This week, Pauline Hanson and Nigel Farage are the only winners

May 10, 2026 — 11:30am

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

When the map of British politics was redrawn last Thursday, the only surprise was the magnitude of the upheaval, not the fact of it. Writing on these pages in January, I said that “no amount of expectation management will be enough to inoculate Labour against its looming electoral calamity” on May 7. Yet the scale of Labour’s losses surprised even the most pessimistic pundit. Is there an order of magnitude beyond “calamity”?

The elections were for English councils and the Welsh and Scottish provincial assemblies. They are as much party contests as general elections. The party in power in Westminster invariably does badly, as voters vent their dissatisfaction without changing the national government. In that respect they somewhat resemble byelections, but they are much more consequential. Since every elector in Britain can vote, they are treated as proxy general elections. Sir Keir Starmer may not have been on the ballot paper, but he might just as well have been because it was all about him, and the Labour government he has led for less than two years.

Labour went into the election controlling 68 of the 136 councils. It lost 40 of them; 1496 of the 2564 seats it was defending (58 per cent). The result was terrible for the Conservatives as well who, starting from a lower base, lost 563 of their 1364 seats........

© WA Today