By Kenneth Maxwell
In a week when President Donald J. Trump visits President Xi Jinping in Beijing, the war between Iran and the U.S. (and Israel) is in a precarious truce with the Strait of Hormuz remaining closed to the vessels that keep many of the world’s economies running, while the fragile truce between Israel and Lebanon continues in the face of continued Israeli strikes against Hezbollah targets in Southern Lebanon, and Hezbollah continues to target Israeli soldiers and military vehicles, and while Russia continues its endless war against Ukraine, the U.K. is obsessively fixated on its own navel. In London, the Keir Starmer “pantomime” is featuring centerstage on Downing Street. Will he or won’t he go? Will he be the seventh British Prime Minister to be ousted in the last decade?
This past Thursday, on May 7th, 2026, elections took place across the United Kingdom. In the United States these would be called the mid-term elections. The elections in Britain were in Scotland and in Wales, both “devolved” nations, which have their own elected parliaments: Scotland’s at Holyrood in Edinburgh (established in 1999 following the Scotland Act of 1998) and in Wales at the Senedd Cymru in Cardiff (established in May 1999 following a 1997 referendum). In England there were local elections to elect representatives in many constituencies to run local government. The results were a political earthquake.
On May 7th In both Wales and Scotland, national(ist) parties took power, the Scottish National Party at Holyrood in Edinburgh, and the Welsh nationalist party, Plaid Cymru, in the Senedd in Cardiff. Neither the SNP nor Plaid Cymru has a clear majority. In Scotland the Scottish National Party (SNP) won 58 seats, Labour 17, Reform UK 17, the Scottish Greens 15, the Conservatives 12, the Liberal Democrats 10. For the SNP this was the fifth successive victory even though they did not gain enough seats (65) to form a a majority government. But for Reform U.K. it was a sensational breakthrough in Scotland. The majority of parties in the Scottish parliament now support independence with the SNP and the Greens totalling 73 of the 129 seats.
For the Conservatives with only 12 seats, it was the worst ever Holyrood result. Reform UK, however, now match Scottish Labour. Anas Sarwar, who had previously called for the resignation of Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour Prime Minister at Westminster, said that Labour had failed to overcome “a national wave of disappointment.” President Donald J. Trump, whose mother, Mary Anne Macleod Trump, was born in Tong on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, to a Gaelic-speaking family, congratulated John Swinney, the SNP leader, on his party’s success.
In Wales, Plaid Cymru won 43 seats in the Welsh Parliament elections. Reform UK, however, won 34, Labour 9, the Conservatives 7, the Greens 2 and the Liberal Democrats 1. This result was to say the least a political earthquake. The Plaid Cymru leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth, will become the next Welsh first minister ending a 100 years of Labour dominance in Wales. Reform U.K. came in second, pushing Labour into a distant third place. The Welsh labour leader, Eluned Morgan, lost her seat in the Senedd, the first leader of a government in the UK to do so while in office. She called on the U.K. government to “change course”.
These election results mean that none the three devolved governments in the UK, in Wales, in Scotland, and in Northern Ireland where the first minister is from SinnFein (Michelle O’Neil). SinnFein members have long refused when elected to take their seats in the British Parliament in London, and their objective is the reunification of Ireland.
It is not too much to foresee potentially major challenges arising to the constitutional settlement of the United Kingdom emerging from Scotland, Wales and potentially from Northern Ireland. For Labour and for Sir Keir Starmer the results were seismic, and in Wales in particular in the elections for the Senedd, where the turn out exceeded 50% in what was once considered Labour’s most loyal heartland, Labour support was down 25 points from the last election in 2021.
In England the local elections for councillors on May 7th, in 136 jurisdictions, was no less seismic. Reform U.K. won 1,453 seats (up 1,451), Labour won 1,068 (losing 1,496), the Liberal Democrat’s won 844 (up 155), the Conservatives won 801 (losing 563 and the Greens won 587 (up 441), and independents won 212 (up 34). Sir John Curtice, the British election guru, said that that the election results show that politics in the U.K. has become highly fragmented. Reform UK was the clear winner, with more seats and more votes. Nigel Farage’s party did best in areas that had voted for Brexit, Labour and the Conservatives both suffered losses. Labour was down 18 points from 2022 and 2024. And Labour’s losses was especially sharp in places were many people identify as Muslim. 2026 was the worst local election result for Labour on record.
