The UK, like much of the rest of Europe, has been committing slow-motion cultural suicide in recent years. By piling up unsustainable debts, deindustrialising in pursuit of “net zero” fantasies, atomising into multiple incompatible subcultures via unconstrained immigration, and persecuting citizens for tweets and other previously accepted forms of dissent, the former liberal democracy had set itself up for civil war and/or financial collapse.

And there was no real hope in sight. Whichever of the two dominant parties was in charge, the borders would remain open, speech would be increasingly censored, debt would continue to pile up, etc., etc., until the culture that invented the whole individual freedom, limited government thing met a squalid, fiery end.

Election earthquake

Labour and the Conservatives have taken turns running the UK (into the ground) for the past century, and are suddenly virtual afterthoughts, with the Conservatives in danger of extinction.

Not a done deal

Put another way, this is not a done deal, but it is a near-complete repudiation of the policies that have put the UK on its deathbed. So whoever is in charge going forward will have to address the failure of current policies and look for ways to actually fix what’s broken.

Here’s a BBC post-election analysis:

Farage hails election results, as Labour and Tories digest losses

Nigel Farage has hailed Reform UK’s gains in Thursday’s elections as “unprecedented” and “the end of two-party politics”.

The party has taken control of 10 local councils, won two mayoral races and added a fifth MP to its ranks in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election.

Many of these wins came at the expense of the Labour and Conservative parties, which have both sought to explain the results.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer conceded that people were not yet feeling the benefits of a Labour government, while Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch pledged to make her party a “credible” alternative once again.

‘Not Labour enough’: MPs’ despair at voters’ verdict on government

Local elections at-a-glance: What’s happened?

Local elections 2025 in maps and charts

Farage claimed on Saturday: “In post-war Britain, no one has ever beaten both Labour and the Tories in a local election before.”

Writing in The Times, Sir Keir said the lesson learned from the elections was not that the country needed “ideological zealotry”.

“It’s that now is the time to crank up the pace on giving people the country they are crying out for,” he said.

The results were worse than Conservatives had feared, with the party not only losing to Reform but also the Liberal Democrats.

It lost 674 council seats and control of all 16 authorities it was defending – but wrested the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough mayoralty from Labour.

Roger Gough, the former Conservative leader of Kent County Council, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the party had a huge job to do.

“We are still under the shadow of what happened when we were in government,” he said. “That’s a shadow that was over us when we went to the national polls last year and it hasn’t lifted.”

He added: “There’s a genuine pressure between coming up with serious answers, which will in some cases take time, and establishing a credible position in the shorter term.

“Clearly that’s not happened so far, that’s why so many of us paid the price electorally over the last couple of days.”

Watch Farage celebrate and the Establishment cope: