The Week 2 May 2025
Director
As I write this, local election results continue to come in. Reform UK have had quite the night. So far, they have picked up one metro mayor and 80 councillors. And they won the Runcorn by-election (by 6 votes), taking the 49th saftest Labour seat in the country (which counterintuitively is also a bit of a win for Labour; only losing by 6).
People have talked for some time about political realignments, but that has tended to be about the shift of voter groups between the main parties. We are witnessing the realignment of the party landscape itself. As election guru Sir John Curtice put it “narrow wins and losses were the order of the night. Nobody, it seems, dominates British politics any more”… at least for now.
Danny Finklestein, characteristically hits the nail on the head. Why are so many people voting for Reform UK? Because “they think (rightly or wrongly) that Britain is broken. And they feel particularly strongly that it is broken for them.”
In other words, the State isn’t working — and when you look at waitlists in healthcare, the cost and paucity of social care, the delays to justice, the cost of energy and housing, the shrinkage of council services, the state of the trains and the roads, who can blame them for feeling this way?
For those concerned by the rise of Reform UK, the best antidote is to remake the State. The Government is pushing ahead with positive reforms to planning, and seeking to streamline regulation to boost growth and attract investment, but it’s going to need to be bolder — and act with much greater haste — if people are to start feeling like Britain is healing.
Read of the week...
Senior Researcher Patrick King, a stalwart of the Reform team for the past 3.5 years, sadly left this week for pastures new. To mark the occasion — and because it’s bang on — my read of the week is his last blog: ‘The paradox of radicalism’. It’s very short, so I’m not going to summarise, but if you’re perplexed by the fact that radical reform never actually seems to happen, this is for you.