Donald, I cannot say enough how welcome I find your voice here, and I am 100% certain I am not alone.
cleek, you're not the only argumentative commenter/bastard here, and I certainly include myself among them. Peace and love, as we used to say in the 60s.
Meanwhile, I'm astonished that neither the Guardian, the Times nor the NYT seem to make anything of the fact that China has warned Trump not to threaten Cuba. I thought when I saw it on C4 News that it was a tremendous slap in the face after Trump's rosy description of their relationship, but it seems that most of the world press is not necessarily taking it that way. How interesting...
You get no argument from me on that. And despite my comments on litmus tests, that should in no way be taken as opposition to certain kinds of extreme protest and activism; what i think is so counterproductive is the necessity for every box of the ideological checklist having to be ticked before allies can be accepted.
I’m sure the conversation will slide towards straw-man justifications of why one side is right and the other side is [fill in your favorite flavor of wrong, weak principled, and destined to lose], but I think these work as descriptions.
It's a tough one, particularly with people (on both sides) who are determined to vilify the views of the other side, and ostracise those who hold them. This is where I particularly sympathise with Barney Frank when he talks about the litmus tests. To look at people who share very many of one's basic values and aims, but who disagree on one or two issues, and immediately write them off as the devil's spawn, is regrettable and counter-productive; it lowers the chances of achieving much in the generally desired direction of travel. You could categorise this as "destined to lose", but I think that is a simplistic way of looking at it, and essentially a different mindset regarding strategy v tactics.
Barney Frank, in Hospice, Has Advice for Democrats
Mr. Frank speaks about the missteps of the Democratic Party and his hope for its future. “Frankly, if I weren’t dying, people wouldn’t be paying as much attention.”
Given wj's reflex to defend "true" conservatives and conservatism from some of the worst accusations that can be and have been made against them, and the rough consensus here that the GOP, MAGA and maybe most Republicans these days are "reactionaries and irresponsible greedheads", I'd be interested to know when wj thinks the switch happened between most conservatives being roughly like him, and now. When last, under which presidency, did you feel wj that people like you were part of the conservative mainstream? And do you think that your views have changed somewhat as a reaction to the changes you have perceived developing in today's GOP?
Hey, there's another target (other than liberals) for the ire of an influential portion of the right: women! I want to see the Venn diagram. Gift link:
nous: your self-description makes it very clear how so much of the rightwing "liberal elite" description is pure, superficial and bad-faith argumentation. They saw it was damaging when applied to them, and decided to have a go at turning the tables. Because, of course, one couldn't have liberal opinions based on anything like principle! Why, the very concept is absurd....
Still going through a lot of this, but I was interested in nous being struck by the idea that Liberalism is elitist. I have noticed that this has become an increasingly common rhetorical trope of the right; they saw how damaging the accusation of elitism was to the public, and have arrived at a way to accuse liberals of it. e.g. Only liberals have no problem with immigration, because they are not directly affected by the consequences on public services etc, whereas "the working man" is.
Apart from that, but still on liberalism, Ian Leslie has a podcast of his interview with Cass Sunstein on "What the Beatles and Dylan tell us about Liberalism". It's 50 minutes long, with no transcript, but since the first 18 minutes are about Dylan's relation to it, I got hooked in. I didn't agree with everything Sunstein said, but it's interesting nonetheless.
It’s a shooting war, but on the level of The Troubles, not of The American Civil War. No one is putting units on the ground and fighting openly for territory. That’s an obsolete vision of war.
As for the following, me too:
I read this conversation as “If this were going to happen, how might it go down?” more so than “Oh, no! This is what’s going to happen!” I don’t think any of it is ridiculous to consider as being possible.
bc: Ah, thank you. It's true, I (and probably most liberals) find it hard to reconcile the strong judgementalism on sexual and moral issues (in which latter I include cruelty, dishonesty and lack of empathy for vulnerable e.g. poor people - see Jesus's teachings passim) with tolerance for the clear display of any of these failings (or "sins") in favoured rightwing politicians, religios, judges etc. As for your reservation about the chances of "a shooting war" I very much hope you're right. But alas, examples like the violence in Minneapolis, the deaths in "illegal immigrants' detention centres", the clear disregard for the necessity to protect Americans' health (vaccinations etc) and the obvious and rampant corruption, leads me to believe that it's not all that far fetched to speculate that large scale violence and subsequent retribution may result.
Funnily enough, after posting that, I read this in today's NYT. I knew about Pressler and the SBC, but this bigger picture demonstrates why so many of the hated liberals can no longer stomach the hypocrisy so that partition is becoming a hot issue, even more than when Michael first started talking to us about it:
The modern history of political evangelicalism is riddled with the same kind of story: A powerful man gains a following by casting himself as the heroic warrior against the heretical and the godless. When he uses his power and fame to indulge his basest desires, he treats exposure as an attack and justice as persecution.
And because he’s built a following, he has an army of people ready to leap to his defense. After all, if they stay silent, then the liberals will win, and no one can let the liberals win. Ever. Against this backdrop, President Trump wasn’t an aberration; he was an inevitability.
I'd pretty much decided not to reply to bc's comment a day ago, since it seemed clear that s/he didn't really understand the underlying point being made by nous and wj about possible cooperation between Evangelicals, Southern Baptists and the LDS. The point is that whatever doctrinal differences they might have, organisations with a strong moralistic conservative mindset have already proven that they can support someone who actually displays the opposite qualities, as long as they attack Democrats and liberals. This has already been demonstrated by the Evangelicals, and of course by strongly moralistic, law-and order rightwing Republicans, in their support for Donald Trump. And this phenomenon is connected to a growing discussion about partition in the US. Tangentially, but I think really significantly in the last couple of days, we see this even in the wake of things like this:
If we are considering the various extraordinary ways in which people get elected, regarding the people who say they would still vote for Trump, I wonder how many voters in the US are even aware of this kind of thing:
Well, for anybody who wants a more up-to-date (and hugely more informed) update on the election, here it is from Comment is Freed:
Seven things we learnt from the elections Sam Freedman May 10
Hopefully Comment is Freed readers will have felt a sense of familiarity as election results came in over Thursday night and Friday.
While I certainly didn’t get all my predictions right, with a few exceptions all the contests played out along the lines set out. I forecast the correct result in 107 out of 136 English councils, and close to the exact Welsh Senedd results. If you’re interested in a more detailed analysis of what I got right and wrong I’ve included an appendix at the end.
In my last post I said there was no plan from any of the main candidates to challenge Keir Starmer for the Labour leadership after the scale of their losses became apparent, but that these things can spiral when MPs and members are at their most angry and frustrated. Yesterday’s intervention from backbencher Catherine West, who has said she will challenge Starmer tomorrow if no one else comes forward, it a perfect example of this. It seems unplanned and, in part, a response to a friend losing their council seat.
Whether she succeeds in forcing a challenge will depend on how others react. 80 MPs are required to trigger a contest, and there are many more than that who want Starmer gone. But lots want Andy Burnham to replace him and so need a longer timetable while he finds a way back into Parliament. Others, who support Wes Streeting or Angela Rayer, will be waiting for a signal. Plenty who are uncommitted will be spending the day furiously WhatsApping each other and trying to figure out what to do. If it doesn’t happen now, it will happen at some point. Starmer’s authority has been gone for some time.
The purpose of this post, though, is not speculation on Labour’s leadership but to look at some of the broader trends and shifts that have become apparent during these elections and have long term significance for the future of British politics.
I’ve discussed some of the more obvious ones before. We’re experiencing a transition into a more fragmented European-style multi-party system. Labour and the Tories are facing competition for their core vote in a way they never have before. As a result they are struggling to identify strategies that allow them to retain previously loyal voters, while appealing to the centre, as Reform and the Greens hoover up the right and left bloc votes. The result is a paralysis of indecision and an increasingly dissatisfied electorate. And so the cycle continues, made worse by an electoral system unsuited to our new politics that encourages a narrow tactical approach from parties.
In the rest of the post I’m going to focus in more detail on how this is all playing out in practice. How do we assess results in such a messy system? What are the strategic challenges facing all the main parties? Is Reform on track for a majority? What can the Greens realistically achieve? What are the best options for the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems? What can we learn about PR from what happened in Wales? Most of all – is there any route out of the paralysis induced by a fragmented system?
The battleground model is the right one
In my preview post I broke England down into five types of battleground where the contests would all look very different. This is what happened. In the first type – lower income, older, whiter towns – the kind that are often called “left behind” and suffered most from deindustrialisation, Reform did extremely well, taking control of councils in places like Barnsley, Sunderland, Gateshead, and Walsall. Whereas in the “middle England marginals” battleground, places like Swindon and Milton Keynes that tend to vote for whatever party is in government, Reform made gains but not on anything like the same scale. In younger urban wards with lots of graduates the contest was largely between progressive parties.
