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The local elections have left Labour potholed below the waterline.

Hurrah!! It’s the Mid Terms!

I know, I know. They’re really just the ‘local elections’ here but you can’t blame me for trying to inject a tiny bit of transatlantic glamour into what is usually the most boring spin of Britain’s electoral cycle.

Local elections often seem like one of those peculiarly British inconveniences we all might grumble about under their breath, but generally accommodate without too much serious complaint.

You know, like the way the sick are forced to wait months to receive basic, grudging, inadequate hospital treatment from ‘Our NHS’, the very best of all possible health services, in the entire world.

Or how busy mums are compelled to battle crack addled shoplifters, gangs of leering foreign men, and mountains of bubonic bin bags, each time they pop down the High Street to grab some out-of-date American Candy, from one of their tiny market town’s plethora of brand new, but seemingly never open, Turkish barbers.

Or how we are made to watch as our local parks, grass verges, and roundabouts, turn overnight, into reeking tent cities, rancid homeless encampments, and rotting cardboard shanty towns.

So for a change, when my turn came to finally ‘have my say’, I actually thought it would be fun to make a day of it, and even took my kids along, to experience firsthand, what participating in the farce of a fake, Potemkin, democracy, actually feels like.

So well done me.

Surprisingly my efforts to crowbar us all into one voting booth did not meet with the approval of the polling station’s killjoy officials.

I told them that now ‘family voting’ was all the rage in forward thinking, progressive constituencies like the recently famous Gorton and Denton, we simply wanted to try it out for ourselves.

But they were having none of it.

Patiently explaining that this was very much a ‘special rules for special people’, sort of deal, and that as a pale, male, and stale (late) middle aged, white oppressor, who’s only job is to pay for everything, I was simply not ‘special’ enough.

Yes, when the residents of one half of Gorton and Denton do it, it is ‘family voting’. But if we try it, it’s plain old, ‘election fraud’.

And fair enough.

That does actually make sense.

Because of Islamophobia. Or something.

Anyhoo, the results are in, and as predicted, the locals have proved a disaster for Sir Keir Starmer, and his nation hating, wealth repelling, competence dodging, Labour Party.

Labour lost 1500 council seats. In line with the very worst predictions.

It was a catastrophe.

And now everyone in his own party has turned into a Ukrainian rent boy. They all want to see the back of Keir Starmer.

And yet, like a resolute six year old princess, clinging determinedly to a copy of Sparkle World in a busy Waitrose, (if you know, you know), our piss-poor PM still, at the time of writing, refuses to relinquish his grip on power, reassuring the British public that

‘I was elected to change this country - tough days like this don’t weaken my determination to do that. They strengthen it’.

But you have changed this country Sir Keir.

You’ve made its people poorer. More divided. Less secure. And more dependent on their enemies. You’ve trashed our nation’s legacy, besmirched our history, and insulted our dignity. You’ve given away our islands, our rights, and our fish. You’ve filled up our prisons with foreigners, our hotels with grifters, and our streets with sex offenders, knife wielders, and Jew haters.

So when it comes to ‘change’, I’d say, it’s pretty much Mission Accomplished.

The Conservatives, who themselves contributed so very much to bringing about the ‘change’ described above, also lost a bunch of council seats. And continue on their ignominious odyssey, from most successful election winning machine in history, to psephological irrelevance.

Regular readers will know I’m pretty dismissive of the useless, late stage, Tories. And have generally been disappointed in Kemi Badenoch.

But I have to say, the Tory leader’s off the cuff defence of the Jewish community in the face of a far left ‘Pro-Palestine’ activist last week, is the single most impressive intervention from any leading British politician that I have seen on the issue.

So I’m minded to give her, if not her Gauke riddled corpse of a party, a decent hearing from now on.

I think that’s only fair.

Meanwhile Restore defied the naysayers, sweeping the board in Rupert Lowe’s home constituency of Great Yarmouth. Completely annihilating the competition. It was an absolute triumph.