In fact, In three days, the political landscape in Scotland, Wales and England has shifted dramatically. Sir Keir Starmer, the embattled Prime Minister, admits that Labour had “made unnecessary mistakes” but he is refusing calls to step down.
On Monday in central London he made a defiant speech: “The reset to end all all resets” He had already appointed veteran Labour politicians to shore up his position, the former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and the former deputy Prime Minister, Harriet Harman, into advisory roles.
Gordon Brown, whatever his other merits, however, was also the Prime Minister who lost the general election for Labour. He is also the man who brought Peter Mandelson, the so-called “prince of darkness,” back into the Labour fold (after he had twice been forced to resign from office over his dodgy dealings with millionaires). Gordon Brown made Mandelson (Mandy) his de-facto deputy prime minister. He was raised to the peerage on October 13, 2008 as Baron Madelson of Foy in the county of Herefordshire and of Hartlepool in the county of Durham. Peter Mandelson then almost instantaneously leaked confidential and highly market sensitive information to his old pal, Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and notorious and prolific American paedophile.
In one of his first acts as Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, appointed Lord Mandelson to be the UK ambassador to Washington, despite (or perhaps because of) Mandelson’s connection to Epstein. This was Starmer’s most egregious and catastrophic misjudgement. He was forced to sack Mandelson when the Epstein files emerged in the US revealing just how close Mandelson and the paedophile Epstein were over many years: Including information on Mandelson’s leaks of confidential information to Epstein when he was serving in Gordon Brown’s cabinet.
Labour MP, and former junior minister, Catherine West, issued a challenge over the weekend. She urged fellow Labour MP’s to demand that Steiner resign. The mayor of West Yorkshire. Tracy Brabin, had already saíd that the election results were “catastrophic for the party” and that “the party was facing oblivion” if Thursday’s election result were repeated. This is not surprising. In Wakefield, West Yorkshire, long a Labour bastion, Reform U.K. took 58 of the 63 seats. Labour which had held the council for 52 years was left what only one seat.
Keir Starmer is in any case already the most unpopular Prime Minister on record. And this was reflected on the doorsteps across the country in the run up to the election across the United Kingdom. The election results last week, and projections for the future, all now point to Reform U.K.’s leader, Nigel Farage. becoming the Prime Minister after the next general election, and Reform U.K.’s elected members of Parliament obtaining a near-majority in the House of Commons..
But why has it come to this? Why do so many voters believe that Britain is Broken? Why is Sir Keir Starmer’s prime ministership facing a devastating crash into the rocks.
The general disillusion across the country has many causes. Primarily this is because of the migrant crisis. More than 200,000 migrants have crossed the English Chanel in small boats since 2018. Successive government, Tory as well as Labour, have promised to reduce the numbers, but all have demonstrably failed. The majority of migrants crossing the channel are from Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Eritrea, and Albania. Many are driven by organised crime. Over 70% are male, and over 90% are males under the age of 39.
The cost of housing asylum seekers in hotels has risen to £5.6 million a day (plus £1.2 million for Afghan evacuees). According to the Home Office this is costing taxpayers nearly £3 billion a year. The illegal migrants, mainly young men, from Muslim counties, are put up in hotels, and local people who live nearby are throughly fed up, especially where there have been cases of sexual attack on young girls and women (and the murder of an English woman hotel worker assigned at one of the migrant hotels). This anger is not confined to those, as Sir Keir Starmer likes to claim, from the “far right” and St George flag waving “bigots”. These are ordinary people enraged at being taken for granted.
It is also because of the demonstrable incompetence of Labour local government. Birmingham, for example, considered to be the second city in the UK, and also a Labour controlled local authority, has suffered for over 16 months a dispute between the City Council and the trade union, Unite, which has lead to a bin strike since 2025 over proposed pay cuts and the removal of waste recycling and waste collections positions, which has caused severe refuse pile ups and has cost the Birmingham council approximately £33 million.
Mountains of rubbish have been left in the streets. Not surprisingly Labour lost control of the Birmingham City Council in a disastrous 24 hours for the party in the May 7th local elections, leaving the local authority with no party in overall control. Reform U.K. won 22 seats, but is a long way from the 51 needed for a majority. The Green Party was second with 19 seats. Labour had run (or rather mis-managed) the Birmingham council for the last 14 years. Birmingham is now, as one commentator observed, a local political congregation that resembles a rainbow.
