LONDON–The May 8 electoral results of the local council election signaled a new era in British electoral politics. This is the severe defeat of the traditional political parties and the rise of new parties in the local council elections in England and in the parliamentary elections in regional parliaments in Wales and Scotland.
Having moved from two seats before this election to 1,453 seats after election, Nigel Farage’s far right colonial Reform Party emerged as the most important national political force in England and Wales, accelerating the decline of the traditional colonial Labour and Tory Parties.
The Labour Party had a catastrophic night. Having lost 1,496 seats, they now have 1,098 seats. The Tory Party has lost 563 seats and now has 801 seats.
The Green Party was another winner of that night having won 441 new seats, now holding 587 seats. They even won the overall control of the Borough of Hackney, one of the big prizes in London, with a significant black population–although Hackney has been heavily gentrified under the Labour Party.
The Reform Party has emerged with these elections as the most popular political party in England and Wales, but not so in Scotland where they were not able to win a single seat.
We are not surprised by the victory of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. Britain just confirms the trend that is already under way throughout Europe and in the U.S. where colonial political parties that represent liberalism are being challenged and defeated at the polls.
Farage has been one of the architects of the victory of the “No” camp during the Brexit referendum in June 2016. His political line—like most of the far right white colonial nationalists in Europe, Australia and the U.S.—is centered on attacking colonized peoples who are labeled as immigrants as the main source of the problems that white people face in the UK.
This is not a new phenomenon. We know that in Germany, Adolf Hitler came to power through the ballot box. Just as it happened in Germany where the bourgeoisie financed the rise of the Nazis under Adolph Hitler, we are seeing the same thing in Europe where sectors of the bourgeoisie are financing and supporting the far right political parties to capture political power.
A sector of the bourgeoisie recognizes that liberal colonialism is in a crisis and that it cannot satisfy the needs and aspirations of the white peoples as they used to in the old days when Britain used to rule over an empire “upon which the sun never set.” They recognize that they need a system that can raise white nationalism or patriotism that is loyal to the colonial bourgeoisie overtly at the expense of black people and other colonized peoples in Britain and around the world.
White people have turned their backs on traditional parties, who cannot guarantee them a wonderful colonial life at our expense without meaningful resistance.
Why are white people in Britain and throughout the world turning their backs on traditional ruling class parties such as the Labour and Tory Parties?
In an article in The Burning Spear in August 2014, we wrote that “As many of our readers may know, since the 2008 near financial meltdown, financial uncertainty and insecurity have become the norm for many people in Europe.
“People are worried about their jobs, mortgages, high cost of food and so on. These worries are compounded by the fact that the ruling class is nowhere near to solving those problems.
“This is one of the main reasons that white people are turning their backs on traditional white nationalist parties for new white nationalist parties.
“The crushing defeat of the coalition parties in power in Britain in the May 2014 European elections are all symptoms of a system that is deeply dysfunctional, has lost its dynamics and has reached a low point from which it cannot recover.”
Then in July 2024, British prime minister Kier Starmer came to power having won only 33 percent of the votes, which secured the Labour Party 412 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons. Now that voter turnout was 59.7 percent, which, according to the House of Commons library, “was the lowest at a general election since 2001.”
This recent local election seems to be a revenge for Nigel Farage, the new darling of the British colonial bourgeoisie, who won five seats in parliament in the 2024 elections despite winning 14.3 percent of the votes.
The British electoral system has been designed to favor the “First Past the Post” as the winner. This is a system in which the party with the largest share of votes, rather than the majority of votes, wins the election. It does not reflect the number of the votes won by the rest of the candidates.
Kier Starmer was a career prosecutor who sent countless black youth to the British jail system as part of the counterinsurgency warfare against the black community.
Starmer’s appointment of Peter Mandelson, a friend of Jeffrey Epstein as the UK ambassador to the U.S., made him even more unpopular when it emerged that Mandelson was given security clearance for the role by the Foreign Office, despite concerns being raised by vetting officials.
For African people, which colonizer stands at the helm of this imperialist power isn’t the most important question. The most important thing is what African people must do to defend ourselves and advance our own selfish national interests in the UK.
The first thing is to check our website theburningspear.com to find out what is going on in the world and check apspuhuru.org for how you can join the struggle for universal African self-determination.
It does not matter who wins the elections—we are our own liberators!