And Ed Davey also did, or said something. Apparently.

Of course the big story of the night was meant to be the ascendency of the Zack Polanski’s Greens.

‘Green Party’ are two words which used to conjure up images of musty tree huggers, enviro loving sandal wearers, verruca encrusted hygiene dodgers, harmless basket weavers, and loamy compost fanciers.

But not anymore. Because since becoming leader, wonky faced wannabe, one time X Factor backing dancer, tit-tickler, heroin legaliser, pretend DOJ advisor, fake Red Cross spokesman, and Semitic shunning svengali, Zack Polanski has given the party quite the makeover.

He’s put the ‘mentalist’ into ‘environmentalist’.

And the ‘Green’ into, ‘There’s been another stabbing in Golders Green’.

Of course the Greens are at pains to claim they still care just as much about the environment as they ever did.

It’s just that they now think it would be a more fragrant, pleasant, and sustainable environment, if only it didn’t have quite so many Jews genociding up the place.

And by ‘quite so many’ they mean ‘any’.

Polanski’s Greens have spent months being bigged up by a huge variety of commentators, experts, and insiders, representing many different perspectives.

These have included soft-left BBC journalists, high profile communists, socialist media personalities, and even left wing podcasters. All have tipped Polanski’s party for greatness.

But on the night, the Greens were the dog that didn’t bark.

Sure, they won some councils in a few student towns, and even secured the mayoralty of Hackney, in East London.

(For 10 points guess the hair colour of Hackney’s new mayor:

a.) Pink

b.) Brown

c.) A uniquely unattractive mixture of pink and brown

Answer: Here. )

But overall Zack Polanski’s barmy army only secured around 18% of the vote.

18%.

That’s still an awful lot of gulls, idiots, lunatics, and fools highly intelligent, socially aware, balanced young women.

But the country wasn’t subsumed under the tsunami of idiocy that some had predicted.

This failure can probably be blamed on Polanski himself, after the gap toothed gaffemeister made the most self-destructive intervention in any election campaign since that time in 2017, when Theresa May ran breathless through a wheat field, to excitedly tell unimpressed voters all about her brilliant new plan to put a tax on dementia.

Most British politicians seeking high office, even David Lammy, would have more sense than watch a brave policemen risk his life, wrestling a knife wielding terrorist to the ground, on a busy London street, and immediately take the side of the terrorist.

But not our Zack. Confronted with harrowing footage showing two Jewish men being stabbed in North London, he immediately leapt to the defence of the knife waving madman, condemning the police for being unnecessarily heavy handed, and insufficiently conciliatory, in their efforts to prevent the public being murdered.

On the surface, yes, it seems like a stupid thing to do. But maybe Polanski’s decision to throw his lot in with violent extremists, Islamists, and terrorists, while robustly denouncing Britain’s brave men in uniform, isn’t quite as bonkers as it first seems.

After all, the government’s top lawyer, and Keir Starmer’s best pal, Lord Hermer, got himself the plum gig of Attorney General, by pretty much following this very strategy.

Happily Polanski’s intervention did not go down well with the voters. And overnight his approval rating dropped a massive 14 points.

1 point for each of his IQs.

In the end it was Nigel Farage’s night. And though I’m not a Reform supporter per se, I was delighted to see his party do so well in a national poll.

Well done Nigel, you played a blinder.

Regime commentators, the Labour government, and the BBC might consider Reform the Britain First, second coming of the Third Reich, for proposing milquetoast immigration policies which John Major’s government would have dismissed as a bit wishy washy, but the party seems pretty popular with actual, regular voters.

Reform won around 26% of the vote. Which in the world of two party politics would never be enough to win an overall majority. But in a five way race, quite possibly is. (Maybe, almost.)

In some ways the two insurgent parties were mirrors of each other.

Polanski went to the extremes, pandered to the most rabid sections of his base, alienated the Green Party’s more traditional, centrist, genuinely ’be kind’, ‘National Trust/Mumsnet’ type supporters, and paid a heavy price at the ballot box.

