Editorial: Local election results are a deserved rebuke to Labour but suggest worrying tensions that could pull apart the UK

The local election results in England, Scotland and Wales are some of the most momentous in British history.​

Not only is the scale of losses for the governing Westminster party, Labour, immense, but separatists have had a huge showing not only again in Scotland but also in Wales. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has swept the board in England.

This is all, in a way, deserved, given the incompetence of Sir Keir Starmer’s government, which seems to have no clear principles and which has not only lacked conviction, but has been weak on issue after issue, and forced into numerous humiliating u-turns.

But this is a dangerous moment for the United Kingdom. Not only is it alarming to see the return of power in Scotland to the Scottish National Party, which has been if anything more incompetent in office north of the border than Labour has been across the nation, the rise of nationalism in Wales is worrying too. Separatism there has never had the same traction that it does in Scotland.

Furthermore, Nigel Farage has done little to dispel critics of his movement that he and his key supporters are English nationalists. While he makes intermittent pledges of support and sympathy for Northern Ireland, he has made appalling comments about the prospects of an all Ireland, and he recently seemed to be relaxed about yet another Scottish attempt to split form the UK.

There is another troubling feature about the results. The ruinous level of immigration, often from people who are hostile to British culture, ought to lead to sustained support for parties that want a border clampdown, yet public opinion is fluctuating back and forth between such parties on the political right and the Labour-Green-Lib Dem leaders who are still so naive as to be fundamentally weak on these matters.