John Daniel Davidson writes for the Federalist about the lesson Americans should learn from Great Britain’s latest elections.
Last week in Britain the ruling Labour Party suffered historic losses in local elections held across the country, while the right populist Reform UK won an astounding 1,400 seats. Reform leader Nigel Farage called it a “truly historic shift in British politics.” Labour, led by the increasingly unpopular Prime Minister Kier Starmer, lost 1,300 councilors, triggering calls for Starmer’s resignation from Labour MPs and unions. In Scotland and Wales, pro-independence nationalist parties made gains at the expense of both Labour and Conservatives. …
… It would be easy to look at these results and conclude that they amount to a resounding rebuke of globalist left-wing politics embodied by leaders like Starmer and other fixtures of the European establishment, and that a populist victory by Farage and Reform will rescue Britain and pull her out of what seems to be the impending collapse of civil society.
But that’s the wrong lesson to take away. What’s happening in Britain is the political expression of a loss of social cohesion and the first signs of brewing civil conflict along ethnic nationalist and post-nationalist lines. Broadly speaking, the rejection of the establishment parties by British voters signals a deeper loss of confidence in the political process in Britain and the legitimacy of the British political elite. …
… In elevating Reform, voters are shattering the old right-left political divide in much the same way that Trump’s winning coalition has in the United States. But Britain is a smaller and less ethnically diverse society than the U.S., and so the breakdown of traditional right-left politics represents a volatility that points beyond mere political realignment and toward something darker: the real possibility of civil war. …
… What Britain is facing, in other words, is the dissolution of its establishment parties and the traditional right-left politics they represented, and the emergence of a politics based explicitly on ethnic and religious identity.
