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The UK’s Far Right Is On the March—Thanks to Keir Starmer

How the Labour Party’s catastrophic prime minister paved the way for fascists to dominate British politics.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage outside Havering Town Hall on May 8, 2026.

Two years ago, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won a historic parliamentary majority, returning to government after 14 years of austerity, Brexit, sleaze scandals, and a revolving door of prime ministers under Conservative rule.

The scale of Labour’s victory in terms of seats won was undeniable. But shrewd analysts noted something that the size of the majority threatened to obscure: Labour’s overall vote share had actually dropped relative to past elections. More than that, Labour’s success in flipping Tory seats was not entirely its own doing. Rather, all across the country, Reform UK, a new far-right party led by Brexiteer Nigel Farage, had systematically chipped away at Conservative votes, allowing Labour to come through the middle. In the end, Reform received the third-largest share of the votes of any party in the election, even though, thanks to the distortions of the United Kingdom’s first-past-the-post system, this breakthrough netted the party only five seats in the House of Commons.

The fact that more Reform candidates hadn’t won led some to declare that its forward march had been halted; one commentator concluded that “the British can also take comfort in the fact that their far right is nowhere [near] the levers of power.” But, as has now become all too clear, the party was just getting started.

Since then, Reform has surged in popularity and leaped over both Labour and the Conservatives in the opinion polls, which it has consistently led since the beginning of 2025. And this past week, the results from crucial elections across England, Scotland, and Wales proved that Reform is no longer a specter looming over the country’s future—it is the party of Britain’s present.

Last week’s elections—in which voters chose the members of local councils in England and the national parliaments in Wales and Scotland—were widely understood to be a referendum on the two years of Starmer’s premiership, which have been an objective disaster. Accordingly, pundits predicted a catastrophic Labour collapse. They were right.

Dragged down by the visceral loathing the entire country seems to have for Starmer, Labour suffered the worst local election defeat in its history. It lost nearly 1,500 local government seats in England and control of over 37 councils. It lost in the north, the Midlands, and the south. It lost councils and borough mayoralities in London. It lost control of the Welsh parliament, the Senedd, for the first time in its 27-year history—a drubbing that also marked the first time Labour failed to win an election of any kind in Wales in over a century. To underscore the depth of the crisis, incumbent Welsh Labour First Minister Eluned Morgan became the very first leader of a national government to lose their seat while in office in British history.

The vast majority of Labour’s losses were Reform’s gains. Reform increased its presence in local government by more........

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