What does the age of nationalism mean for UK’s unity?

Few observers were surprised by the local election results in Britain last week. Opinion polls had already shown that the ruling Labour Party was heading toward a painful defeat under its weak, opportunistic leadership that lacks substance, conviction and charisma.
Its current leader’s rise to power in the 2024 general election was more the result of the failures of others than through any merit of his own. Labour’s share of the vote in this seemingly sweeping victory was telling: the party won 411 seats with only about 34 percent of the vote.
That is, Labor increased its vote share by no more than 1.6 percent from the defeat of 2019. Indeed, that 34 percent was the lowest vote of any party with an outright parliamentary majority since the end of the Second World War.
The Conservatives, meanwhile, saw their share collapse, from 44 percent in 2019 to just 20 percent in 2024. The centrist Liberal Democrats raised their share to 12.2 percent, a gain of 0.7 percent. But most of the Conservatives’ votes went to the far right — the Reform UK party, which was born from the twins of Brexit and hostility toward immigration and immigrants.
Indeed, Labour did not win the 2024 election by offering a coherent alternative grounded in a solid set of values. It won because it benefited from the chaos and division at the top of the Conservative hierarchy on the one hand and from the rise of a populist party, Reform, that was more extreme and more hostile to immigrants than even the Conservative right on the other.
Even so, despite the generous and largely undeserved mandate that Labour and its leader received, Prime Minister Keir Starmer chose to settle scores within the party rather than reach out to its various factions and defuse their desire for revenge.
Backed by the Labour right wing that had dominated the party under former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his former ally Peter Mandelson (the most powerful and influential figure in Blair’s circle), Starmer launched a ferocious campaign against the remnants of the party’s previous left-wing leadership.
After the 2024 elections, the Conservative Party was in shambles. The defeat not only cost the party power but it also opened the floodgates to defections. A number of hard-line Conservatives left to join the extremist Reform UK, among them several senior ministers from recent Conservative governments. Ironically, some of these defectors had themselves been born to immigrants from ethnic and religious minority communities, including Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists.
As for Britain’s “two-party system,” which goes back to 1721, it is worth recalling that, between 1721 and 1924, the two rivals were the Whigs, who later evolved into the Liberal Party after absorbing various groupings, and the Tories, the Conservative Party. Since 1924, the Conservatives and Labour have been the two key players. 

The most significant political shift seen in last week’s results was the rise of nationalist sentiment across the board.

Eyad Abu Shakra

The most significant political shift seen in last week’s results was the rise of nationalist sentiment across the board: both in its proto-independence form in the non-English political entities (Scotland and Wales) and in its isolationist, anti-immigrant form in England itself, though Reform also made inroads in the non-English entities.
These two versions of nationalism are ideological rivals. The racist and economic notions of the far right that underpin Reform’s isolationism present a stark contrast to the nationalism of the Scots, Welsh and Irish, which is rooted in notions of liberation from the weight of England’s old colonial legacy.
In any event, Reform was the big winner, followed by the Green Party, which many now regard as a credible alternative to Labour on the left.
Reform’s rapid and alarming rise runs parallel to the broader ascent of far right, racist and neo-fascist movements from India to the Americas to Europe. What is happening today, however, cannot be understood in isolation from Margaret Thatcher’s legacy. Thatcher was the last Western leader to boycott South Africa’s apartheid regime. She waged wars of attrition against the welfare state that had been built in Britain after the Second World War. She led the battle against “European identity” before her disciples and the heirs of her policies fulfilled her dream of separating Britain from Europe.
At the time, Thatcher’s policies complemented those of Washington under Ronald Reagan. The European stage today, however, is far more complicated. The “special relationship” between Washington and London was real at the time; that is no longer the case. Thatcher was once the loudest of Washington’s European allies. Today, other European capitals are more right-wing than London, including Berlin. Moreover, conflicts within Europe are now shaped by the detente taking shape between Washington and Moscow.
Personally, I believe the collapse of the two-party system in the UK will endure for some time. I also fear it may prove costly for both its internal stability and national unity, as it is difficult to imagine the nationalists of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland finding comfort in a government headed by Reform extremists.

• Eyad Abu Shakra is managing editor of Asharq Al-Awsat, where this article was originally published.
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