This is partly about the post-Brexit realignment that has led people to polarise more on age, level of education and values. But it also reflects voters trying to figure out what the effective two-party system is in their area. There’s no longer much point voting Tory in Barnsley because Reform is the only viable right-wing winner. Whereas in Swindon there’s still a genuine split on the right, with the Tories winning seats off Labour too. In London councils where there was no prospect of a right-wing party succeeding, like Lewisham and Hackney, voters clearly felt more comfortable voting Green than in Wandsworth or Westminster where the Labour vote held up more.
This all means that models of election outcomes based on projections of national vote share are no longer much use. Both Sky and the BBC used their projected shares to calculate seat numbers at a general election, but the results didn’t make much sense. Sky suggested the Greens would only win 13 seats on a 14% vote share. But clearly these votes would be highly concentrated in certain types of constituency. I can think of more than thirteen seats they’d win just in London if these results were reflected at a general election. Likewise, Reform would be unlikely to get to their projected 284 seats because, outside of their strongholds in deindustrialised towns, they can be stopped with tactical voting.
We are going to need different and more complex models, including a lot of qualitative insight, to make sense of a multi-party world with an unsuitable electoral system.
Reform didn’t break through in places they need for a majority
Outside of London, Reform won nearly all of the councils I said they would and a few similar ones that I thought they’d just miss out on (Sandwell, Calderdale and St Helens). But they didn’t win Swindon, which polling suggested they should have done. Nigel Farage launched his campaign here, so it was a major target. Had they won it would have indicated they were on track to become the next government. But generally speaking the Tory and Labour vote held up better in these kinds of bellwether seats like Harlow, Crawley, and Milton Keynes.
These are all constituencies Reform would need for a majority, given they won’t win many in the big cities or Scotland (and Plaid Cymru may now be a barrier to them taking constituencies in Wales off Labour). Winning places like Doncaster and Barnsley won’t be enough to make Farage prime minister.
Reform’s overall vote share was down to 26%, from 30% in the previous local elections, which is consistent with a drop in their polling since last summer, and worsening approval ratings for Farage. So while they have obviously had a successful eighteen months, becoming a serious force in British politics, there is plenty of evidence that they are now moving backwards, or at least failing to build on their momentum.
As I’ve written elsewhere they are caught between trying to appeal to a radicalised online supporter base, some of whom have defected to Rupert Lowe’s Restore UK, and focusing on reassuring waverers, in places like Swindon, who are worried about voting for a more radical party. The more they cater to the extreme the harder it is to win these places and the more people will be willing to vote tactically against them. Yet they really do face a threat to their right. Notably Restore won the only seats it stood in around Lowe’s Great Yarmouth constituency, which blocked Reform from taking outright control of Norfolk county council. Had they stood nationally it would have likely stopped Reform winning dozens if not hundreds of seats.
3. The Tories are becoming the Liberal Democrats of the right
These results weren’t quite as bad for the Conservatives as last year, but they were still dire for a party that’s supposed to be the main opposition. They lost all six county councils and all the ground they’d made post-Brexit in “left behind” places like Walsall and Newcastle-under-Lyme. They came fourth in Wales and fifth in Scotland, having come second last time in both.
They did best in more affluent right-wing areas like Barnet, Bromley, and parts of Hampshire. This is essentially what’s happened to the Liberal Democrats in reverse. Ed Davey’s party has become the “left bloc” choice in wealthier parts of the country where Labour has always struggled to win. In areas with lots of remain-voting graduates like Richmond, Surrey, and Tunbridge Wells they’ve consolidated this vote very effectively. But it also means they will always be the junior partner in the left bloc at a national level, and dependent on tactical voting for their victories.
Likewise, the Tories are increasingly reduced to being the right bloc choice in areas that are bit too genteel and well qualified to vote Reform. They even benefitted from some anti-Reform tactical voting in places like Bexley where they explicitly positioned themselves to progressives as the best option to beat Farage. This is something the Lib Dems do in places like Haringey and Southwark when they’re trying to beat Labour.
It’s a strategy they could lean into by focusing on economics over culture wars and being more willing to criticise Reform than Kemi Badenoch has in the past, and is probably their best bet to avoid being wiped out completely in 2029. But it does mean accepting that they’re the junior partner to Reform in the right bloc and have no route to a majority unless Farage’s party implodes. We will now see this play out in councils like Hampshire and Peterborough where Reform and the Tories will need to work together to govern.
4. The Greens are limited by a lack of infrastructure and vote concentration
Though the Greens won five councils and hundreds of seats they did a bit worse than their polling would have suggested, which stopped them taking several more London boroughs. This may be due to bad publicity the party received over antisemitic comments from a number of candidates and Zack Polanski retweeting criticism of the police over the Golders Green stabbings. His approval ratings dropped considerably in the last few weeks.
Their lack of experience showed more widely in these elections. They won in Hackney and Lewisham where they’ve had a relatively strong presence for years and came second in parliamentary seats in 2024. In other areas where polling would have suggested similar success, like Hammersmith and Ealing, they did considerably less well, in part due to an absence of infrastructure and activists. If they’re able to build this out, as Reform has done over the past few years, they could do better in the future.
A bigger long-term challenge is they have a more extreme version of Reform’s voter concentration problem. Polanski’s “left populist” strategy speaks much more to inner city private renters angry about their economic precarity, than it does to older Green-curious voters in more rural areas whose main interest is conservation. This was reflected in the results. The Greens made nearly all their gains in London, and picked up lots of seats in Manchester and Newcastle, as well as taking Norwich and Hastings where they’ve been building a presence for some time. They did make a few gains in rural counties, but had nothing like the same vote share across those areas.
The Polanski strategy could feasibly win 50 seats at a general election, maybe 100 if they keep building momentum and get better at dealing with extremism in their ranks. But not more than that given this concentration of their voters. Reform could feasibly win a majority, even if they’re not on track to do so at the moment, but the Greens can’t. Which means that, if they can maintain their position, no left bloc party can win a majority. If this remains true as we get closer to 2029 there’s going to be endless speculation about deals between parties and “coalitions of chaos”. The Greens democratic approach to internal policy-making makes this particularly tricky for Polanski as it will make it harder for him to renounce some of their quirkier ideas.
5. The Lib Dem strategy is running out of steam
Over the past decade the Lib Dems have run a successful strategy to become the left bloc choice in large parts of the south. This has involved avoiding too much in the way of national campaigning, so as not to take positions on issues where there are differences of view across their target seats, while placing a lot of emphasis on local issues and being best placed to beat the Tories. In these elections they made more incremental gains using the same approach. They won both of the new Surrey unitary authorities, wiped the Conservatives out of Sutton and picked up a few of their long-term targets like Stockport.
But it’s an approach with diminishing returns. They gained proportionally fewer seats this time than in recent years and it’s trapping them in a certain type of area. They were notably unsuccessful in winning a lot of the wards they targeted in London boroughs like Southwark that don’t have the demographics of Richmond or Kingston. They even lost some wards to Labour (like the one I live in in Haringey). In places like Manchester or Islington, where they have previously benefited from dissatisfaction with a Labour government, it was the Greens who provided the main challenge. The Libs national vote share hasn’t budged even as the government’s poll ratings have halved.
Under Ed Davey this isn’t going to change. These kinds of tactical incremental victories are what he does best, and what he knows. There is a growing unhappiness within the party, though, about the absence of greater ambition. When they do change leader (not something I’m expecting to happen soon) this question will be at the centre of the debate.
6. Labour is going to need a very different approach
Labour actually did a bit better than I expected them to, particularly in London where they held councils like Merton and Redbridge I thought they’d lose. But it was, obviously, still a disastrous set of results, especially in their northern heartlands like St Helens, Sunderland, Gateshead and South Tyneside. They’ve been struggling to hold these areas for some time, as their base has shifted to being more urban, educated, and remainer, and now Reform has emerged as a receptacle for voters’ unhappiness.
There’s a lot of debate about the exact nature of the voter flows here. In most places where Labour lost to Reform they lost more voters to the Greens, so there’s certainly no case for chasing Farage’s vote (and to the extent that’s been tried it’s failed anyway). But there are also places, like Halton or Sandwell where the scale of their losses cannot be explained by defectors to the Greens or Lib Dems. The swings are just too large. There will be an element of differential turnout here. We can see from turnout figures that Reform managed to attract a lot of people who don’t usually vote, and may not have voted Labour in the past. But there must have been some direct switchers too.
