Elections
How Bad for Labour? Britain’s Local Elections in Six Charts
Voters arrive at a makeshift polling station set up at St John's Parish Hall in London on May 7.
Photographer: Peter Nicholls/AFP/Getty ImagesAnyone hoping for a decisive result in UK elections to settle questions about the future of Prime Minister Keir Starmer were likely disappointed. Returns presented a mixed picture.
Overall, it was clearly a bruising election for Starmer’s Labour Party, which lost in Wales for the first time in a century and has shed more than 1,000 England council seats. It was another strong performance by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which notched up wins at the expense of both Labour and the Conservatives, the latest sign of the erosion of Britain’s two-party system.