The disillusion is also the result of the Labour Party’s and Sir Keir Starmer’s failure in government to tackle welfare reform, where even modest reform measures were discussed and were opposed by Labour Party members in Parliament and the government retreated. But the welfare reform is desperately needed. The welfare bill has increased dramatically over the last year with 3.7 million now on universal credit.
Yet one of the government’s first measures was to abolish the winter fuel allowances which meant many poorer old people were forced to live in cold homes, until the government performed a U-turn, the first of many. Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the Finance Minister) also increased taxes on business by raising national insurance contributions. Imposed a tax on the inheritance of farmers, and taxes on small businesses by increasing the minimum wage, which severely diminished the employment prospect of many young people, whose first jobs were often in pubs and in hospitality, and forcing the closure of many pubs across the country, which were the hubs of their communities in many urban and rural communities.
Many small business have closed as have scores of pubs which were the lively center of many communities. It has been a litany of recurrent missteps and U-turns from the Starmer government, and the attack on family farms by Rachel Reeves, and by imposing VAT (20%) on the school fees of private schools, has been a policy of misplaced class envy, implemented with Cromwellian vigor and glee by Brigit Phillipson, the Education Secretary.
And there are the continuing national scandals: To name a few. The covid PIP scandal where well connected Tory donors provided useless hospital gowns for million of pounds during the COVID pandemic; the infected and contaminated blood scandal where 30,000 were infected with HIV during the1970s/1980s and where there was a NHS (National Health Service) cover up and delay for over two decades when the innocent victim lived through hell and 3000 died (£12billion was eventually set aside in compensation though only 460 have received any compensation).
There has been the Post office scandal where victims of a faulty computer system have tried for decades for compensation and where Sub-Post masters were failed by successive governments which refused to recognise the scale of problem with the horizon faulty computer system. 59 victims considered suicide and 13 died of suicide, and many innocent victims were wrongly prosecuted and convicted; the surge of drugs and so-called “county-lines” distribution networks, often using young school children as couriers across the country and the loss of control to organised crime; the rise of anti-semitism and attacks on Jewish men on the streets in London and the murder of Jewish men in a synagogue in Manchester, and arson attacks on Jewish properties and ambulances in London.
There is the continuing failure to prosecute Pakistan grooming gangs across the country where young vulnerable white girls were targeted and sexually exploited and trafficked across the country; the murder of three beautiful young girls in Southport (Merseyside), Alice, Bebe and Elsie, at a dance class, by Axel Rudakbana, a 17 year-old, born in Cardiff, to Rwandan parents, after multiple failures of the social services system to stop him; the murder in Nottingham of two university students, Grace OMalley-Kumar and Barnaby Webber, both 19, and Caretaker Ian Coates (65), all fatally stabbed in the street by Valdo Calocane (31), born in Guinea-Bissau, moved to Madeira and Portugal, and who arrived in England in 2007, also known to the police and mental heath professions, and again was on the street after multiple failures by the social services system to prevent him going on his deathly rampage..
Last, but by no means least, the dereliction of duty on the most fundamental of any government’s task: The safety of its citizens and the defence of the nation.
Royal Navy as of May 2026 has five active type 23 frigates following the withdrawal of HMS “Iron Duke”. The state of the Royal Navy is incomprehensible to Falklands war veterans. When the U.S. launched Operation Epic Fury, the Royal Navy in fact has no ships in the Middle East for the first time in half a century. U.K. naval personnel number 32,000. The U.S.number 240,250. The Chinese number 262,000. Of the six Type 45 destroyers in the Royal Navy, three are in deep maintenance. One HMS “Dragon” was deployed to Cyprus though on arrival it had to be docked after experienced what the MoD (The Ministry of Defense) called a “minor technical issue”.
The four aging “Vanguard” submarines entered service in the 1990’s. They carry up to 16 Trident missiles capable of launching up to 192 nuclear warheads. Yet HMS “Vanguard” has recently spent over seven months st sea. The replacement “Dreadnought-class” submarines, part of a £31 billion program, will not join the fleet until 2032. Today, the Royal Navy is smaller than at any point since the English Civil War in the mid-16th century. Lord Horatio Nelson and Lord Thomas Cochrane will be turning in their graves. HMS “Dragon” is now on its way to join the proposed international mission to be “pre-positioned” in the region ahead of its “potential role” in safeguarding shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. But as Sr Keir Starmer and President Emmanuel Macron have stated, this would only take place after the fighting in the region ends.The Royal Navy in 2026 has more Admirals than it has operational warships.