In any case, trying to chase the Green vote won’t work any better than chasing the Reform one. Labour can only win by finding a way to hold together a coalition who don’t agree on issues like immigration. The best way to do that would be to stop worrying about narrow political strategy and just focus on governing well. There are things this coalition does agree on, like wanting NHS improvements, that a successful government could campaign on.
But given the current state of things, and the Gulf crisis which is going to lead to yet another miserable budget this autumn, they may need, at some point, to try a bolder strategy to survive. Increasingly, I suspect this will involve seeking a mandate to renegotiate Brexit because, as I said in a previous post, it’s the one issue that is polarising enough to get attention and can bring together enough of Labour’s 2024 coalition to win.
Clearly there are downsides to this plan. The EU might not appreciate the issue being so politicised again, and they have a say over whether negotiations are going to happen. It might mean sacrificing some seats in the most Brexit-y areas to Reform (though, perhaps counter-intuitively, more than a fifth of Reform supporters say they want to rejoin). It would mean a lot of other important issues were ignored in the campaign. But the dynamics of the system we’ve ended up in means it will be increasingly tempting. (It will also depend on the leadership contest assuming Starmer does go at some point. Some of the candidates would be much more likely to embrace this idea – possibly during the contest – than others.)
7. PR wouldn’t be inherently more fragmenting than first past the post under current conditions
For years the argument against PR has been that it would lead to something very like what is now happening in England – a messy multi-party system.
Ironically, we also had our first fully PR election for a parliamentary election, in Wales, and it produced an emphatic two-party result, with Plaid and Reform miles ahead of anyone else. One of the benefits of PR is it gives voters clarity about their options rather than forcing them to try and figure out the best tactical vote. Had the election been fought under first past the past, the results would likely have been more fragmented as people felt they needed to vote Lib Dem or Labour in some seats to beat Reform.
I’ve thought for a long time that we will eventually end up with PR for national elections but that it will probably require a couple of messy hung parliaments for it to happen. That it still probably true but the case is now overwhelming – it is just not reasonable to expect voters to navigate a multi-party system like this. We had seats won on 20% of the vote this time.
More importantly than the complexity, the inability to identify broad-based political strategies that work across multiple types of battleground is paralysing our politicians. If we don’t change we can look forward to an endless string of election campaigns built around narrow tactics, demographic targeting, and fear of the alternative.
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Appendix: what I got right and wrong
In my first preview post I forecast that the parties’ national vote share equivalent would be:
Reform: 27%
Greens: 20%
Lib Dems: 16%
Tories: 15%
Labour: 14%
The actual numbers according to the BBC were:
Reform: 26%
Greens: 18%
Tories: 17%
Labour: 17%
Lib Dems: 16%
Because I was a bit too low on the Tory and Labour percentages I overestimated their collective losses by 700 seats and overestimated Reform/Green gains by the same amount. Hundreds of seats were retained by the main parties by just a few percentage points. This shows how sensitive first past the post systems are to tiny vote share changes.
The main parties’ vote held up best in London, which meant a disproportionate number of my council misses were in the capital. Labour held five boroughs I thought they’d lose (Merton, Redbridge, Camden, Islington and Barking) and the Tories two (Bromley and Bexley).
Outside of London I had a better hit rate – correctly forecasting the result in 93 out of 104 councils. Several of these misses were in those “middle England marginals” discussed above – Reform didn’t win Swindon, the Tories retained Harlow, Labour retained Crawley and Lincoln. A few were Reform gains I thought they’d get close to but not take in “left behind” areas (St Helens, Sandwell, Calderdale). The Lib Dems lost a couple of councils I thought they’d just hold (Hull, Gosport). There were no big surprises.
In Wales my predictions for the Senedd were:
Plaid: 39 seats
Reform: 33
Labour: 13
Tories: 6
Greens: 4
Lib Dems: 1
The actual result was:
Plaid: 43
Reform: 34
Labour: 9
Tories: 7
Greens: 2
Lib Dems : 1
In Scotland I thought the SNP would get closer to the 65 seats they needed for a majority than the 58 they won. They lost a few more constituencies than I expected. But I was right to think the Greens would benefit from a lot of tactical voting for the regional lists and would challenge for second place. In the end they just missed out, winning 15 seats, while Labour and Reform both won 17.
My main aim with the previews is to try and give readers a sense of the nature of contests in different parts of the country and an idea of the range of likely results and I think I did that.
Pro Bono: yup, loose talk costs lives alright. I should have just quoted from Wikipedia:
Welsh Labour and its forebears have won a plurality of the Welsh vote at every United Kingdom general election from 1922, every National Assembly (now Senedd) election from 1999 to 2026, and all elections to the European Parliament in the period 1979–2004 and in 2014.[8] Welsh Labour holds 27 of the 32 Welsh seats in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, 9 of the 96 seats in the Welsh Senedd, and 576 of the 1,264 councillors in principal local authorities including overall control of 10 of the 22 principal local authorities.
From 1922 to 2026, it had the longest winning streak of any political party in the world and had been described as "by some distance the democratic world's most successful election-winning machine".[9] Its winning-streak ended in 2026 when it was reduced to just 9 seats in the Senedd, with the progressive, pro-independence Plaid Cymru winning instead.
And, as far as the success of Reform being "a natural continuation of the realignment on the right which was in progress at the last General Election", this is very true. But nonetheless deeply depressing particularly, as you say, because of Trump's ballooning European unpopularity since then (not least in the Greenland matter). I suppose in light of that, and growing Brexit regret, I (disregarding the polls) had hoped it wouldn't be as bad as this. For so many people to have voted Reform makes me despair at what kind of country we are becoming. And as for these being (in England) merely local council elections, these people must have disregarded everything known about the few Reform councils already in place. Cue even more despair.
The count is done in Wales, Plaid Cymru won the most seats (43), but 6 short of a majority, Reform won 34, and Labour 9. Labour had been in power there since 1922, according to Wikipedia the longest winning streak in the world for a political party in a democracy. The various commentators (and voters) seemed to indicate that a good proportion of the electorate voted Plaid tactically to keep Reform from power. In Scotland, the SNP won the most seats, but not enough for a majority (they would need 65). Labour (17) are slightly ahead of Reform (15), and there are still 7 seats to declare. The English numbers are much worse than when I posted before, with 7 still to declare. If you look at this link, make sure to click on "How this election works" for each of the three nations, they're all different.
Meanwhile, Reform have so far gained almost 900 seats in local councils, and Labour (and the Tories) have lost around 500 each (I'm too disheartened to catch up with their exact figures). The Greens have done quite well, but given that their leader Zack Polanski is currently dealing with accusations that he has been fiddling his council tax by misreporting where he lives, and has been proven to have lied about e.g. having been a representative of the Red Cross, things don't look too great for them either. It's true that the latest accusations about Zack Polanski surfaced very near the end of the campaign, as did the news that Farage had accepted an undeclared "gift" of £5 million from a Filipino-resident crypto billionaire just before deciding to stand for parliament, so just maybe those stories didn't have time to cut through. Although this election was just for local councils, I still think it is a very ominous sign of where we are going and what the British public is prepared to overlook. All in all, things are looking almost as appalling in the UK as they are in the US....
hsh, hadn't seen that. Also, I've been meaning to come back to you on your question about post-Brexit immigration. But the truth is, what's happening pretty much all round politically is so depressing, and (not unrelated) at this very moment we are looking at the probability that Nigel Farage's Reform will be making big (huge) gains in today's local elections, so frankly I can't think about any of this stuff at the moment. I'd rather soothe myself by watching gorillas groom and cuddle David Attenborough, or watching the camera zoom back from David Attenborough talking about meerkat habits, to show a meerkat sitting on his head. So I think it's time to go to bed and read the latest Murderbot.
When the Natural Environment Research Council rejected the results of the poll to name their new Antarctic research vessel Boaty McBoatface, the public were nonetheless happy to hear that one of the new RRS Sir David Attenborough's remotely controlled submersibles would be called that instead.
He is an amazing man, who has revolutionised the way millions of people around the globe see the natural world. Although a very senior BBC TV executive in the 60s and 70s, (among other highs, he commissioned an extraordinarily varied series of ground-breaking series e.g. Civilisation, The Ascent of Man, Monty Python's Flying Circus) he gleefully escaped the boring prospect of being appointed Director General of the BBC in 1972, resigned and instead went on to make and present various programs while writing the scripts for his historic series Life on Earth, a joint production between the Beeb and Turner Broadcasting (RIP Ted Turner) which moved into production in 1976. And, as they say, the rest is history.
