Well, it wasn’t a great week for the public broadcasters in Britain and here in Australia. I’m talking about the BBC and ‘our’ ABC, the journalists who describe any party to the right of a David Cameron or a Malcolm Turnbull-led Coalition as ‘far right’. The same journalists who love to characterise those who are against wide-open mass immigration from the impoverished Islamic world as ‘populists’. Well, as I said, last week was a bad week for these inner-city, metropolitan elitists journos who virtually all vote for – nothing to see here folks, really, just a coincidence – Labour (with or without the ‘u’) or the Greens or the lovey Teal Lib Dem types.  I’m sure you’ll be as sad as I am that they had a really bad week.

Why?  Let me start with England’s local council elections. From a standing start, Nigel Farage’s Reform party won a massive victory. It won an incredible 1,451 council seats. More importantly, the UK’s Labour party suffered by far the biggest losses ever in local council elections losing just shy of 1,500 councillors. And the bulk of the damage came in the north of England with working-class voters deserting Labour in steroidal droves for Nigel’s Reform party. It was an annihilation of historic proportions, one that left Labour leader ‘Two Tier Keir’ Starmer looking like a dead man walking. Of course, there was a very small bit of good news for the BBC types watching this all with tears falling into their organic French wine. You see the Conservative party also did badly.  Not Labour party catastrophic. More like a Labour-lite bad result, which I suppose was fit and proper given that’s the way the Conservatives governed for fourteen years. The Tories lost 563 council seats, as well as being made more or less invisible in the devolution elections in Scotland and Wales. (Did I mention that for the first time in the history of the Welsh devolved elections, Labour lost power there?) Given that their official name is the Conservative and Unionist party – a signal of their support for the Union of England with Wales and Scotland – and that they have largely been driven out of those Celtic parts of the United Kingdom, they might want to avoid any ‘truth in advertising’ lawsuits. Reform is now the right-of-centre union party in Scotland and Wales.

Meantime, what about that fake environmental party now devoted to the Palestinian cause, the Greens?  (And yes, the Green party leader in Britain did say just before these English local council elections that Gaza was on the ballot.) Well, I only know the results before the polls in Gaza have reported, but this party whose core supporters are young females (you tell me why, it’s a baffler to anyone who knows how women fare in the Islamic Middle East) picked up 441 council seats, mostly in the university towns, London, the usual suspects. That puts the Green party in fifth place in terms of council seats held. And behind the lovey-dovey Teal-like Lib Dems who picked up 155 seats to take their overall tally to 844.

Put it this way. No one denies that this was a massive win for Reform. Nigel Farage’s odds of becoming the next prime minister of Britain went up as soon as the results came in. He’s now the commanding favourite. Better yet, Labour now joins the Tories as facing an existential crisis. Where the Tories are losing to Reform on one side and to the Turnbullesque Lib Dems on the other, Labour now faces something similar. Labour are being attacked on the political right and left too. Last election Labour won virtually the entire north-east working-class vote and so myriad Labour MPs hold seats there. Now, though, Reform is obliterating the party there as these voters move en masse to Reform.  If Labour refuses to cut immigration massively and end the wokery all those Labour seats will go next election. But down in the south Labour is losing to the socialist, pro-Gaza Greens from the other side.  Like the Tories, then, they’re now wedged.  Damned if they do and damned if they don’t.  Hence the tears from the BBC head office.  (Full disclosure readers: I was ever so slightly more jubilant about these results.)

Which takes us some 17,000 kilometres to the Farrer by-election in New South Wales. Here was a first. Neither the Coalition nor Labor made the two-party preferred calculation. And One Nation scored just a smidgen under forty per cent first preferences – a tally that will have the Coalition scared witless. Well, that and the Liberal candidate’s 12.4 per cent first preference tally and the Nationals’ 9.8 per cent. That is doing more than sending a message to the Coalition. It goes almost without saying that the woman who put the Coalition into this spot by resigning her seat, former leader Sussan Ley, went from not having uttered a peep since being deposed to pontificating about her party’s need to ‘change or die’. I think that’s what Angus Taylor is trying to do, Sussan. It was you, two-sibilant Sussan, who moved the Coalition even further into the no-win Labor-lite terrain. Taylor is trying to perform a disciplined retreat back into John Howard and Tony Abbott-type ground.

But here’s the key question that links Nigel Farage and Pauline Hanson and their insurgent political parties. Can the established, long-time political parties of the right rebuild the trust with their former core voters? In Britain it is looking very, very bleak for the Tories. Everything that Labour is doing now the Tories did earlier, just more softly, without conviction, and in breach of their election promises. Yes, they are now saying it will never happen again. But why believe the four-time philandering husband who promises ‘this time is different, dear’?

My view is that things are not quite so dire for the Coalition here in Australia. Bad, really bad? You bet. And things are particularly awful for the Nationals. Why in the world did the Coalition recently allow the Queensland preselections for the Senate spots to be brought forward by a year? All that did was let Senator James McGrath – a key player helping Malcolm Turnbull knife Tony Abbott – lock in the top spot forcing Matt Canavan (the leader of the Nationals and someone Taylor needs if he’s going to resuscitate the Coalition) to the number two spot. I’m not voting for McGrath. Worse, on current polling Canavan will not be re-elected. Surely Canavan and Taylor could have delayed this decision. Where is the willingness to fight?

Still, Australia’s virtually unique (and in my view awful) preferential voting system makes insurgency far harder here than with any other voting system in the democratic world. If Taylor starts announcing actual big ticket policies he can turn this around. (And I mean ones with details, like ‘how many immigrants per year, all up, will you let in and if you overshoot you promise to resign’ type promises, not waffling abstractions about how values matter and which we all know amount to nothing.) This is existential for the Libs and Nationals. Waiting till near an election to say precisely what you’ll do is, in my view, folly

Anyway, it was a deservedly great week for what the public broadcasters disdainfully label ‘the populists’.