Endlessly Anxious, Terminally Passive

Notes on the 2025 UK Local Elections

The UK local elections of 2025 are done and dusted, and if you're still reeling in surprise, you might want to update your news sources from "vibes" to "polls." Nigel Farage’s Reform UK—yes, the man who’s been rebooting the same xenophobic infomercial for two decades—won a staggering 677 out of approximately 1,600 seats. That’s not an exception. That’s a trend report in real time.

Sky News called it a “massive blow to traditional parties,” and for once, even their tabloid baritone seems underwhelming. Farage has gone from beer-hall oddity to national bellwether. In other words, if this were a video game, UKIP 2017 was just the tutorial level.

Political scientist Will Jennings offers the kind of geographic and demographic breakdown that that sharpens your mind while sinking your mood: Reform did best “in areas with fewer university graduates, higher levels of employment in manufacturing and primary industries, and where UKIP did well in 2017.” Translation? The places politicians only remember exist when they need to cosplay authenticity.

The Tories got hammered. Full stop. Labour didn’t exactly waltz out with a victory dance either. Sure, they retained the West of England mayoralty, but not before making it look like a narrow escape. The Greens, forever the Peter Pan party of British left, gained over 40 seats, but couldn’t pull off the symbolic coup their Guardian and Bluesky cheerleaders (yes, Owen Jones & co., we’re looking at you) had been fantasizing about. Spoiler: real-world politics isn't a Jon Stewart segment with applause break.

And the reactions? Oh, they range from the unhinged to the soporific. On the right, it was all grins and gin—Matt Goodwin, once a political scientist and now a full-time Farage cosplay account, declared it a “historic result.” Elsewhere, we saw the predictable offerings: the liberal intelligentsia’s deeply furrowed brows, the recycled references to “normalization of the far right,” and yes, that one highly cited article that they just can’t stop citing (you know the one). Same take, different week. At this point, the commentary is less about analysis and more about auto-therapy.

But perhaps more irritating than the jubilant grifters are the “progressive reactionaries”—a phrase that should be an oxymoron, but isn’t. These are the guardians of The Discourse, gatekeeping from their ergonomic chairs, telling us that Reform’s rise is purely a media construct, a phantasmagoria produced by GB News and algorithms. “It’s the mainstream, stupid!” they scream. “The far right’s popularity is top-down!” As if that analysis alone could evict despair from a housing estate or put food on a Lidl receipt.

This is the same camp that polices political imagery like medieval clergy policing relics. Don’t post a photo of Farage smiling—he might appear likeable. Don’t quote his voters without condemning them. Don’t acknowledge their concerns unless you can footnote it with Judith Butler or back-catalogue of Aurelien Mondon articles from The Conversation. After all, the culture war must be fought, not understood.

Here’s a thought experiment: what if, instead of explaining voters to themselves, we occasionally lent them an ear? What if we stopped treating the electoral base of Reform as a homogeneous blob of culture-war avatars and started asking what kind of world could make a racist demagogue look like the most relatable person on the ballot?

What if we admitted that the left has no compelling material offer? No believable pitch to those wrecked by deindustrialization, stripped of public services, denied dignified housing? What’s our message to the Black, Brown, and white working class equally brutalized by a neoliberal economy that masks cruelty with technocratic civility?

The problem isn’t just that we don’t have all the answers. It’s that we’re often asking the wrong questions. Like: how do we “educate” voters? How do we “combat disinformation”? How do we stop them from voting wrong? These are the rhetorical equivalents of scolding someone drowning for not knowing how to swim.

Let’s flip the frame. Why should someone who can’t afford rent care about Farage’s digital footprint or his latest dog whistle? Why should someone on a zero-hours contract spend their free time learning about media bias when the only bias they know is the one that keeps their heating off and their council estate underfunded?

Maybe, just maybe, the problem is us. The ones with the time to thread Bluesky posts into moral dissertations, who can afford the luxury of viewing politics as theater while others experience it as survival. If the far right is the new mainstream, then the task isn’t just resisting it—it’s building something that makes it obsolete.

We don’t need another referendum on who’s more outraged or more correct. We need a plan. One that acknowledges pain, not just identity. That speaks about wages, rent, work, care—not just aesthetics and semiotics.

That doesn’t mean abandoning anti-racism, identity-based rights politics. It means grounding them in material life. Because without that? We’re just narrating our decline in increasingly niche vocabulary.

So yes, the local elections were a disaster. But they were also a reckoning. The question isn’t just why people voted for Reform. It’s why no one else offered a future worth voting for.