I cannot think of another person who is so admired and who inspires so much affection in the UK (and probably worldwide as well). It is such a relief to see his name trending in the last few days, and not have to feel an icy hand gripping the heart until one checks the news....
Wow, this story from today's Times is quite something. Hard to approve of anything done in Elon Musk's name, but still. In fact, if he had a good instinct for PR (instead of being a mad bastard) he'd fund a movie about it:
The great Starlink sting: how Ukrainian hackers are duping Russian troops
On the front line with the cyberassault division tricking enemy invaders into revealing their GPS co-ordinates
Wednesday May 06 2026, 11.53am, The Times
Under cover of fog, the Russian troops had trudged through swampland to flank Ukraine’s defensive positions on dry land.
The tangled undergrowth of the Kakhovka floodplain had slowed their movement but offered sanctuary from the prying eyes of Ukrainian drones buzzing across the sky.
Advance units had infiltrated within 12 miles of Zaporizhzhia city, the capital of one of the four Ukrainian regions coveted by President Putin, and prematurely announced as annexed in 2022.
It was early February, at the tail end of an intense Kremlin bombing campaign and a long, freezing winter of blackouts. The future looked bleak for Ukraine’s defenders.
“The enemy was attempting to infiltrate their units through indirect assault operations — particularly by exploiting poor weather — to move their infantry between our positions and continue their advance,” said Yaro, an intelligence officer with the 128th Heavy Mechanised Brigade, which is fighting Russian forces in the village of Plavni, south of Zaporizhzhia city.
Further east, Russian forces were advancing near the city of Hulyaipole. Across the Donbas, Ukrainian troops were falling back at Pokrovsk, Myrnohrad, Lyman.
Then, suddenly, the invaders lost access to the battlefield internet provider they had come to rely on for encrypted communications and drone control, Space X’s Starlink.
Tens of thousands of Starlink satellite receivers had been smuggled into Russia via Central Asia, Turkey and the Middle East. Russian soldiers were able to use them to increase the range of their attack drones, as well as make them more accurate and difficult to jam. Officers were able to employ real-time mapping of the battlefield overlaid with troop positions and terrain imagery, improving their co-ordination of soldiers in combat.
“Since 2025 they started to use Starlinks to control their big drones and give a higher precision for the attacks, give them an advantage to bypass our anti-drone systems,” said “Goldfinger”, a wounded soldier turned hacker for Ukraine’s 256 Cyber Assault Division, a group of civilian cyberwarriors. “So it was becoming more important and dangerous for us.”
Kyiv appealed to Space X and its founder, Elon Musk, to introduce a registration requirement for any Starlink on Ukrainian territory. They agreed. To register, users had to visit an authorised service centre on unoccupied territory and present their passport. Shortly afterwards, unregistered devices were blocked.
The Russians in the field were blinded. Desperate soldiers sought Ukrainians willing to register their Starlinks for cash, and the 256 Cyber Assault Division spotted an opportunity. Posing as cybercriminals, they opened a Telegram channel offering to register Russian Starlinks as Ukrainian in exchange for cryptocurrency.
Inside the Ukrainian tank brigade trying to hold back Putin’s onslaught Acting like IT support, they used an AI chatbot to gather data from the Russians in stages, starting with innocuous requests for serial numbers and culminating in a request for the Starlink’s GPS co-ordinates. Surprisingly, they coaxed out the data of more than 2,600 receivers.
The co-ordinates revealed Russian headquarters, command posts and drone pilot positions. The hackers turned them over to Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence, or gave them directly to Ukrainian brigades they knew were fighting near by.
One such brigade was Yaro’s. In his command centre, a wall of screens broadcast a dizzying array of information, including troop dispositions, radar alerts for incoming enemy drones and livestreams of outgoing friendly ones striking their targets.
On one screen, he opened up the latest co-ordinates from the 256 Cyber Assault Division, mapped them on to reconnaissance imagery and zoomed in to examine the area. The Russian infiltrators were revealed.
He said: “So, they live here. The roof of the shelter is absolutely perfect, but because there are many branches across it, it’s been closed off as if ruined. This is where they’ll be, and right next to it we can see all the signs of their rubbish. Fresh tracks. We’ll now process and issue the co-ordinates to the lads.”
Soon afterwards, a strike drone smashed into the roof, bringing the walls of the shelter down around the Russians. Just before impact, the drone’s camera relayed images of a satellite dish on the building’s roof. It pointed not toward the sky, but to a neighbouring village.
Since the Starlink receivers no longer work, the Russians have begun using dishes to build wifi bridges between units. The tactic allows communications but also helps the Ukrainians spot new enemy positions.
Yaro said that Russians often remained in the same position that had been given away to the hackers, either because the soldier who gave away their co-ordinates was too afraid to confess his mistake to his superiors or because it was too difficult to move out into the open so close to the front line.
Once his team have verified the target, the attack itself is farmed out to one of the brigade’s strike drone teams, or those of a neighbouring unit. Katerina, 24, pilots a heavy bomber drone, launching from close to the front line to fly deeper into enemy territory.
She decided to join the Ukrainian armed forces after her village was liberated in the first year of the war. “My fellow villagers suffered during occupation — some of the men were taken prisoner, one was tortured to death. They threw grenades into basements were people were hiding, too terrified to come out. Some people died as a result,” she said.
Katerina is four months pregnant but runs the gauntlet daily attacking the Russian positions, and is determined to fight on: “I just feel a thirst for revenge, for everything they’ve done here and are doing.
“I’m protecting my sisters, brothers, little nephews and, in fact, all the children in Ukraine who are suffering from Russian aggression. And I’m doing this so that my children can live in peace later on.”
During the week The Times visited the 128th Heavy Mechanised Brigade, the pace of attacks was relentless, with new intelligence coming in daily and the brigade’s drone teams striking target after target.
In the brigade’s area of responsibility, Russian strikes on Ukrainian lines have fallen by 45 per cent thanks to the shutdown of Starlink terminals and the strikes enabled by obtaining co-ordinates of Russian positions, Yaro said.
The true impact of the operation may be much greater. The 256 Cyber Assault Division has been able to distribute the data gathered to Ukrainian units from across the front line. Other brigades too, have emulated their success, adopting hacking techniques for frontline reconnaissance and gathering yet more Starlink data.
Yet the hackers’ work does not stop there. Working with the Ukrainian think tank Dallas Analytics and volunteer hactivist organisations like InformNapalm, the division has exposed western politicians and companies working with Russia by hacking the email addresses of Kremlin officials and Moscow businessmen.
They have even discovered the location of Russian arms factories, since targeted by UK-supplied Storm Shadow missiles. Increasingly, their operations are begun using AI personas or other AI designed and implemented hacking tools, and finished by semi-autonomous attack drones.
The nature of warfare is becoming increasingly dystopian, and fast, Yaro said. “I see the picture that in five years we mostly won’t need people. It scares me.”
For those of us still concerned (or obsessed!) with the need for proper investigative journalism, I thought some might be interested in this, which is held annually in memory of the legendary journalist and editor Harry Evans. The actual summit is held in London for an invited audience only, but there is a live stream available for anybody interested to watch.
https://sirharrysummit.org
Pioneering British newspaperman Sir Harry Evans (1928-2020) was one of the giants of post-war journalism. The award-winning work he spearheaded as editor of The Northern Echo, The Sunday Times and The Times set the gold standard for courageous investigative journalism – from his fight to overturn a young Welshman’s wrongful murder conviction that spurred the end of the death penalty in the UK, to his celebrated ten-year campaign to win compensation for Thalidomide children, and his exposure of the cover-up of Soviet spy Kim Philby. In 2002, he was voted the Greatest British Newspaper Editor of all time by his media peers.
The summit brings together the world’s most dogged and diverse truth-seekers, both seasoned and innovative: unsung reporters who risk their lives and reputations, intrepid war photographers, digital data sleuths, relentless documentarians, and enterprising investigators in podcasting, publishing, TV, and streaming media. What they share is a moral commitment to the truth – not the sanctioned story, the acceptable version or the cosmetic spin – but the unvarnished account of what really happened..
On “What’s wrong with liberalism?”
Donald, I cannot say enough how welcome I find your voice here, and I am 100% certain I am not alone.
cleek, you're not the only argumentative commenter/bastard here, and I certainly include myself among them. Peace and love, as we used to say in the 60s.
On “Open Thread time”
Meanwhile, I'm astonished that neither the Guardian, the Times nor the NYT seem to make anything of the fact that China has warned Trump not to threaten Cuba. I thought when I saw it on C4 News that it was a tremendous slap in the face after Trump's rosy description of their relationship, but it seems that most of the world press is not necessarily taking it that way. How interesting...
