WHEN the crowd at the World Darts Championship were caught up in an enthusiastic rendition of “Keir Starmer is a w****r” and even the Dead Ringers impersonation of his voice gets booed, we know that the Prime Minister is done for.

His Commons majority now represents a diminishing minority of British voters. The mid-year elections in 2026 will reveal just how much the British political landscape has changed.

There are elections to local councils in many places in England, to the Welsh Senedd and to the Scottish Parliament.

With both Labour and the Conservatives emaciated versions of their former selves, the campaigning prospects for these two main parties of capitalist continuity depend on their contracting cadre of councillors. A May 7 cull could precipitate an organisational and existential crisis.

A precedent was set in France when the Parti Socialiste, reduced almost entirely to elected officials and party functionaries, virtually disappeared with the Socialist presidential candidate in successive election polling in pathetic numbers.

The erosion of anything resembling an homogeneous British polity has added a new dimension to the routine alternation of parties in office. The lack of effective working-class political representation means that an alliance of Reform UK/Conservative parties as mooted by Nigel Farage facing off against a fractured Labour/Green/nationalist axis would rupture existing British political institutions and habits.

Keir Starmer’s political failure is not his alone but is that of his party and, for that matter, of social democracy everywhere in the liberal and neoliberal “democracies.”

The extra dimension in the British case is way in which the contradiction between the multinational character of the state and the overarching power of capital works out.

The block-headed Unionism of the Labour leadership in the referendum on Scottish independence swiftly dissipated the reservoir of goodwill over devolution built up by the STUC-led initiatives in earlier times and the rise of the SNP has almost completely displaced Labour as the hegemonic force in Scottish politics while clothing itself in the tattered remnants of a social democratic appeal.

Its opportunism lies in obscuring its own complicity in the bipartisan administration of British capitalism post the 2008 economic crisis with an overblown rhetoric about resistance to the Westminster consensus.

Devolution — itself a necessary first step in constructing a popular sovereignty — loses meaning without a dirigiste economic policy which can only rest on public ownership.

Welsh Labour has been compelled to differentiate itself from Westminster Labour. The utility this tactic possessed under previous Welsh Labour leaders is now diminished when its challengers are not the Tories but a repurposed Plaid Cymru and Reform UK.

Plaid Cymru has a better claim to a national progressivism than the SNP and is more convincingly a challenge to neoliberal economic orthodoxy despite the unworked-out character of its actual economic programme. Whether this is a powerful enough factor in combatting Reform UK’s mobilisation of crude anti-immigrant sentiment and the not inconsiderable reservoir of British national feeling in Wales is yet untested.

It is unclear just how conscious the labour and trade union movement is about the challenge Reform UK’s iteration of British nationalism presents.

This is sometimes expressed as as English nationalism. Actually there are quite progressive strains in the popular conception of an English nationalism, although the mobilisation of the symbols of an distinct English identity are so charged with imperial associations that it is easily conflated with the racism and imperialist nostalgia upon which Reform UK and its predecessors depend.

While Reform UK has a real potential in both Scotland and Wales, its success in England is made more potent by the simple facts of geography and numbers.

Wales and Scotland make up barely 15 per cent of the population of our country while England is economically rather more significant. The bloated state of London and south-east England is itself a function of the shift from a manufacturing economy to a parasitic finance-industry-based neoliberalism and of the woeful imbalances that capitalist anarchy creates.

A good part of Reform UK’s appeal is grounded precisely in resentment at the attenuated lives people lead in the ruined local economies of industrial Britain. Lack of investment, decaying housing, unemployment and the low-wage jobs market are weaponised by anti-immigrant sentiment in ways that should not surprise anyone seeing fascism’s mobilisation of imperialist ideology and the racism that accompanies it.

It is inevitable that reaction to this state of affairs should be refracted through the lens of a Welsh and Scottish national feeling but the expression of these sentiments in England is compounded by a sense that the local power vested in the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Senedd has no equivalent in the English regions.

How much of this is reflected in the advance of Reform UK which took the two most recently instituted mayoralties — in the Hull/East Yorkshire and Greater Lincolnshire circumscriptions — clocked up hundreds of council seats and won the parliamentary by-election in Runcorn?

It is clear that the cost of living, allied to a crisis in local economies and the failure of the Tories’ “levelling-up” agenda, is the main driver of this collapse in Labour support.

The government’s response is its English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, designed to introduce a more general pattern of devolution across England, turning on the enhancement of the power of mayors to intervene in local economies.

The Bill restructures local government but with four new mayoral elections pending this May the government has postponed them until 2028 supposedly to allow the reorganisation be be completed but, most probably, because Labour is unlikely to win them.

When devolution of powers to Scotland and Wales was first mooted it was conceived of in Labour circles as a measure to limit the appeal of the nationalist parties at a time when Labour hegemony in these two nations was a given.

Where such thinking still exists it is as an illusion fuelled by nostalgia and a rejection of the real in politics.

So too is the fading dominance of the Tories in the English counties while Labour’s presumed advantages in the big cities are eroding with defections to both the left, most obviously to the Greens, and to Reform UK. The appeal of Your Party after its botched birth, although much diminished, is still likely to weaken the Labour vote in places.

Mayoral elections are first-past-the-post but in Wales, London and Scotland the mix of direct constituency contests and proportionally elected seats is creating a new electoral psychology.

Ruling-class hegemony is no longer guaranteed by the alternation in office of two largish parties both committed to the stability of the political system. Where the notion of a more profound change in British society once turned on the prospects of a Labour government impelled by popular pressure to open the way to socialism today this — always speculative — proposition no longer has even the limited credibility it once enjoyed.

Today we need to think outside the box about ways to make the working class a decisive force in national politics on its own account rather than as a stage army mobilised by reaction.

That this is only partially contingent on unions taking the lead is made most clear by some union leaders more keen to secure jobs in aerospace and arms manufacturing than in an alternative economic strategy based on limiting the prerogatives and power of capital.

TUC rhetoric about the cost of living being the decisive issue in British politics is true enough, but unless the connection between austerity economic policy and ramped up arms spending is made clear then the beneficiaries of any insurgency are likely to be on the right. If word gets out about the TUC’s wrong-headed hankering after a return to the EU customs union it would turbocharge support for Reform UK.

The flip side of this uncomfortable reality is that challenging Reform UK can only erode its working-class electoral support if it turns on the class issues which put most of that support in opposition to the policies favoured by the Faragiste billionaire leadership, rather than on a raft of lofty liberal sentiment.

This is a battle that needs to take place in the working-class communities and the workplace, in every school and shopping centre, in every pub and club and on the streets.