All Flanks, No Front
On Britain's safeguards, and their failure.
The Irony Engine
There is a particular category of political problem where the solution becomes the source of the next crisis. Britain is currently running several simultaneously.
First-past-the-post was designed to manufacture stable majorities from a fragmented electorate, compress minor parties out of relevance, and deliver a decisive two-party duopoly that Enlightenment architects (presumably) found comforting. The 2024 election gave Labour a 172-seat majority on 33.7% of the vote, which is the system working exactly as designed. The combined Labour and Conservative vote share that year was 57.4%, itself a record low. It has since fallen to 38.2%. The mechanism for producing stability is now producing a governing party held in place partly by fear of what replaces it, an opposition so fragmented it cannot agree on its own purpose, and projection models where Reform wins a majority of 112 seats on 30% of the vote because the left cannot coordinate around a single candidate. No party has polled above 30% in months.
Manifold gives 18% odds that any party consistently hits 35% this year. The system that was supposed to squeeze chaos into a majority is instead amplifying it.
The special relationship was meant to guarantee British influence in Washington: a privileged bilateral channel that would make up in diplomatic proximity what Britain had lost in post-imperial weight. It is now the leverage Trump uses against Starmer, a relationship so asymmetric that Britain ends up defending its right to be an ally rather than assuming it. “This is not Winston Churchill we are dealing with,” Trump told journalists, which lands decisively even if it describes nothing more than a specific disagreement about which bases to lend.
The bond market was meant to discipline governments that spent too freely. It has, for the past year, been the main thing keeping Keir Starmer in office, because gilt yields spike whenever it looks like he might be replaced by someone to his left. A Labour Prime Minister, historically unpopular with voters, sustained in position by the City’s preference for his fiscal conservatism over his successor’s probable alternative. If you wanted to design a scenario that made Labour’s internal politics look most absurd, it would be difficult to improve on that one.
Reform was meant to be a clean insurgency: anti-establishment, ideologically coherent, the vehicle for everyone who had decided the old parties were irredeemably broken. It has been in local government for eight months and already has 1 in 18 of its elected councillors gone through suspension, expulsion, or resignation. One shared a meme suggesting Hitler “would have been a legend” had he targeted a different group. One was charged with assault at a Pride event. One had been the council leader caught swearing at colleagues on video, which then got leaked. Six of the seven Kent councillors who defected to Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain had already been expelled by Reform before they defected. Reform’s response: “Restore are welcome to our dregs.” The party originally elected 57 councillors to Kent County Council. It now has 48.
This is not the same observation as saying British politics is chaotic, an insight we’ve already covered in detail. It is the more specific observation that the chaos is being generated by the mechanisms supposed to prevent it.
The Teams Call
On Sunday 25 January, at 11am, Keir Starmer dialled into a Microsoft Teams meeting. He was about to speak with Zelensky. First, though, he personally led an 8-1 NEC vote to block Andy Burnham from standing as Labour’s candidate in Gorton and Denton, on the grounds that triggering a fresh mayoral election would drain resources ahead of May.
The seat itself had been triggered by Andrew Gwynne, the former health minister suspended from Labour after WhatsApp messages surfaced in which he called a constituent a “Duki Hag” and described her neighbourhood as a quote-unquote “shithole.” The seat had returned a Labour MP, in various boundary configurations, since 1931. Burnham, the most popular figure in Labour politics (net approval ±0, against Starmer’s -47), was blocked. Labour then deployed a leaflet from a tactical voting organisation called “Tactical Choice” recommending voters back Labour. No such organisation exists. Nobody appears to have checked this before the leaflet went out.
Labour still came third. Hannah Spencer, a 34-year-old plumber and Green councillor, won 40.7% on a 27.5-point swing - the largest Green by-election swing ever, and the party’s first by-election win. It was the 127th seat on their target list. The mechanism Labour used to protect Starmer from a leadership challenge produced the most embarrassing by-election result the party has suffered since 1931, in a seat the leadership explicitly chose to fight as a show of strength.