On “What’s wrong with liberalism?”
"what we have now isn't working"
You get no argument from me on that. And despite my comments on litmus tests, that should in no way be taken as opposition to certain kinds of extreme protest and activism; what i think is so counterproductive is the necessity for every box of the ideological checklist having to be ticked before allies can be accepted.
"
Thanks, wj, very interesting.
I’m sure the conversation will slide towards straw-man justifications of why one side is right and the other side is [fill in your favorite flavor of wrong, weak principled, and destined to lose], but I think these work as descriptions.
It's a tough one, particularly with people (on both sides) who are determined to vilify the views of the other side, and ostracise those who hold them. This is where I particularly sympathise with Barney Frank when he talks about the litmus tests. To look at people who share very many of one's basic values and aims, but who disagree on one or two issues, and immediately write them off as the devil's spawn, is regrettable and counter-productive; it lowers the chances of achieving much in the generally desired direction of travel. You could categorise this as "destined to lose", but I think that is a simplistic way of looking at it, and essentially a different mindset regarding strategy v tactics.
"
Tangentially, gift link:
Barney Frank, in Hospice, Has Advice for Democrats
Mr. Frank speaks about the missteps of the Democratic Party and his hope for its future. “Frankly, if I weren’t dying, people wouldn’t be paying as much attention.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/us/barney-frank-congress-democrats-advice.html?unlocked_article_code=1.j1A.PqtU.8Yyt0B_H6GEI&smid=url-share
"
Given wj's reflex to defend "true" conservatives and conservatism from some of the worst accusations that can be and have been made against them, and the rough consensus here that the GOP, MAGA and maybe most Republicans these days are "reactionaries and irresponsible greedheads", I'd be interested to know when wj thinks the switch happened between most conservatives being roughly like him, and now. When last, under which presidency, did you feel wj that people like you were part of the conservative mainstream? And do you think that your views have changed somewhat as a reaction to the changes you have perceived developing in today's GOP?
"
Hey, there's another target (other than liberals) for the ire of an influential portion of the right: women! I want to see the Venn diagram. Gift link:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/06/conservative-masculinism-misogyny/686939/?gift=cx0iluuWx4Cg7JjlT8ugCQm4fwz1z7Y-btjq1gZjNas&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
"
nous: your self-description makes it very clear how so much of the rightwing "liberal elite" description is pure, superficial and bad-faith argumentation. They saw it was damaging when applied to them, and decided to have a go at turning the tables. Because, of course, one couldn't have liberal opinions based on anything like principle! Why, the very concept is absurd....
"
Still going through a lot of this, but I was interested in nous being struck by the idea that Liberalism is elitist. I have noticed that this has become an increasingly common rhetorical trope of the right; they saw how damaging the accusation of elitism was to the public, and have arrived at a way to accuse liberals of it. e.g. Only liberals have no problem with immigration, because they are not directly affected by the consequences on public services etc, whereas "the working man" is.
Apart from that, but still on liberalism, Ian Leslie has a podcast of his interview with Cass Sunstein on "What the Beatles and Dylan tell us about Liberalism". It's 50 minutes long, with no transcript, but since the first 18 minutes are about Dylan's relation to it, I got hooked in. I didn't agree with everything Sunstein said, but it's interesting nonetheless.
https://www.ian-leslie.com/
On “Open Thread time”
Looks credible to me:
It’s a shooting war, but on the level of The Troubles, not of The American Civil War. No one is putting units on the ground and fighting openly for territory. That’s an obsolete vision of war.
As for the following, me too:
I read this conversation as “If this were going to happen, how might it go down?” more so than “Oh, no! This is what’s going to happen!”
I don’t think any of it is ridiculous to consider as being possible.
"
bc: Ah, thank you. It's true, I (and probably most liberals) find it hard to reconcile the strong judgementalism on sexual and moral issues (in which latter I include cruelty, dishonesty and lack of empathy for vulnerable e.g. poor people - see Jesus's teachings passim) with tolerance for the clear display of any of these failings (or "sins") in favoured rightwing politicians, religios, judges etc. As for your reservation about the chances of "a shooting war" I very much hope you're right. But alas, examples like the violence in Minneapolis, the deaths in "illegal immigrants' detention centres", the clear disregard for the necessity to protect Americans' health (vaccinations etc) and the obvious and rampant corruption, leads me to believe that it's not all that far fetched to speculate that large scale violence and subsequent retribution may result.
"
Funnily enough, after posting that, I read this in today's NYT. I knew about Pressler and the SBC, but this bigger picture demonstrates why so many of the hated liberals can no longer stomach the hypocrisy so that partition is becoming a hot issue, even more than when Michael first started talking to us about it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/14/opinion/southern-baptist-convention-paul-pressler.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ilA.Up_P.Q5MFggBPR151&smid=url-share
The modern history of political evangelicalism is riddled with the same kind of story: A powerful man gains a following by casting himself as the heroic warrior against the heretical and the godless. When he uses his power and fame to indulge his basest desires, he treats exposure as an attack and justice as persecution.
And because he’s built a following, he has an army of people ready to leap to his defense. After all, if they stay silent, then the liberals will win, and no one can let the liberals win. Ever.
Against this backdrop, President Trump wasn’t an aberration; he was an inevitability.
"
I'd pretty much decided not to reply to bc's comment a day ago, since it seemed clear that s/he didn't really understand the underlying point being made by nous and wj about possible cooperation between Evangelicals, Southern Baptists and the LDS. The point is that whatever doctrinal differences they might have, organisations with a strong moralistic conservative mindset have already proven that they can support someone who actually displays the opposite qualities, as long as they attack Democrats and liberals. This has already been demonstrated by the Evangelicals, and of course by strongly moralistic, law-and order rightwing Republicans, in their support for Donald Trump. And this phenomenon is connected to a growing discussion about partition in the US. Tangentially, but I think really significantly in the last couple of days, we see this even in the wake of things like this:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/12/trump-late-night-social-media-posts
"
I am afraid what nous says rings horribly true. I believe it.
On “Rue Britannia!”
If we are considering the various extraordinary ways in which people get elected, regarding the people who say they would still vote for Trump, I wonder how many voters in the US are even aware of this kind of thing:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/12/trump-late-night-social-media-posts
"
Well, for anybody who wants a more up-to-date (and hugely more informed) update on the election, here it is from Comment is Freed:
Seven things we learnt from the elections
Sam Freedman
May 10
Hopefully Comment is Freed readers will have felt a sense of familiarity as election results came in over Thursday night and Friday.
While I certainly didn’t get all my predictions right, with a few exceptions all the contests played out along the lines set out. I forecast the correct result in 107 out of 136 English councils, and close to the exact Welsh Senedd results. If you’re interested in a more detailed analysis of what I got right and wrong I’ve included an appendix at the end.
In my last post I said there was no plan from any of the main candidates to challenge Keir Starmer for the Labour leadership after the scale of their losses became apparent, but that these things can spiral when MPs and members are at their most angry and frustrated. Yesterday’s intervention from backbencher Catherine West, who has said she will challenge Starmer tomorrow if no one else comes forward, it a perfect example of this. It seems unplanned and, in part, a response to a friend losing their council seat.
Whether she succeeds in forcing a challenge will depend on how others react. 80 MPs are required to trigger a contest, and there are many more than that who want Starmer gone. But lots want Andy Burnham to replace him and so need a longer timetable while he finds a way back into Parliament. Others, who support Wes Streeting or Angela Rayer, will be waiting for a signal. Plenty who are uncommitted will be spending the day furiously WhatsApping each other and trying to figure out what to do. If it doesn’t happen now, it will happen at some point. Starmer’s authority has been gone for some time.
The purpose of this post, though, is not speculation on Labour’s leadership but to look at some of the broader trends and shifts that have become apparent during these elections and have long term significance for the future of British politics.
I’ve discussed some of the more obvious ones before. We’re experiencing a transition into a more fragmented European-style multi-party system. Labour and the Tories are facing competition for their core vote in a way they never have before. As a result they are struggling to identify strategies that allow them to retain previously loyal voters, while appealing to the centre, as Reform and the Greens hoover up the right and left bloc votes. The result is a paralysis of indecision and an increasingly dissatisfied electorate. And so the cycle continues, made worse by an electoral system unsuited to our new politics that encourages a narrow tactical approach from parties.
In the rest of the post I’m going to focus in more detail on how this is all playing out in practice. How do we assess results in such a messy system? What are the strategic challenges facing all the main parties? Is Reform on track for a majority? What can the Greens realistically achieve? What are the best options for the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems? What can we learn about PR from what happened in Wales? Most of all – is there any route out of the paralysis induced by a fragmented system?
