UK Politics 2025

[Jubal]

We somehow made it this far through 2025 without a UK politics thread, which is testament to how much less chaotic politics in the UK is under Labour - or was until recently because we've just had local elections.

This was a largely Conservative held block of councils, and now... isn't. Labour lost about 190 seats and the Conservatives lost 670 or so, hard-right Reform picked up 670, the Liberal Democrats 160, and the Greens about 50. Consequently 10 councils are now controlled by Reform, and three by the Liberal Democrats. So the Reform Party now have millions of pounds of budget to spend, and are explicitly taking Elon Musk and DOGE as inspirations for their agenda so that is concerning (but might also mean that they implode upon hitting reality in the near future).

So generally bad news, though the shift of council control isn't very big between the left and right per se, but the right-wing councils are now really weird far-right councils and the not right wing ones are going to be liberal and liberal-green coalitions rather than labour for the most part.