itself to be unable to offer real political solutions or an alternative narrative to the status quo.
Since taking office just last year, Labour, in the interests of penny pinching, have suspended their own MP’s for supporting an end to the infamous (and Tory-invented) ‘two child benefit cap’, they have cut winter fuel payments for around 10 million pensioners, and cut disability payments for around one million people, including those with mental health conditions and physical disabilities. The changes to Personal Independent Payments in particular have sparked widespread criticism from disability rights organizations, who argue that the reforms could push disabled individuals further into poverty and exacerbate a range of health issues. The government’s own internal forecasts suggest that 3.2 million families could be adversely affected by 2029/2030, including 700,000 families already living in poverty.
It is in this context that Labour appears to have given away some votes to Reform UK. Its share of the vote is down by 11 points since 2021, and Farage was even able to boast after the election that Starmer has “alienated so much of his traditional base, it’s extraordinary”.
However, Labour is also vulnerable to its left. A recent study showed that the majority of Reform UK voters are not “Labour’s lost voters”. But there are nearly three times as many Labour voters who are open to voting for the Greens in comparison to being open to voting for Reform UK.
Despite this, the Labour government seems more than happy to respond to Reform UK’s win by further pandering to the racist scapegoating of migrants. Labour boasted about deporting people in the run-up to the elections and are seeking to go further. On Monday, they published their 69-page white paper entitled ‘Restoring Control Over the Immigration System’. The proposed changes will affect work, study, and family routes, reduce visa eligibility, decrease visa length, introduce harsher language requirements, and also increase the time it takes to gain permanent status in the UK from five to ten years. The changes will also tighten enforcement rules and make it easier to deport people from the UK. This will do nothing to undermine Reform UK’s support—it will further legitimise the lie that migrants are to blame for the problems in society.
Not only will these changes negatively affect many people already living and working in the UK (including people who have lived here since they were children), but the announcement itself has clearly adopted elements of the populist language once closely associated with Nigel Farage. Keir Starmer called for an end to the “one-nation experiment of open borders,” that migrants should “commit to integration” and “learning our language,” and that we need to “take back control of our borders.” He even said the UK risked becoming an “island of strangers” without the tough new policies, which some have claimed echoed Enoch Powell’s notorious and racist 1968 “rivers of blood” speech.
These are clearly concerning developments. As socialists, we know that migrants are not the ones responsible for workers’ low pay while profits remain high, or for cutting funding for schools and hospitals. Migrants did not sell off social housing and build luxury flats to charge extortionate rents. This was done by big business, landlords, and they were aided by both the Tory and Labour governments.
Lessons for Canada
Reform UK’s surge has significant implications for the UK’s political future but is also extremely relevant in Canada, given the centre-right government that has just been elected. Pierre Poilievre may have lost his seat for now, but the Liberals have already tacked to the right to win the election. Don’t be surprised to see this rightward shift happen further throughout the current parliament, and as the Liberals inevitably fail to improve the lives of working people through austerity, don’t be surprised to see the resurgence of a more virulent and aggressive far-right in Canada.
It is so important now for alternative organizations on the left to unite in order to fight the far-right, just as Stand Up To Racism did in the UK local elections. More than ever, we need to build a strong left movement that says “blame bosses and billionaires, not migrants” to millions of people both in the UK and internationally.
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