The battleground model is the right one
In my preview post I broke England down into five types of battleground where the contests would all look very different. This is what happened. In the first type – lower income, older, whiter towns – the kind that are often called “left behind” and suffered most from deindustrialisation, Reform did extremely well, taking control of councils in places like Barnsley, Sunderland, Gateshead, and Walsall. Whereas in the “middle England marginals” battleground, places like Swindon and Milton Keynes that tend to vote for whatever party is in government, Reform made gains but not on anything like the same scale. In younger urban wards with lots of graduates the contest was largely between progressive parties.
This is partly about the post-Brexit realignment that has led people to polarise more on age, level of education and values. But it also reflects voters trying to figure out what the effective two-party system is in their area. There’s no longer much point voting Tory in Barnsley because Reform is the only viable right-wing winner. Whereas in Swindon there’s still a genuine split on the right, with the Tories winning seats off Labour too. In London councils where there was no prospect of a right-wing party succeeding, like Lewisham and Hackney, voters clearly felt more comfortable voting Green than in Wandsworth or Westminster where the Labour vote held up more.
This all means that models of election outcomes based on projections of national vote share are no longer much use. Both Sky and the BBC used their projected shares to calculate seat numbers at a general election, but the results didn’t make much sense. Sky suggested the Greens would only win 13 seats on a 14% vote share. But clearly these votes would be highly concentrated in certain types of constituency. I can think of more than thirteen seats they’d win just in London if these results were reflected at a general election. Likewise, Reform would be unlikely to get to their projected 284 seats because, outside of their strongholds in deindustrialised towns, they can be stopped with tactical voting.
We are going to need different and more complex models, including a lot of qualitative insight, to make sense of a multi-party world with an unsuitable electoral system.
Reform didn’t break through in places they need for a majority
Outside of London, Reform won nearly all of the councils I said they would and a few similar ones that I thought they’d just miss out on (Sandwell, Calderdale and St Helens). But they didn’t win Swindon, which polling suggested they should have done. Nigel Farage launched his campaign here, so it was a major target. Had they won it would have indicated they were on track to become the next government. But generally speaking the Tory and Labour vote held up better in these kinds of bellwether seats like Harlow, Crawley, and Milton Keynes.
These are all constituencies Reform would need for a majority, given they won’t win many in the big cities or Scotland (and Plaid Cymru may now be a barrier to them taking constituencies in Wales off Labour). Winning places like Doncaster and Barnsley won’t be enough to make Farage prime minister.
Reform’s overall vote share was down to 26%, from 30% in the previous local elections, which is consistent with a drop in their polling since last summer, and worsening approval ratings for Farage. So while they have obviously had a successful eighteen months, becoming a serious force in British politics, there is plenty of evidence that they are now moving backwards, or at least failing to build on their momentum.
As I’ve written elsewhere they are caught between trying to appeal to a radicalised online supporter base, some of whom have defected to Rupert Lowe’s Restore UK, and focusing on reassuring waverers, in places like Swindon, who are worried about voting for a more radical party. The more they cater to the extreme the harder it is to win these places and the more people will be willing to vote tactically against them. Yet they really do face a threat to their right. Notably Restore won the only seats it stood in around Lowe’s Great Yarmouth constituency, which blocked Reform from taking outright control of Norfolk county council. Had they stood nationally it would have likely stopped Reform winning dozens if not hundreds of seats.
3. The Tories are becoming the Liberal Democrats of the right
These results weren’t quite as bad for the Conservatives as last year, but they were still dire for a party that’s supposed to be the main opposition. They lost all six county councils and all the ground they’d made post-Brexit in “left behind” places like Walsall and Newcastle-under-Lyme. They came fourth in Wales and fifth in Scotland, having come second last time in both.
They did best in more affluent right-wing areas like Barnet, Bromley, and parts of Hampshire. This is essentially what’s happened to the Liberal Democrats in reverse. Ed Davey’s party has become the “left bloc” choice in wealthier parts of the country where Labour has always struggled to win. In areas with lots of remain-voting graduates like Richmond, Surrey, and Tunbridge Wells they’ve consolidated this vote very effectively. But it also means they will always be the junior partner in the left bloc at a national level, and dependent on tactical voting for their victories.
Likewise, the Tories are increasingly reduced to being the right bloc choice in areas that are bit too genteel and well qualified to vote Reform. They even benefitted from some anti-Reform tactical voting in places like Bexley where they explicitly positioned themselves to progressives as the best option to beat Farage. This is something the Lib Dems do in places like Haringey and Southwark when they’re trying to beat Labour.
It’s a strategy they could lean into by focusing on economics over culture wars and being more willing to criticise Reform than Kemi Badenoch has in the past, and is probably their best bet to avoid being wiped out completely in 2029. But it does mean accepting that they’re the junior partner to Reform in the right bloc and have no route to a majority unless Farage’s party implodes. We will now see this play out in councils like Hampshire and Peterborough where Reform and the Tories will need to work together to govern.
4. The Greens are limited by a lack of infrastructure and vote concentration
Though the Greens won five councils and hundreds of seats they did a bit worse than their polling would have suggested, which stopped them taking several more London boroughs. This may be due to bad publicity the party received over antisemitic comments from a number of candidates and Zack Polanski retweeting criticism of the police over the Golders Green stabbings. His approval ratings dropped considerably in the last few weeks.
Their lack of experience showed more widely in these elections. They won in Hackney and Lewisham where they’ve had a relatively strong presence for years and came second in parliamentary seats in 2024. In other areas where polling would have suggested similar success, like Hammersmith and Ealing, they did considerably less well, in part due to an absence of infrastructure and activists. If they’re able to build this out, as Reform has done over the past few years, they could do better in the future.
A bigger long-term challenge is they have a more extreme version of Reform’s voter concentration problem. Polanski’s “left populist” strategy speaks much more to inner city private renters angry about their economic precarity, than it does to older Green-curious voters in more rural areas whose main interest is conservation. This was reflected in the results. The Greens made nearly all their gains in London, and picked up lots of seats in Manchester and Newcastle, as well as taking Norwich and Hastings where they’ve been building a presence for some time. They did make a few gains in rural counties, but had nothing like the same vote share across those areas.
The Polanski strategy could feasibly win 50 seats at a general election, maybe 100 if they keep building momentum and get better at dealing with extremism in their ranks. But not more than that given this concentration of their voters. Reform could feasibly win a majority, even if they’re not on track to do so at the moment, but the Greens can’t. Which means that, if they can maintain their position, no left bloc party can win a majority. If this remains true as we get closer to 2029 there’s going to be endless speculation about deals between parties and “coalitions of chaos”. The Greens democratic approach to internal policy-making makes this particularly tricky for Polanski as it will make it harder for him to renounce some of their quirkier ideas.
5. The Lib Dem strategy is running out of steam
Over the past decade the Lib Dems have run a successful strategy to become the left bloc choice in large parts of the south. This has involved avoiding too much in the way of national campaigning, so as not to take positions on issues where there are differences of view across their target seats, while placing a lot of emphasis on local issues and being best placed to beat the Tories. In these elections they made more incremental gains using the same approach. They won both of the new Surrey unitary authorities, wiped the Conservatives out of Sutton and picked up a few of their long-term targets like Stockport.
But it’s an approach with diminishing returns. They gained proportionally fewer seats this time than in recent years and it’s trapping them in a certain type of area. They were notably unsuccessful in winning a lot of the wards they targeted in London boroughs like Southwark that don’t have the demographics of Richmond or Kingston. They even lost some wards to Labour (like the one I live in in Haringey). In places like Manchester or Islington, where they have previously benefited from dissatisfaction with a Labour government, it was the Greens who provided the main challenge. The Libs national vote share hasn’t budged even as the government’s poll ratings have halved.
Under Ed Davey this isn’t going to change. These kinds of tactical incremental victories are what he does best, and what he knows. There is a growing unhappiness within the party, though, about the absence of greater ambition. When they do change leader (not something I’m expecting to happen soon) this question will be at the centre of the debate.
6. Labour is going to need a very different approach
Labour actually did a bit better than I expected them to, particularly in London where they held councils like Merton and Redbridge I thought they’d lose. But it was, obviously, still a disastrous set of results, especially in their northern heartlands like St Helens, Sunderland, Gateshead and South Tyneside. They’ve been struggling to hold these areas for some time, as their base has shifted to being more urban, educated, and remainer, and now Reform has emerged as a receptacle for voters’ unhappiness.