On Monday Sir Keir Starmer gave a speech intended to reset his administration in central London. He said he had “got it”. He took he said “full responsibility for the election losses.” It was “the reset to end all resets”. But his delivery was as always wooden and he looked like a rabbit caught in headlights. And his speech did not satisfy Catherine West, the MP for Hornsey and Friern Barnet in north London, who said that after the “disastrous” set of elections for the Labour Party that “new leadership” is required, “which understands the urgent and real concerns of people across the U.K.” Catherine West is an Australian, born in Mansfield, 110 miles northeast of Melbourne, and moved to London is 1998 when her husband got a job at the London School of Hygiene and tropical Medicine. She speaks five languages, including Mandarin, which she developed while teaching English as a second language in Nanjing, China. She is a quite Quaker, not an agitator. But as Boris Johnson observed when “the Herd moves, it moves” and the herd can bring down a Prime Minister, as he claimed it brought him down. Catherine West set off the herd against Keir Starmer.
On Tuesday morning at the weekly cabinet meeting at 10 Downing Street, Keir Starmer, said again that he was not going anywhere. But by Tuesday evening over 81 Labour MPs had said that Starmer should set a timetable for his resignation, and four ministers had resigned. The problem was there was disagreement as to who would challenge him: Wes Streeting, the Heath Secretary, has been manoeuvre for months, but he is associated with Peter Mandelson, and is not popular among the old left of the party. There is the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, there is Starmer’s former deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner (who had to resign because of failure to pay tax on a property purchase), and there is Andy Burnham , the “King of the North”, and the favorite, the mayor of Greater Manchester, but whom is not an MP. He is enormously popular and has been a very successful mayor, tough after the disaster of the Labour Party election results it is not clear he could even win a seat if one were opened up for him.
The hordes of journalists in Downing Street on Tuesday all had difficulty getting there because all the adjacent streets were closed off for rehearsals by the military for the state opening of Parliament on Wednesday. King Charles III (the former husband of Diana, Princess of Wales), and the former Mrs Parker Bowles (Queen Camilla) will sit on the twin thrones in the House of Lords. King Charles will deliver the King’s Speech, written by Keir Starmer’s government, outlining the legislative agenda for next session of Parliament. The King and Queen will be arriving in their golden Coach and will be presented with their Crowns. When seated on their thrones, the Commons will summoned by Ed Davis, the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, who will beat of the door of the House of Commons, which will be shut in his face as is the tradition, and when opened, the Speaker of the House of Commons, and Keir Starmer, and the leader of the Conservative Party, Olumkemi Badenoch, will lead the members of the House of Commons to the House of Lords to hear what the King has to say.
The Lords of course will all be regaled in their lordly robes, though not all the Lords will be present, since the membership of the House of Lords is more numerous than the membership of the central committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Keir Starmer did have one achievement, however. He expelled the remaining hereditary peers from the House of Lords, though he has not refrained from stuffing the House of Lords with his political cronies.
More than 1,000 military personnel from the Royal Navy, Army, and Royal Air Force (RAF) along with 200 horses will provide the military escort, street lining and gun salutes. The Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment will lead the procession from Buckingham Palace. The Yeoman of the Guard, a the Monarch’s bodyguard, will conduct the ceremonial search of the cellars of the Houses of Parliament (in case Guy Fawkes is there intending to blow up the King and his ministers). The UK army in 2026 numbers only 73,760 regular full-time soldiers, making it the smallest in recent history.
The State Opening of Parliament on Wednesday will provide a short breathing space for Keir Starmer no doubt. But already the bond markets have given a preliminary answer. UK Borrowing costs hit a 28 year high by mid-afternoon. And in Wigan, in the metropolitan area of greater Manchester, in North West England, midway between Manchester and Liverpool, long a classic Red Wall seat, and where Reform U.K won 24 of the 25 seats last Thursday, the people there when asked on Tuesday evening said they were entirely fed up with the Labour Party, They all wanted a general election, and they all were thinking of Nigel Farage, not of Sir Keir Starmer. In broken, unhappy, and disillusioned Britain, rather than the shenanigans in Westminster and in Downing Street, that is the much more likely future.
Editor’s Note: For an analytical overview on the election, see the following: