A political reset, or a glitch in the matrix?

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so

The UK political landscape was ripe for reform. We knew that, but we didn’t necessarily mean it the way that it turned out last week. Has the political landscape in the UK changed after Thursday May 1? Yes.  Has it changed for ever? Possibly.

Local elections, and mid-term by-elections, have long been used as a way of the electorate letting the incumbent government know of their dissatisfaction with the status quo, with government policies, with government personalities in some cases. It’s less usual for there to be such a clear condemnation of the party that is in opposition. The Conservative Pary suffered an embarrassing near wipe-out.

There’s a lot of dissatisfaction with current Labour policies, we know that. With the changes to National Insurance, the minimum wage, the winter fuel payments, the continuation of the hordes of small boats arriving, laden with immigrants bypassing the official channels. In previous times, such dissatisfaction with the ruling party would have had voters flocking to the main opposition party.

However, the headlines on Friday showed the real state of the rift that has opened up on the right of the country. A rift that Nigel Farage and his Reform Party have taken advantage of big time.  I don’t think there’s ever been a time when the Conservative Party has lost this much ground when in opposition to a government as unpopular as this one is. Tory-Blue Kent is now Reform-Blue Kent, apart from a few pockets of Lib Dem Orange in Tunbridge Wells, Sevenoaks and Canterbury. It’s a similar picture in Lincolnshire.

Reform did far better than their national polling suggested they would do, and far better than Farage’s previous incarnations – with UKIP and the Brexit Party – managed. This time, with five MPs, two mayors and control of 10 councils they have something to build on. Whether they build it with bricks and mortar or with straw time will tell. The Conservaives also have a rebuilding job to do, having lost not only to Reform, but also to the Liberal Dems and Greens. As the estimable polling guru Professor Sir John Curtice pointed out, British politics is “no longer a two-party system”.

These results were, of course, only for a small number of councils across the country. Reform is in charge in 10 out of the 23 councils that went to the polls. And despite the acceptance speeches proclaiming Nigel Farage as our ‘next Prime Minister’, there’s a very, very long way to go before that becomes a possibility. Less far than there used to be though.

In any case, the local elections were for local councils. Reform may well have won on the back of their anti-immigration platform, but it will be interesting to see how they manage to sort out the real-world issues that are now their responsibility: roads and public transport infrastructure, libraries, social services, the fire services, street lighting, buses,

Let’s see how they manage to deal with all those potholes before working out whether Farage can manage the grown-up stuff in Downing Street.