There’s a lot of debate about the exact nature of the voter flows here. In most places where Labour lost to Reform they lost more voters to the Greens, so there’s certainly no case for chasing Farage’s vote (and to the extent that’s been tried it’s failed anyway). But there are also places, like Halton or Sandwell where the scale of their losses cannot be explained by defectors to the Greens or Lib Dems. The swings are just too large. There will be an element of differential turnout here. We can see from turnout figures that Reform managed to attract a lot of people who don’t usually vote, and may not have voted Labour in the past. But there must have been some direct switchers too.
In any case, trying to chase the Green vote won’t work any better than chasing the Reform one. Labour can only win by finding a way to hold together a coalition who don’t agree on issues like immigration. The best way to do that would be to stop worrying about narrow political strategy and just focus on governing well. There are things this coalition does agree on, like wanting NHS improvements, that a successful government could campaign on.
But given the current state of things, and the Gulf crisis which is going to lead to yet another miserable budget this autumn, they may need, at some point, to try a bolder strategy to survive. Increasingly, I suspect this will involve seeking a mandate to renegotiate Brexit because, as I said in a previous post, it’s the one issue that is polarising enough to get attention and can bring together enough of Labour’s 2024 coalition to win.
Clearly there are downsides to this plan. The EU might not appreciate the issue being so politicised again, and they have a say over whether negotiations are going to happen. It might mean sacrificing some seats in the most Brexit-y areas to Reform (though, perhaps counter-intuitively, more than a fifth of Reform supporters say they want to rejoin). It would mean a lot of other important issues were ignored in the campaign. But the dynamics of the system we’ve ended up in means it will be increasingly tempting. (It will also depend on the leadership contest assuming Starmer does go at some point. Some of the candidates would be much more likely to embrace this idea – possibly during the contest – than others.)
7. PR wouldn’t be inherently more fragmenting than first past the post under current conditions
For years the argument against PR has been that it would lead to something very like what is now happening in England – a messy multi-party system.
Ironically, we also had our first fully PR election for a parliamentary election, in Wales, and it produced an emphatic two-party result, with Plaid and Reform miles ahead of anyone else. One of the benefits of PR is it gives voters clarity about their options rather than forcing them to try and figure out the best tactical vote. Had the election been fought under first past the past, the results would likely have been more fragmented as people felt they needed to vote Lib Dem or Labour in some seats to beat Reform.
I’ve thought for a long time that we will eventually end up with PR for national elections but that it will probably require a couple of messy hung parliaments for it to happen. That it still probably true but the case is now overwhelming – it is just not reasonable to expect voters to navigate a multi-party system like this. We had seats won on 20% of the vote this time.
More importantly than the complexity, the inability to identify broad-based political strategies that work across multiple types of battleground is paralysing our politicians. If we don’t change we can look forward to an endless string of election campaigns built around narrow tactics, demographic targeting, and fear of the alternative.
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Appendix: what I got right and wrong
In my first preview post I forecast that the parties’ national vote share equivalent would be:
Reform: 27%
Greens: 20%
Lib Dems: 16%
Tories: 15%
Labour: 14%
The actual numbers according to the BBC were:
Reform: 26%
Greens: 18%
Tories: 17%
Labour: 17%
Lib Dems: 16%
Because I was a bit too low on the Tory and Labour percentages I overestimated their collective losses by 700 seats and overestimated Reform/Green gains by the same amount. Hundreds of seats were retained by the main parties by just a few percentage points. This shows how sensitive first past the post systems are to tiny vote share changes.
The main parties’ vote held up best in London, which meant a disproportionate number of my council misses were in the capital. Labour held five boroughs I thought they’d lose (Merton, Redbridge, Camden, Islington and Barking) and the Tories two (Bromley and Bexley).
Outside of London I had a better hit rate – correctly forecasting the result in 93 out of 104 councils. Several of these misses were in those “middle England marginals” discussed above – Reform didn’t win Swindon, the Tories retained Harlow, Labour retained Crawley and Lincoln. A few were Reform gains I thought they’d get close to but not take in “left behind” areas (St Helens, Sandwell, Calderdale). The Lib Dems lost a couple of councils I thought they’d just hold (Hull, Gosport). There were no big surprises.
In Wales my predictions for the Senedd were:
Plaid: 39 seats
Reform: 33
Labour: 13
Tories: 6
Greens: 4
Lib Dems: 1
The actual result was:
Plaid: 43
Reform: 34
Labour: 9
Tories: 7
Greens: 2
Lib Dems : 1
In Scotland I thought the SNP would get closer to the 65 seats they needed for a majority than the 58 they won. They lost a few more constituencies than I expected. But I was right to think the Greens would benefit from a lot of tactical voting for the regional lists and would challenge for second place. In the end they just missed out, winning 15 seats, while Labour and Reform both won 17.
My main aim with the previews is to try and give readers a sense of the nature of contests in different parts of the country and an idea of the range of likely results and I think I did that.
On “Open Thread time”
Pro Bono: yup, loose talk costs lives alright. I should have just quoted from Wikipedia:
Welsh Labour and its forebears have won a plurality of the Welsh vote at every United Kingdom general election from 1922, every National Assembly (now Senedd) election from 1999 to 2026, and all elections to the European Parliament in the period 1979–2004 and in 2014.[8] Welsh Labour holds 27 of the 32 Welsh seats in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, 9 of the 96 seats in the Welsh Senedd, and 576 of the 1,264 councillors in principal local authorities including overall control of 10 of the 22 principal local authorities.
From 1922 to 2026, it had the longest winning streak of any political party in the world and had been described as "by some distance the democratic world's most successful election-winning machine".[9] Its winning-streak ended in 2026 when it was reduced to just 9 seats in the Senedd, with the progressive, pro-independence Plaid Cymru winning instead.
And, as far as the success of Reform being "a natural continuation of the realignment on the right which was in progress at the last General Election", this is very true. But nonetheless deeply depressing particularly, as you say, because of Trump's ballooning European unpopularity since then (not least in the Greenland matter). I suppose in light of that, and growing Brexit regret, I (disregarding the polls) had hoped it wouldn't be as bad as this. For so many people to have voted Reform makes me despair at what kind of country we are becoming. And as for these being (in England) merely local council elections, these people must have disregarded everything known about the few Reform councils already in place. Cue even more despair.
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The count is done in Wales, Plaid Cymru won the most seats (43), but 6 short of a majority, Reform won 34, and Labour 9. Labour had been in power there since 1922, according to Wikipedia the longest winning streak in the world for a political party in a democracy. The various commentators (and voters) seemed to indicate that a good proportion of the electorate voted Plaid tactically to keep Reform from power. In Scotland, the SNP won the most seats, but not enough for a majority (they would need 65). Labour (17) are slightly ahead of Reform (15), and there are still 7 seats to declare. The English numbers are much worse than when I posted before, with 7 still to declare. If you look at this link, make sure to click on "How this election works" for each of the three nations, they're all different.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c1428pev1n0t#election-england
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Meanwhile, Reform have so far gained almost 900 seats in local councils, and Labour (and the Tories) have lost around 500 each (I'm too disheartened to catch up with their exact figures). The Greens have done quite well, but given that their leader Zack Polanski is currently dealing with accusations that he has been fiddling his council tax by misreporting where he lives, and has been proven to have lied about e.g. having been a representative of the Red Cross, things don't look too great for them either. It's true that the latest accusations about Zack Polanski surfaced very near the end of the campaign, as did the news that Farage had accepted an undeclared "gift" of £5 million from a Filipino-resident crypto billionaire just before deciding to stand for parliament, so just maybe those stories didn't have time to cut through. Although this election was just for local councils, I still think it is a very ominous sign of where we are going and what the British public is prepared to overlook. All in all, things are looking almost as appalling in the UK as they are in the US....
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hsh, hadn't seen that. Also, I've been meaning to come back to you on your question about post-Brexit immigration. But the truth is, what's happening pretty much all round politically is so depressing, and (not unrelated) at this very moment we are looking at the probability that Nigel Farage's Reform will be making big (huge) gains in today's local elections, so frankly I can't think about any of this stuff at the moment. I'd rather soothe myself by watching gorillas groom and cuddle David Attenborough, or watching the camera zoom back from David Attenborough talking about meerkat habits, to show a meerkat sitting on his head. So I think it's time to go to bed and read the latest Murderbot.
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Friday is David Attenborough's 100th birthday.
When the Natural Environment Research Council rejected the results of the poll to name their new Antarctic research vessel Boaty McBoatface, the public were nonetheless happy to hear that one of the new RRS Sir David Attenborough's remotely controlled submersibles would be called that instead.
