Special Report: Broken Britain
How the collapse of Labour and the Conservatives opened the door to Reform, the Greens, and a dangerous new era of political extremism.
by Ben Cohen
Something has broken in British politics. The recent local and by-election results don’t just show a governing party in trouble — they show the entire political establishment coming apart at the seams. The two-party dominance that has defined British democracy for a century is over, and in its place is a fractured, angry, directionless mess.
The hard-right populist Reform UK party surged across England. Labour lost huge numbers of council seats and control of major local authorities, and the party’s collapse in Wales was even more dramatic, with Plaid Cymru winning the Senedd election ending 100 years of Labour rule. The Conservatives were also badly damaged, confirming that old two-party structure is almost certainly obsolete. The Greens and Lib Dems took chunks elsewhere, and nationalist parties strengthened in Wales and Scotland.
It is hard to imagine Keir Starmer surviving for much longer. He has pledged to stay on, but the Labour leader is now under serious internal …