Farage has gone the other way, and risks disappointing his more strident followers.

He’s tacked to the centre, shrugged off the ethno nationalists, rejected purity spirals, and maximalism.

Instead he’s sought to appeal to a broad coalition of decent, hard working voters who have clearly had enough of mass unskilled immigration, deportation-dodging foreign criminals, town centres full of ‘asylum seekers’, and the very real migrant crime wave.

But it’s 2026, not 1996, so they are also likely to have a broad mixture of immigrant friends, foreign born work colleagues, and interact daily with perfectly nice Muslim acquaintances, shopkeepers, and neighbours.

These voters are fed up with being unfairly smeared as ‘racists’ by an out of touch elite class which is happy to spend their wages, even as it looks down its nose on their lifestyles and opinions. Yes, they see mass migration, both legal, and illegal, as a major, even the major issue facing this country, but do not consider themselves remotely bigoted, xenophobic, or intolerant.

(Yes. I am absolutely describing myself here.)

Of course, some on the right don’t like where Farage has repositioned his party. But it does seem to be where the votes are. 26% of them anyway.

And just as the Greens managed to repel a chunk of voters in the last days of their campaign, so Reform no doubt picked up significant new support, by unveiling its hilarious new policy of siting detention centres for illegal migrants in Green supporting constituencies, which have consistently and loudly voted for open borders.

You’d think that these beneficent do-gooders would be delighted to experience first hand, the cultural enrichment which comes from having hundreds of Eritreans, Afghans, Iranians, Somalians and Iraqis, move next to their local kid’s school.

After all, they have been literally screaming ‘Diversity is our strength!’ in our faces for years.

But not a bit of it.

Reaching for the smelling salts, the progressives described a policy, which they had spent years imperiously and enthusiastically imposing on the lower orders, as a ‘punishment beating’. Throwing a wholly predictable tantrum when confronted with the novel concept that they might actually be forced by the uppity proles, to suffer the real world consequences, of their own virtue signalling.

And it wasn’t just the left, some on the ‘sensible’ right have apparently decried the policy as well. Branding it spiteful and vindictive.

Yes. That’s the point.

Turning our nose up at this sort of ‘unreasonable’ politics is one reason why we keep losing.

Plus, it’s no more spiteful and vindictive than Bridget Phillpson slapping VAT on private schools, Rachel Reeves taxing farmers into suicide, or Labour Party grandees boasting how mass immigration was always intended to ‘rub the right’s nose in diversity.’

Confronted by his party’s dismal results, Starmer did what he always does, and blamed his own catastrophic failure on simply not doing enough stupid things, quickly enough.

Rent controls, price controls, wealth taxes, Net Zero, welfare bloat, Digital ID, sky high taxes, rejoining the EU, open borders, an ever expanding authoritarian state.

This isn’t the politics of progress, it’s the politics of performance, ignorance, grievance, envy, and rage.

Policies which don’t work, have never worked, and can never work.

Still, if there is one thing Starmer excels at, it doubling down on failure. Which is why his latest ‘solution’ to Labour’s woes is to bring back Gordon Brown.

Yes. The very same Labour Prime Minister who ruined it all for his party, (and our country), the last time.

It’s as if Rishi Sunak attempted to steady his sinking ship, by bringing back Liz Truss.

Starmer is like a man, banging his head against a wall to cure a headache.

And when that doesn’t work, reaching for a hammer.

That’s enough for now. But let’s close on a positive note for once.

Like so many of you, I’ve been black-dogged by the steady, and under Starmer, accelerating, decline in our country of late. Unable to see any realistic path to recovery.

But I’m permitting myself the possibility that these local elections might represent, if not a bona fide turning point, then at least a glimmer, a tiny, fragile, but growing flame of hope, that perhaps there’s a chance to save this great nation after all.

No wonder Sir Keir Starmer, was so desperate to cancel them.

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LSO