The Self-Demolition
The more analytically interesting question about Reform is not whether electoral headwinds will slow them down but whether they will manage to do it themselves first.
The governance record after eight months in local power is instructive. Having promised to eliminate “waste” and cut council tax, every Reform council is raising it. Worcestershire got special government permission to exceed the standard 5% cap, raising council tax by 9%. Kent’s own social care lead admitted “spending is down to the bare bones.” The forest of waste, when located, turned out to be a single shrub. The issue is structural: 48% of Kent’s budget goes on adult social care, which does not yield to populist promises about DEI spending. The easy observation is that Reform’s candidates did not know this when they were elected. The pointed one is that several of them had previously served under Labour or Conservative administrations and knew perfectly well.
The candidate quality issue has been persistent enough to quantify. At least 38 Reform councillors were suspended, expelled, or resigned within the first six months after the May 2025 elections, with at least four facing criminal investigations. The party ran a man as council leader in Staffordshire who had previously posted that a statue of a Black woman was a “fat a***d black woman,” and when it emerged, the internal email from the council leader defending him was accidentally sent to all 81 members of the council rather than just Reform ones.
Restore Britain now sits as third-largest group on Kent County Council. Six of its seven defectors were people Reform had already expelled. The party Rupert Lowe calls more principled than Reform has published a 133-page mass deportation policy document and lists Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) among its affiliated figures. One of Reform’s own spokespeople called Restore “neo-Nazi.” Musk called Reform “Nazis” in return. This exchange happened in public, in February, in the run-up to local elections. The right-wing vote splitting effect this produces is not primarily an electoral threat to Reform from Restore, which is probably too extreme to gain serious traction outside online ecosystems, although traders do think there is potential for them to win a seat or two.
On funding: Reform’s biggest donor is Christopher Harborne, a Thailand-based investor who has given £12 million over the past year, including the single largest living political donation in UK history at £9 million in one go. The Electoral Commission has warned it cannot verify the identity of Reform’s crypto donors because the party’s payment processor is a Polish-registered entity not regulated by the FCA. The Commission’s exact words: donations could be “unidentifiable” under UK law. This sits interestingly alongside the party’s central pitch about cleaning up British political corruption.
The Squeeze
British politics has reorganised around tactical voting in a way that is not entirely serving its intended purpose.
Labour’s theory entering the next election is straightforward: fear of Reform winning will squeeze Green and Lib Dem voters behind Labour candidates in marginal seats, replicating the 2024 mechanism that gave them their majority. YouGov’s tactical voting study this month complicated this. 57-58% of Lib Dem and Green voters would tactically back Labour to stop Reform in their seat. But only 43-44% would do so to stop the Conservatives.
Gorton was also the clearest signal yet that tactical voting is no longer reliably flowing toward Labour from the left. Three independent tactical voting organisations endorsed the Greens as best placed to beat Reform. Labour invented a fourth to endorse itself. The Greens won by 4,400 votes. The lesson the Green Party absorbed is that they can now credibly position themselves as the tactically rational anti-Reform choice in seats where they are competitive with Labour, which changes the calculus Labour built its entire seat-count modelling around.
Manifold has Reform at 40% to win the next election, and 20% to top the YouGov poll at that election but still lose.
That second number is the most structurally interesting: the scenario where tactical voting coordination across the left succeeds well enough to deny Reform the FPTP amplification they need. Electoral Calculus models this as reducing Reform from 398 seats to 335 when tactical voting is applied. The 63-seat gap is what coordination on the left is worth, which is a reasonable description of why the Gorton result was alarming to Labour in a way that transcends the headline.
Not Winston Churchill
Keir Starmer has never said a bad word about Donald Trump in public. That is not being reciprocated.
