Labour’s
nationwide collapse risks making Nigel Farage the face of the UK’s fragile
union
Rafael
Behr
Scottish
and Welsh nationalism will be further radicalised if Reform UK sets the tone of
debate over inclusion in the British state
Wed 6 May
2026 06.00 BST
Keir
Starmer has neither a heartland nor a stronghold. That is the picture likely to
emerge once all the votes in this week’s local and devolved elections have been
counted.
Council
seats in Labour’s traditional northern-English working-class base will fall to
Reform UK. Parts of inner London, where the electoral map has been red for
decades, will go Green.
The
Scottish National party will still be the biggest party at Holyrood, thwarting
Labour’s hopes of ending its banishment from power there. If opinion polls are
not mistaken and Plaid Cymru becomes the largest party in the Senedd, it will
bring an epic run of Labour dominance in Welsh politics to an end. The party
hasn’t been in opposition since the formation of a devolved assembly in 1999.
And that record reflects a cultural primacy dating back a lot further.
Northern
Ireland and Scotland already have first ministers whose parties are opposed to
union with England. Wales will join that number if Plaid’s nationalist leader,
Rhun ap Iorwerth, forms the next government at Cardiff Bay.
That
wouldn’t sound a death knell for the UK, but it would be a symbolic fracture.
Downing Street will look ridiculous trying to pretend that such results are an
expression of normal midterm turbulence. Even in the best-case scenarios
available to Labour from current polling, Starmer will look like the caretaker
leader of a party that struggles to say who its core voters are or where they
might live. (Manchester, maybe.)
The
Conservatives are not faring much better. Their electoral base has been
partitioned along a Brexit faultline. Reform appeals to angry, disillusioned
leave voters. The Liberal Democrats are consolidating their hold over the
remainer belt in what used to be true-blue Tory suburbs and shires. The
two-party duopoly that defined British political competition in the 20th
century has broken down everywhere, except the Palace of Westminster. Labour
and the Tories are still the big beasts in the chamber where laws are made and
ministers are held to account, but that constitutional primacy looks like a
relic from another era.
Zack
Polanski, leader of the Greens, is not an MP. Reform’s Nigel Farage notionally
represents Clacton in the Commons, but his time and energy are mostly spent
elsewhere.
In that
respect, England is following trends that are well established in the devolved
nations. Labour’s first “red wall” to fall, years before that metaphor was
applied to Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit march through the Midlands and northern
England, was in Scotland. It was demolished by the SNP.
Some of
that terrain was recovered in Starmer’s landslide 2024 general election win.
That only makes it more galling for Scottish Labour to be facing another term
of opposition in Edinburgh; to see the SNP, weighed down by failures and
scandals accrued over many years in office, somehow defy political gravity.
It helps
the SNP to have a bedrock of supporters for whom independence is a cause to
trump all others. It helps even more that the pro-union vote is fragmented and
that the Westminster government is hated. Anas Sarwar, Labour’s leader in
Scotland, has repudiated Starmer but the national brand is still an albatross
round the Scottish party’s neck.
Eluned
Morgan, Wales’s first minister, has the same problem compounded by double
incumbency. Under Tory prime ministers, blame for whatever went wrong in Wales
could be deflected on to wicked Tory rule in Westminster. Starmer’s arrival in
Downing Street withdrew that device. Change was promised and not delivered. For
Welsh voters of a leftish disposition who are fed up waiting, Plaid Cymru
offers a multi-use electoral tool: try something new; punish Labour; prolong
Tory exile; block the forces of Faragism.
That
confluence of motives doesn’t amount to a surge in demand for independence and
Plaid’s leadership know it. The prospect of ending union with England is buried
in the manifesto as part of an “ongoing national conversation about the
options” on the future, with a vague commitment to a white paper that might one
day raise the constitutional question that used to be the party’s defining
purpose.
But a
Welsh nationalist government could still effect the kind of systemic drift that
has made Scottish politics feel increasingly remote from the rest of the UK,
without drastic alteration to the constitution. Plaid, like the SNP, will be
able to govern from a stance of perpetual opposition. They can frame every
UK-wide debate as a question of who can be trusted to stand up for Wales
without conflicting allegiance.
The
lesson from Scotland is that opposition leaders, operating in the shadow of
English parent parties, find it very hard to wrestle control of the agenda back
once it is set in those terms.
The
challenge could be even greater if Farage becomes the standard bearer for
unionism. His party is poised to come second in Wales and might do the same in
Scotland.
Reform’s
Scottish and Welsh supporters mostly care about the same issues that have
driven the party’s growth in England – immigration, economic insecurity,
general antipathy towards Westminster politics. Constitutional structures are
not much on their radar. That won’t necessarily prevent the union question
getting sucked into a feedback loop of polarisation and mutual radicalisation.
Not if Faragism sets the tone of resistance to Welsh and Scottish independence
movements.
Reform’s
anglocentric, Brexit-coded, racially inflected mode of British nationalism is a
pungent brew that could give undecided, moderate voters in the devolved nations
a taste for rupture from England. A sharpening of pro-independence demands will
then animate the resentful streak in English nationalism that sees the existing
constitutional setup as a scam, siphoning resources from an enterprising
motherland to ungrateful Celtic dependants.
There is
a precedent for these dynamics in the breakup of another asymmetrically
weighted, multinational state. The collapse of the USSR started with secession
demands on the periphery, but it became inevitable once Russia itself –
rallying to Soviet Russia’s ambitious national president, Boris Yeltsin – moved
for dissolution of the union.
The
comparison is flawed in countless ways. The UK is not an authoritarian,
one-party communist regime with hardline generals plotting to resist liberal
reform. Our traditions of pluralism and democracy have deep roots. The economy
is troubled but not in anything like the condition of abject failure that made
the Soviet system unviable. Any likeness in the two cases is a matter of
historical rhyme, not analytical rigour.
Continuing
for a moment in that spirit, it is possible to glimpse in Starmer a hint of
Mikhail Gorbachev – the reforming apparatchik who underestimated the scale of
the challenge before him, lost control of centrifugal forces and ended up
stranded as leader of a country that didn’t exist any more.
Meanwhile,
back in the realm of evidence, the votes have not even been cast in this
Thursday’s ballots. The vagaries of the different electoral systems in play
make a wide spectrum of outcomes available. But a safe prediction is that the
map of British politics, shaded by party representation, will be a more
Technicolor mosaic after these polls than it is now. There will still be
patches of red, but it will be hard to make a coherent pattern of them. Britain
will still have a Labour government with a huge majority in parliament. But
Starmer will lead a party with no place to call home.
Rafael
Behr is a Guardian columnist
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