In 2020 the American activist and anthropologist David Graeber made a prediction: ‘The Labour Party under Keir Starmer will abandon its core idealism and principles and won’t even gain tactical advantage. It will be a party which gives no one a reason to vote for it – and no one will, in fact, vote for it’. Graeber died shortly after uttering these words, but his warning proved prophetic.

On 7 May, at the local and devolved elections held across the United Kingdom, Starmer’s incumbent Labour Party suffered an almighty battering at the hands of the British electorate. In Scotland, Labour posted its worst performance since the creation of the devolved Holyrood parliament 27 years ago, finishing a distant second behind the pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP). In Wales, it was beaten by the progressive nationalists Plaid Cymru, with Welsh Labour leader Eluned Morgan losing her seat in the Senedd alongside 21 of her colleagues.

In England, Labour shed nearly 1,500 council seats and forfeited control of 38 municipal councils, its base splintering between Zack Polanski’s eco-populist Greens on the left, Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats in the centre, and Nigel Farage’s MAGA-lite Reform UK on the far right. Swathes of urban England, including southeast London and central Manchester, turned green, while Reform’s vote rose fastest in those parts of the country – Sunderland, Barnsley, Newcastle-under-Lyme – that backed Brexit in 2016.

In the lead-up to the elections, Labour, conscious of the prime minister’s historic unpopularity, braced itself for a bruising set of results. The polls had been steady for months and setbacks were expected. Yet the immense scale of the losses – before May, Labour had won every major election in Wales since 1922 – took even battle-hardened insiders by surprise. ‘There’s blood and guts splattered everywhere,’ one party source briefed the }Observer}, anonymously, on 10 May. ‘The anger is visceral’.

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(1) David Graeber Institute, X, 8 May 2026.

(2) ‘Prime minister faces fight for survival after Labour’s local election “disaster” ’, Observer, London, 10 May 2026.

(7) Mason Boycott-Owen, ‘Tony Blair commends Keir Starmer and New Labour in advert ahead of local elections’, Telegraph, London, 2 May 2022.