The US asked to use Diego Garcia and British bases for offensive strikes on Iran. Starmer initially said no. He later said yes for defensive purposes only. Trump called Britain “uncooperative,” said Starmer was “not Winston Churchill,” told the Financial Times the US-UK relationship was “obviously not what it was,” and added that France had been “great,” which is a sentence Trump has not historically deployed. The Financial Times called it Starmer’s “Love Actually moment,” comparing it to the 2003 film scene where a British PM pushes back on a bullying American president. Whether Starmer was playing Hugh Grant or just muddling through is genuinely unclear, but his parliamentary line had some coherence: “American planes are operating out of British bases. British jets are shooting down drones to protect American lives. Hanging on to President Trump’s latest words is not the special relationship in action.”
The practical scale of British involvement: Typhoons and F-35s intercepting Iranian missiles across the Gulf, 300 British personnel within a few hundred yards of an Iranian strike on a Bahrain base, RAF Akrotiri hit by a drone on Cyprus. Starmer has been threading a needle between voters who remember Iraq (and do not want another Middle Eastern war) and an American president who wants “completely blind loyalty” from allies. As one former national security adviser noted, Trump’s officials “crack on as usual behind the scenes” even as the president performs public frustration. The intelligence-sharing relationship continues. The trade deal does not, currently, and may not.
Reform’s position on all of this evolved at impressive speed. Richard Tice called for Britain to “play our part in degrading once and for all the appalling Iranian regime.” Farage argued the West needed to “take the gloves off.” Then petrol prices became a political story, and within days Farage had recast himself as a voice of restraint, warning Britain “cannot get involved.” Suella Braverman, now a Reform MP, accused Starmer of “destroying the special relationship” while simultaneously arguing against sending British troops. Starmer noted, with some restraint, that “those that two weeks ago were urging us to go headlong into a full blown war are beginning to have second thoughts.”
The 1931 Problem
The conventional read on May 7 is Reform sweeps English county councils, Greens pick up London boroughs, Labour suffers the kind of losses that trigger internal recriminations. Farage has pledged to spend “every single penny” of over £5 million on the campaign. Reform at 3/10 to win most seats nationally implies roughly 75% probability. All of that is probably correct.
Another structurally significant story is Wales (probably a first).
Labour has not lost a Welsh election since 1931. Polling has Plaid Cymru at 30%, Reform at 25-27%, Labour third at 18-21%. Welsh Labour’s First Minister Eluned Morgan has taken to saying “Keir Starmer is not on the ballot paper in this election,” which is accurate and desperate in equal measure. The Senedd is simultaneously moving to 96 seats under a proportional closed-list system for the first time, replacing the hybrid that previously squeezed out smaller parties. Under PR, Reform wins seats regardless of finishing position. Whatever happens on May 7, Reform will have permanent institutional representation in Cardiff Bay in a way it has never had, which is a durable structural shift independent of the headline result.
Follow the implication through: if current polling holds, all three devolved first ministers simultaneously favour departure from the United Kingdom. This is not a sentence Westminster is currently discussing with any urgency, possibly because doing so would require acknowledging that the devolution settlement Labour created in 1999 is generating outcomes it did not model.
In London, the Greens are at 28% in capital polling, with all 32 boroughs up. In Scotland, the SNP holds a clear lead but Reform has surged to second, with Labour down to 15% on the constituency vote, their worst share in any election since 1910.
Every Labour rival has reached the same conclusion: let him own the May results before moving. Rayner, Streeting, and Burnham are the names in circulation, with Burnham conspicuously blocked from the parliamentary seat he'd need to run. Polanski told the FT: "I could see potential to work with Burnham. I would rule it out with Starmer." A party that watched the Conservatives go through six leaders in a decade and lose by the largest margin since 1832 is apparently considering the same strategy. Knowing a thing and doing the opposite are not mutually exclusive in British politics, as the Tactical Choice website would suggest.
Happy Forecasting!
- Above the Fold