He is an amazing man, who has revolutionised the way millions of people around the globe see the natural world. Although a very senior BBC TV executive in the 60s and 70s, (among other highs, he commissioned an extraordinarily varied series of ground-breaking series e.g. Civilisation, The Ascent of Man, Monty Python's Flying Circus) he gleefully escaped the boring prospect of being appointed Director General of the BBC in 1972, resigned and instead went on to make and present various programs while writing the scripts for his historic series Life on Earth, a joint production between the Beeb and Turner Broadcasting (RIP Ted Turner) which moved into production in 1976. And, as they say, the rest is history.
I cannot think of another person who is so admired and who inspires so much affection in the UK (and probably worldwide as well). It is such a relief to see his name trending in the last few days, and not have to feel an icy hand gripping the heart until one checks the news....
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Good point. I bet Elon Musk thinks he is John Galt.
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Wow, this story from today's Times is quite something. Hard to approve of anything done in Elon Musk's name, but still. In fact, if he had a good instinct for PR (instead of being a mad bastard) he'd fund a movie about it:
The great Starlink sting: how Ukrainian hackers are duping Russian troops
On the front line with the cyberassault division tricking enemy invaders into revealing their GPS co-ordinates
Wednesday May 06 2026, 11.53am, The Times
Under cover of fog, the Russian troops had trudged through swampland to flank Ukraine’s defensive positions on dry land.
The tangled undergrowth of the Kakhovka floodplain had slowed their movement but offered sanctuary from the prying eyes of Ukrainian drones buzzing across the sky.
Advance units had infiltrated within 12 miles of Zaporizhzhia city, the capital of one of the four Ukrainian regions coveted by President Putin, and prematurely announced as annexed in 2022.
It was early February, at the tail end of an intense Kremlin bombing campaign and a long, freezing winter of blackouts. The future looked bleak for Ukraine’s defenders.
“The enemy was attempting to infiltrate their units through indirect assault operations — particularly by exploiting poor weather — to move their infantry between our positions and continue their advance,” said Yaro, an intelligence officer with the 128th Heavy Mechanised Brigade, which is fighting Russian forces in the village of Plavni, south of Zaporizhzhia city.
Further east, Russian forces were advancing near the city of Hulyaipole. Across the Donbas, Ukrainian troops were falling back at Pokrovsk, Myrnohrad, Lyman.
Then, suddenly, the invaders lost access to the battlefield internet provider they had come to rely on for encrypted communications and drone control, Space X’s Starlink.
Tens of thousands of Starlink satellite receivers had been smuggled into Russia via Central Asia, Turkey and the Middle East. Russian soldiers were able to use them to increase the range of their attack drones, as well as make them more accurate and difficult to jam. Officers were able to employ real-time mapping of the battlefield overlaid with troop positions and terrain imagery, improving their co-ordination of soldiers in combat.
“Since 2025 they started to use Starlinks to control their big drones and give a higher precision for the attacks, give them an advantage to bypass our anti-drone systems,” said “Goldfinger”, a wounded soldier turned hacker for Ukraine’s 256 Cyber Assault Division, a group of civilian cyberwarriors. “So it was becoming more important and dangerous for us.”
Kyiv appealed to Space X and its founder, Elon Musk, to introduce a registration requirement for any Starlink on Ukrainian territory. They agreed. To register, users had to visit an authorised service centre on unoccupied territory and present their passport. Shortly afterwards, unregistered devices were blocked.
The Russians in the field were blinded. Desperate soldiers sought Ukrainians willing to register their Starlinks for cash, and the 256 Cyber Assault Division spotted an opportunity. Posing as cybercriminals, they opened a Telegram channel offering to register Russian Starlinks as Ukrainian in exchange for cryptocurrency.
Inside the Ukrainian tank brigade trying to hold back Putin’s onslaught
Acting like IT support, they used an AI chatbot to gather data from the Russians in stages, starting with innocuous requests for serial numbers and culminating in a request for the Starlink’s GPS co-ordinates. Surprisingly, they coaxed out the data of more than 2,600 receivers.
The co-ordinates revealed Russian headquarters, command posts and drone pilot positions. The hackers turned them over to Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence, or gave them directly to Ukrainian brigades they knew were fighting near by.
One such brigade was Yaro’s. In his command centre, a wall of screens broadcast a dizzying array of information, including troop dispositions, radar alerts for incoming enemy drones and livestreams of outgoing friendly ones striking their targets.
On one screen, he opened up the latest co-ordinates from the 256 Cyber Assault Division, mapped them on to reconnaissance imagery and zoomed in to examine the area. The Russian infiltrators were revealed.
He said: “So, they live here. The roof of the shelter is absolutely perfect, but because there are many branches across it, it’s been closed off as if ruined. This is where they’ll be, and right next to it we can see all the signs of their rubbish. Fresh tracks. We’ll now process and issue the co-ordinates to the lads.”
Soon afterwards, a strike drone smashed into the roof, bringing the walls of the shelter down around the Russians. Just before impact, the drone’s camera relayed images of a satellite dish on the building’s roof. It pointed not toward the sky, but to a neighbouring village.
Since the Starlink receivers no longer work, the Russians have begun using dishes to build wifi bridges between units. The tactic allows communications but also helps the Ukrainians spot new enemy positions.
Yaro said that Russians often remained in the same position that had been given away to the hackers, either because the soldier who gave away their co-ordinates was too afraid to confess his mistake to his superiors or because it was too difficult to move out into the open so close to the front line.
Once his team have verified the target, the attack itself is farmed out to one of the brigade’s strike drone teams, or those of a neighbouring unit. Katerina, 24, pilots a heavy bomber drone, launching from close to the front line to fly deeper into enemy territory.
She decided to join the Ukrainian armed forces after her village was liberated in the first year of the war. “My fellow villagers suffered during occupation — some of the men were taken prisoner, one was tortured to death. They threw grenades into basements were people were hiding, too terrified to come out. Some people died as a result,” she said.
Katerina is four months pregnant but runs the gauntlet daily attacking the Russian positions, and is determined to fight on: “I just feel a thirst for revenge, for everything they’ve done here and are doing.
“I’m protecting my sisters, brothers, little nephews and, in fact, all the children in Ukraine who are suffering from Russian aggression. And I’m doing this so that my children can live in peace later on.”
During the week The Times visited the 128th Heavy Mechanised Brigade, the pace of attacks was relentless, with new intelligence coming in daily and the brigade’s drone teams striking target after target.
In the brigade’s area of responsibility, Russian strikes on Ukrainian lines have fallen by 45 per cent thanks to the shutdown of Starlink terminals and the strikes enabled by obtaining co-ordinates of Russian positions, Yaro said.
The true impact of the operation may be much greater. The 256 Cyber Assault Division has been able to distribute the data gathered to Ukrainian units from across the front line. Other brigades too, have emulated their success, adopting hacking techniques for frontline reconnaissance and gathering yet more Starlink data.
Yet the hackers’ work does not stop there. Working with the Ukrainian think tank Dallas Analytics and volunteer hactivist organisations like InformNapalm, the division has exposed western politicians and companies working with Russia by hacking the email addresses of Kremlin officials and Moscow businessmen.
They have even discovered the location of Russian arms factories, since targeted by UK-supplied Storm Shadow missiles. Increasingly, their operations are begun using AI personas or other AI designed and implemented hacking tools, and finished by semi-autonomous attack drones.
The nature of warfare is becoming increasingly dystopian, and fast, Yaro said. “I see the picture that in five years we mostly won’t need people. It scares me.”
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For those of us still concerned (or obsessed!) with the need for proper investigative journalism, I thought some might be interested in this, which is held annually in memory of the legendary journalist and editor Harry Evans. The actual summit is held in London for an invited audience only, but there is a live stream available for anybody interested to watch.
https://sirharrysummit.org
Pioneering British newspaperman Sir Harry Evans (1928-2020) was one of the giants of post-war journalism.
The award-winning work he spearheaded as editor of The Northern Echo, The Sunday Times and The Times set the gold standard for courageous investigative journalism – from his fight to overturn a young Welshman’s wrongful murder conviction that spurred the end of the death penalty in the UK, to his celebrated ten-year campaign to win compensation for Thalidomide children, and his exposure of the cover-up of Soviet spy Kim Philby. In 2002, he was voted the Greatest British Newspaper Editor of all time by his media peers.
The summit brings together the world’s most dogged and diverse truth-seekers, both seasoned and innovative: unsung reporters who risk their lives and reputations, intrepid war photographers, digital data sleuths, relentless documentarians, and enterprising investigators in podcasting, publishing, TV, and streaming media. What they share is a moral commitment to the truth – not the sanctioned story, the acceptable version or the cosmetic spin – but the unvarnished account of what really happened..
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Tsk tsk Snarki, that's a LOOSE thread!
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