An unfillable political vacuum

Elections of any kind tend to trigger endless think pieces and hot takes, all of which I find achingly tedious. We’re still trotting out the same populist Brexity narratives about a great realignment - and even when they’re right, they’re still boring. It’s the same recycled shtick we’ve been reading since 2016. I think one of the reasons I have such an aversion to writing an analysis of the local elections is because I have an equal aversion to reading them. By now, you shouldn’t need me or anyone else to read the writing on the wall for you. I do find, though that Josh Hunt is a voice I make time for lately. This is his take…

After watching election coverage for two days, despite the nagging feeling I need to shower in bleach given the sheer amount of bs we've been bombarded with, here's my take on things...

This week Labour was hammered in the local elections. Starmer's favourability sits at -45 and the government's net approval is -49. Starmer has lost the public, and no series of bold calls, cabinet reshuffles or stern language is going to change that.

What's really striking to me, isn't that he's lost the public, that’s been clear for months. It's that there's no real plan for what comes next.

I feel like we’re heading towards a period of political paralysis. Labour still has a large majority in the HoC, but let’s be honest, in the general election Labour only managed 33% of the vote, which equates to about 1-in-5 voting age adults actually voting for them in the first place. So whilst electorally and legally, Labour has a mandate, it doesn’t in the ways that matter to voters… the trust, the belief, the sense that the country is actually being governed on its behalf. So there’s a major gap emerging between the government and the public.

So far there’s been no serious challenge from inside the party, and I believe that’s because there’s no obvious successor. So far some of the calls have been vague… “let’s give Starmer until Christmas”, which the more cynical among us will see as just a quiet manoeuvre to buy time in order to parachute Andy Burnham into a Westminster seat so he can, eventually, run for leader.

But let’s unpack that a little, because this is important.

Burnham isn't an MP. So to replace Starmer, a sitting Labour MP would first have to step aside and Burnham would then have to win the by-election. After a week in which Reform took Labour heartland councils, that's no longer a safe assumption. And I imagine Reform would be licking their lips at the prospect of a by-election designed to get a credible replacement for Starmer into Parliament. And assuming he wins (big if), there’d have to be a leadership challenge and eventual battle. Which would likely grind on for months.

And all of this would be happening with Iran at war, the economy softening, the cost-of-living spiralling, the gilt market questioning the country's financial credibility, and social tensions rising to a point where the country feels like a tinderbox.

The plan then, in other words, would be this… trigger a by-election, hope it holds, install a new leader without a public mandate, and call it stability.

That isn't stability. It's an admission that the current Prime Minister can't recover. It would be an admission that the parliamentary party can't produce a credible alternative from within and that the only route forward is a sequence of fragile gambles that all have to work, in order, for the strategy to land.

If a government has to go to these lengths just to find someone the public might tolerate, the question isn't who replaces Starmer. The question is why the country isn't being asked.

Of course, Labour members, MPs and supporters would say this is just speculation. And they’d be right, it is. But these are the questions going on in the minds of many now.

This is what paralysis looks like… a majority government that can't lead. It looks like a party that can't change direction without breaking its own rules. It looks like a public that has already moved on while Westminster argues about who gets to occupy a role the public no longer respects.

Of course, I'm not discounting the possibility that this all goes supernova over the coming weeks, and Prime Minister Rayner is in place to see us through to the next election. But I'm leaning towards paralysis for now.

In fairness, this isn’t just Labour. The widening gap is between Westminster and the country. And watching Nigel Farage speak last night, you really get a sense that Reform have picked up on that, and know how to use it.

As far as X goes, this analysis is about as good as it gets. Hunt is right in hinting that these results are not entirely Starmer’s fault. Labour was already a zombie party even when it took office. The electorate was already done with Labour and the fact they won the general election was an accident of numbers. Both Labour and the Tory party have been living on borrowed time for over a decade. I recall Brendan O’Neill pieces in the Telegraph over a decade ago talking about the empty charade of Westminster party politics. This is just the inevitable clear-out process that started with Brexit.

Hunt is also right in that what follows is political instability - and not just for the interim. Reform may be adept, as Hunt observes, at exploiting the disaffection in terms of winning votes, but Reform does not articulate a vision any more than Labour did. There is no unity of purpose behind Reform’s vote. All that's really changed electorally is that there is now a None Of The Above option. As such, we are seeing the completion of an electoral purge - but with no obvious end state.

You will get no argument from me that it was necessary and it’s been a long time coming, but the question on my mind is whether it actually gets us anywhere. Reform is doing its job of "smashing the uniparty" but there is no unified positive mandate for any particular agenda or manifesto. Nobody knows for sure what a Reform government would do - and we know that the things that need to be done are too rich for their blood.

Moreover, a broad coalition party like Reform has nothing to unite it. I don't see a Reform government playing out any differently to Johnson's Tories. At first will come the jubilation, but then comes the disintegration.

As it happens, this early success for Reform might be a liability since Reform clearly has no vetting process for local candidates, and the ideological make-up of the party at the local level will be as much a surprise to the leadership as everyone else. We will see a steady attrition of unsuitable individuals losing the whip. Reform councillors will be novices and opportunists who will struggle to do anything of note, which may sour Reform's prospects for 2029 - which still looks like hung parliament territory.

The point for me is that the destruction of uniparty creates a political vacuum but there is no force waiting in the wings to fill it. Certainly the "Green surge" isn't going to happen, not least because Moslems have noticed that Polanski is a degenerate - and the traditional Labour vote is going to Reform, which doesn't make for a functioning political vehicle in the long term, especially when its leadership are essentially liberal Tories. The party will stop far short of what needs to be done on immigration and will also stop short of making the necessary structural reforms to the NHS and the welfare state.

The question, therefore, is whether something can coalesce in time before Britain seriously starts falling apart. I don't think it can. There are no interim remedies and the levers that need to be pulled will remain unpulled, and Reform itself may disintegrate. There is already a gulf between the values of Reform voters and its leadership, which may end up recreating the verry disconnect that spurred the implosion of the traditional parties.

In this respect, Reform may implode even faster. Reform have hijacked the local elections for their own devices - to advance their political position nationally, without a local government manifesto or agenda, filling posts with novices and opportunists, who like the social capital but have no idea what councillors even do. That will bring its own problems and harm Reform’s reputation.

It may even be that the Reform surge doesn’t happen in 2029, leaving no party capable of forming a lasting government or coalition, where the result of this “great realignment” is to expose what many of us already suspect. Britain is a fragmented and ungovernable mess, and it will take a generation to return to anything resembling stability and good governance, assuming we can avoid the descent into civil conflict. It’s difficult for any party to articulate the hopes and aspirations of the British people when the people themselves are so fragmented and demoralised.