It may only be of small comfort to Australians mourning the 3 May landslide to Labor, but elections two days before show its British comrades in deep trouble. Yes, it’s probably four years until the next general elections and the 1 May elections were mainly local, and yet they signal a sea change in British politics. Most importantly, Reform UK has eclipsed the Tories as Britain’s most popular party on the right. The bookies now have Nigel Farage down as the favourite to be the next prime minister.

Farage’s triumph included winning 677 council seats across 23 councils, from both the Tories and Labour, and gaining control of ten.  For the first time, the Conservatives failed to win a majority in a single one. Reform UK also won the parliamentary by-election in Runcorn and Helsby, previously a Labour stronghold, its vote rising from 18 per cent at last year’s election to 39 per cent – the biggest swing against a governing party in Britain’s by-election history. Had the voting pattern been reflected in a national election, the Tories would have experienced a wipe-out, winning just twelve of the House of Commons 650 seats.

The results show that Reform UK has evolved into a professional campaigning party, hasn’t been damaged by Farage’s closeness to Trump and has shrugged off its ugly civil war earlier this year, when its high-profile MP Rupert Lowe was expelled from the party after criticising Farage. The party will use its new clout to wage war against waste and Labour policies. Not only will it axe working from home and resources spent on woke causes, Reform UK will endeavour to frustrate local net zero projects, such as plans to cover farming land with solar panels, and the use of hotels for illegal immigrants.

What explains Reform UK’s success? Essentially the fact that Britain has a radically left-green government whose policies and outlook are wildly out of step with the preferences of most voters.

Deputy Reform UK leader Richard Tice says that the main issues raised by voters on the doorstep were out-of-control immigration and the impact of net zero policies.  Contrary to the clear wish of voters, there’s no sign Labour is seriously interested in ending Britain’s mass immigration, which in the past twenty years has seen nine million people added to the population, to reach approaching 70 million in an area the size of Victoria.  Net immigration has approached a million per year in each of the last three years. Rather than slamming on the brakes, the Starmer government has just signed a trade deal with India which will admit an uncapped number of workers who will be cheaper than British workers, as 15-per-cent National Insurance won’t have to be paid for them. On cross-Channel illegal immigration, Starmer promised to ‘smash the gangs’, but there’s no sign of this. A further 34,000 have arrived since the election, including a record 11,000 so far this year.

The general leftist extremism of Labour’s policies seems almost designed to fuel Reform UK’s insurgency. Starmer’s net zero commissar Ed Miliband has broken Labour’s promise of a £300 annual cut in energy bills and presides over the West’s highest energy costs, driven by green levies and taxes, which are destroying industry and jobs and impoverishing households. Purely because of climate ideology, Miliband prefers to import gas and oil, rather than use Britain’s own, and insanely refuses to accept that taxes on energy companies translate into higher bills for consumers.

The backdrop to the elections included plenty of other reminders of Labour’s leftist extremism. Starmer, who long parroted woke orthodoxies on gender self-identification, reacted grumpily to the Supreme Court’s verdict that gender is immutably biological. Two-tier policing and justice continue to run rampant, and that includes Labour’s resistance to a national inquiry into the ‘grooming gangs’ outrage. Labour ministers, including Starmer, repeatedly reveal that they see the issue as ‘dog-whistle’, ‘far-right’ politics, and give every sign of placing higher priority on good relations with Muslims (and Muslim votes) than responding seriously to the mass abuse of white girls by predominantly Pakistani men. Labour’s class-warfare policies have made enemies of farmers and the independent school community.

Starmer’s decision to means-test the winter fuel allowance for 10 million pensioners also fed into the backlash against the party. He claims the decision, which saved £1.5 billion in the current financial year, was unavoidable for budgetary reasons. Meanwhile, Labour has managed to find £11.6 billion for international ‘climate aid’, £9 billion to lease the Diego Garcia base after it gives it to Mauritius and £1.3 billion this financial year alone to house illegal migrants in hotels.

After the 1 May upheaval, Starmer and Tory leader Kemi Badenoch will both be nervous about further falls in the opinion polls. If they manage to hold on to their jobs until the next round of local elections, in May 2026, the results could prove fatal for both. They will include elections Labour and the Tories manoeuvred to delay this year in many areas expected to be Reform UK strongholds, plus Wales and Scotland, where Farage’s forces have recently surged to second place.

Britain’s right is confronted with a closing demographic window as it wrestles with the left for control of the country’s future.  Andrew Neather, an advisor to Tony Blair and two of his home secretaries, revealed in 2009 that Labour under Blair opened the gates to mass immigration using the fig leaf of economic benefit but that ministers’ real motivation was to engineer a much more multicultural society which would weaken the right. Whatever Starmer says, it’s doubtful Labour is genuinely interested in curbing mass immigration or stopping the boats. The new arrivals mean ever more of its beloved ‘diversity’ and, its strategists will calculate, more Labour voters. The fact that Labour’s mediocre Sadiq Khan was easily re-elected as London mayor last year was attributed by many observers to the fact that the white British now form a minority of just 36.8 per cent in the capital. The list of British cities where non-indigenous minorities form the majority – now including Manchester, Birmingham and Leicester – continues to grow.   If Labour somehow sees off the right again in three or four years’ time, they could well be in charge forever.