Blimey! Lessons from the Labour Party's collapse
A cautionary tale for Democrats
Welcome to a Thursday edition of Progress Report.
I’m writing to you from Liverpool, the natural choice for my first real trip since undergoing my sixth heart surgery more than five months ago. I’m here for soccer, but at the moment, due to the time difference, I’m watching coverage of the local council elections across the UK.
Right now, I’m working on several projects for Progress Report, including setting live interviews with candidates in the most important swing districts in must-win legislatures across the Midwest. Those will kick off next week. I’m also updating our ballot initiative site with lots of new referenda, and will also have a news roundup in the next day.
Tonight, I want to take a quick dive into this British election night, because there’s a lot of lessons that apply to the situation we face in the US.
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Election coverage hits different in places where the media isn’t owned by right-wing billionaire moguls and politicians don’t take tens of millions of dollars corporations.
The BBC’s broadcast tonight eschews all the holograms and massive touch screens that clutter American election newscasts. Even more refreshing: there are no pundits burping up cliched talking points. It’s just reporters all over the country, contextualizing the races and describing the local issues and national dynamics, with some government officials mixed in. I’m learning things, not experiencing enough visual stimulation to give me a seizure.
Americans can learn a lot from their coverage — and even more from the results.
While still early in the count, the Labour party, which controls Parliament, is getting walloped up and down the country. At this very moment, Labour has lost 86 seats, almost all of them going to Reform UK, which has already gained 130 seats. It’s a startling but not shocking rise for Reform, the new party formed by white nationalist demagogue Nigel Farage. If you’re unfamiliar with Reform, just imagine if the MAGA movement broke off from the Republican Party.
To extend the US-UK analogy, tonight’s council elections are a bit like American midterm elections: though they don’t impact the makeup of Parliament, they provide a temperature check on the national mood and act as a de facto referendum on the party in control of the government.
The results so far reflect the breathtaking unpopularity of the Labour Prime Minister Kier Starmer, who has a -45% net approval rating. Starmer has been flattened by scandals (Jeffrey Epstein plays a role, of course), sluggish economic growth, and bone-headed attacks on his own party and voters. Labour swept into power with a mandate to end the Tory austerity, but Starmer instead pushed to further strip the social safety net.
To give you an idea of how feckless these people are: the BBC just hosted the Labour trade minister, who claimed that the party didn’t actually have a mandate when it swept to power in 2024, arguing instead that people were just voting to reject the Tories. I find it hard to believe that they blunted a more progressive agenda because they thought voters actually wanted them to continue the conservative policies that exacerbated income inequality and cratered the economy; Starmer rose to power within the Labour Party by beating on the left and allying himself with the sort of insiders who benefit from the status quo.
Instead, Starmer actively worked to alienate the Labour base (he has a 55% disapproval rating among his own voters) while doing nothing to win over voters from other parties. That voters are fleeing Labour in historic strongholds in the Northeast and Wales (where the party has been in power for a century) and flocking to the noxious populists in Reform is a rebuke to the idea that voters operate on what we understand as the typical political spectrum.
Starmer’s bet was that slow-walking policies designed to help working people — essentially acting as a technocratic centrist Democrat — would win over conservative and Liberal Dem voters. Instead, working Britons are running to the far-right, to a Reform UK that hammers on the cost of living and decline in the quality of life; one of its leaders is on a the moment, rattling off statistics about the long waitlists for healthcare and the plight of futureless young men.
The solutions that Reform offer are reactionary and xenophobic — “why are we paying all these taxes for money to go to [immigrants] who don’t work?” the minister just asked rhetorically — but the party is positioning itself as an alternative to the “uniparty” that has run government for time immemorial.
This is not an newsletter about British politics, but I could have just as easily been writing about the last three Democratic presidential administrations. It’s almost scary how much this mirrors what happened to Democrats a few years ago: Chris Bryant, the trade minister, just said that Labour hadn’t done a good enough job communicating its accomplishments to people.
As Democrats coalesce around an agenda ahead of the midterm elections and 2028 presidential race, they should be watching the catastrophe in Britain and recognizing that it’s time to offer bold solutions that fundamentally remake the economy and reform government — these next two elections may well be the last chance to reverse democratic decline.
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