There’s something grimly farcical about the current state of British electoral politics. Four parties—Labour, the Conservatives, Reform UK, and the Liberal Democrats—are now polling within spitting distance of one another, each hovering around the 20 per cent mark. It’s not healthy pluralism. It’s collapse disguised as choice. The local elections on 1 May won’t decide a government, but they will offer a grim litmus test for a political order in its death throes.
Labour, still coasting on the fumes of Tory decline, can barely bring itself to make a promise. Starmer’s strategy is less “no enemies to the left” than “no positions at all.” The Conservatives, riven by internal conflict, now find themselves flanked on the right by Reform, a Frankenstein’s monster of Faragean spite, Facebook memes, and collapsing masculinity. The Lib Dems continue to nibble at the soft Tory shires, promising a return to decency. Meanwhile, the Greens, still treated as a fringe oddity by most broadcasters, may emerge as one of the few parties offering something that feels like conviction.
It’s not the first time British politics has cracked under pressure. The collapse of the Liberals after the First World War, the SDP’s schism in the 1980s, the New Labour project unravelling into austerity complicity. But this moment feels different. It’s not a crisis of ideological competition, it’s a vacuum. None of these parties can hegemonise because none can speak coherently to a social bloc that no longer exists.
Each party now represents fragments. Reform UK draws from disillusioned older men, alienated small business owners, the ex-industrial de-unionised, and those radicalised by culture-war ephemera. Labour clings to parts of the public sector, sections of the middle class, and a handful of urban trade unionists. The Lib Dems rely on the managerial-professional layer and the university towns. The Greens, surprisingly, are assembling a coalition of radicalised youth, disaffected Labour voters, and a portion of the climate-concerned middle class. There’s no unifying class force because neoliberalism has hollowed out collective identity. All that’s left is affect and anxiety.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the mayoral race for Greater Lincolnshire. Reform is surging in the region, buoyed by years of alienation, anti-migrant sentiment, and an opportunistic narrative about decline. Richard Tice, now nominally MP for Boston and Skegness—though more often found in Dubai than on the East Coast—is the party’s most polished vessel for Farage’s project. But it’s Andrea Jenkyns, made a Dame by Boris Johnson and until recently a loyal Tory culture warrior, who embodies Reform’s next phase. She jumped ship to stand as their mayoral candidate, trading blue for Reform red without changing a single line of her politics.
Jenkyns is not just any ex-Tory. She is a former minister at the heart of the party’s most reactionary turn, a regular in the Daily Mail and on GB News, and a professional scandal machine. Her campaign, like Farage’s, is built on stirring up imaginary enemies: net zero, migrants, woke ideology, the blob. What’s most alarming is that she might win. In a region long abandoned by both Labour and the Conservatives, and with Farageism now fully localised, Lincolnshire is becoming the testing ground for a new far-right realignment. The Tory right isn’t resisting it—they’re adapting to it, borrowing its language, accommodating its rage. Robert Jenrick, ever the opportunist, continues to manoeuvre for the Tory leadership as though the post were already vacant, working the WhatsApp groups and briefing sympathetic hacks, still convinced he’s Britain’s man of steel, a Mussolini for the Midlands, minus the charisma, and thankfully, the trains.
The Greens are mounting a credible challenge there, but it’s a hard fight. In an area hollowed out by post-industrial decline, where high streets are shuttered and council budgets slashed to the bone, voters are angry. And in the absence of a strong socialist alternative, that anger is being siphoned off by the right.
Miliband, to his credit, has finally gone on the offensive. His attack on Farage’s “nonsense and lies” over net zero was necessary—and bracing to hear from a Labour frontbencher who still remembers how to fight. But it was also conspicuous: Miliband, rather than Starmer or Streeting or Reeves, doing the dirty work. As if Labour still can’t quite bring itself to admit that Reform isn’t a passing nuisance but an organised insurgency. The attack came years too late. Labour let Farage rebrand, rebuild, and root himself again, unchallenged. For a party still terrified of offending Mail columnists, the very idea of mounting a sustained offensive against the far right feels almost revolutionary. But without it, the danger grows.
Net zero is an easy scapegoat for the right because the benefits are long-term and the costs (real or imagined) immediate. The Tories are already retreating from it. Labour looks likely to equivocate. And while Miliband talks sense, the leadership hedges its bets, worried about polling, headlines, and the mythical Red Wall voter who, if he exists at all, now likely votes Reform.
The media, for its part, presents this four-way fragmentation as a sign of vibrant democracy. In reality, it’s the political expression of a state no longer capable of resolving crisis through consensus. Westminster journalists still fixate on the horse race—who’s up, who’s down, who said what—while Farage re-enters the field with full-spectrum coverage, unhindered by scrutiny. Meanwhile, when Greens or independents speak to structural causes—inequality, capitalism, climate breakdown—they’re dismissed as unserious or radical.
We shouldn’t kid ourselves: the danger here is not just another hung council. It’s that the far right continues to normalise its presence, win council seats, shape discourse, and prepare the ground for a new authoritarian alignment. Jenrick, waiting in the wings to challenge Badenoch for Tory leadership, is positioning himself exactly for that: competent cruelty, polished dogma, nationalism in a suit.
And yet, there is possibility, too. The Greens, if they can hold their nerve and deepen their critique beyond technocratic environmentalism, could become the pole around which a red-green alliance takes shape. Not to win power in the immediate term, but to prepare for rupture, to speak to those alienated by Labour’s managerialism and disgusted by Reform’s bile.
The four-way tie isn’t the beginning of a new consensus. It’s the collapse of the old one. And on 1 May, we won’t be choosing the future, we’ll be registering our discontent with the past. Each ballot cast will land like ash on the pyre of the postwar settlement. What rises from the embers depends on whether we can build something together, before the far right does it for us.
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