There are moments in politics when an election result is more than an electoral event. It becomes a warning light.
This week’s local election results across England, alongside contests in Scotland and Wales, feel like one of those moments.
Not because voters should somehow be criticised for expressing frustration. Democracy means precisely that citizens are entitled to register anger, disappointment, and a desire for change. Nor because every person who cast a vote for Reform UK should be caricatured or dismissed. That would be both lazy and politically self-defeating.
But because something deeper and more troubling is happening in British public life.
We are living through an age in which fear has become one of the most potent currencies in politics.
Fear of migration. Fear of economic decline. Fear of cultural change. Fear of crime. Fear of “the other”. Fear of elites. Fear of institutions. Fear of being left behind. Fear of saying the wrong thing. Fear of losing one’s place in the world.
And fear, once normalised, rarely confines itself neatly to one target.
It spreads.
Today it may be directed at migrants crossing the Channel. Tomorrow at Muslims. The day after at trans people. Then at the wider LGBTQ+ community. Then at “woke liberals”, academics, judges, civil servants, journalists, environmentalists, or anyone else cast as somehow outside the supposedly authentic nation.
History teaches us that once politics becomes organised around grievance and scapegoating, the list of enemies has a habit of growing.
The politics of resentment
The rise of right-wing populism in Britain did not happen in a vacuum.
Many people are genuinely struggling.
Public services are visibly frayed. The NHS remains under extraordinary pressure. Local government has been hollowed out. Economic growth has stagnated. Housing is unaffordable for too many younger people. Communities feel changed, sometimes rapidly, in ways that leave some residents unsettled or unheard.
To acknowledge this is not to endorse every political conclusion drawn from it. It is simply to recognise reality.
When mainstream politics appears managerial, remote, or evasive, insurgent politics thrives.
Reform UK has understood that dynamic well.
Its success is not principally about detailed policy. It is about emotional positioning.
It offers clarity in a confused age. Simplicity in a complex world. Certainty where others hedge. Anger where others triangulate.
That is politically powerful.
But powerful does not necessarily mean honest.
Because many of the challenges Britain faces are structurally difficult, long-term, and not susceptible to slogan-based solutions.
“Stop the boats” is a slogan, not an immigration strategy.
“Anti-woke” is a cultural rallying cry, not an economic programme.
“Taking our country back” may resonate emotionally, but it does not explain how to recruit more nurses, build more homes, improve productivity, or restore crumbling public infrastructure.
And if one looks beneath the rhetoric, one must ask a very simple question: whose interests would actually be served?
Populist movements often claim to speak for working people, but their economic instincts frequently tell a different story. Weakening public institutions, attacking regulation, undermining social protections, or opening the NHS to greater marketisation does not obviously advance the interests of those already struggling most.
Anger can be politically mobilised. It is much harder to convert into competent government.
The media’s role
The media is not solely responsible for this moment, but it has undoubtedly helped shape it.
Modern political journalism increasingly rewards heat over light.
Conflict drives clicks. Outrage drives engagement. Simplification travels faster than nuance.
The BBC, in particular, should reflect seriously on its role.
Public service broadcasting carries special responsibilities. Balance is not achieved merely by putting inflammatory voices on air because they are electorally interesting. Nor is impartiality synonymous with amplifying the loudest provocateurs.
Nigel Farage has, over many years, been afforded extraordinary visibility relative to his formal political success for much of that period. One understands the argument: he attracts audiences, he shapes public debate, he represents a strand of political sentiment that cannot be ignored.
But there is a meaningful distinction between scrutiny and amplification.
Similarly, newer insurgent political figures from other parts of the political spectrum have sometimes benefited from disproportionate attention because controversy makes good television.
Meanwhile, slower, more granular political movements often struggle for oxygen. The Liberal Democrats, despite being the third-largest party in Westminster and continuing to build local strength, often seem to exist in a kind of media invisibility unless a by-election upset makes them temporarily impossible to ignore.
This distorts democratic understanding.
Politics becomes framed as a gladiatorial contest between extremes, while more measured voices disappear from public consciousness.
That is not healthy.
Social media and the industrialisation of fear
If traditional media has played a role, social media has supercharged the phenomenon.
Algorithms do not reward calm reflection. They reward emotional activation.
Anger performs. Fear performs. Conspiracy performs.
A lie can circle the country before the truth has put its shoes on, and now it can do so in seconds.
We should also be honest about the legitimate questions surrounding foreign interference, bot amplification, coordinated disinformation, and hostile state efforts to destabilise democratic societies.
Britain is hardly unique in this regard.
From the United States to continental Europe, evidence has repeatedly emerged of malign online influence operations seeking to deepen division, erode trust, and radicalise political discourse.
Whether particular narratives trend organically or are artificially amplified is not always easy to determine in real time. But pretending the risk does not exist would be naïve.
Democracy is vulnerable when citizens no longer know what is authentic.
The weaponisation of identity
One of the bleakest features of our current politics is how readily minority communities are turned into symbols rather than treated as citizens.
Muslims are told, implicitly or explicitly, that they are a threat.
Migrants are blamed for structural failures decades in the making.
Trans people, an extraordinarily small and often vulnerable minority, are portrayed as existential dangers.
The wider LGBTQ+ community increasingly finds itself once again dragged into culture war narratives that many had hoped belonged to the past.
Equality, diversity, and inclusion, imperfect but fundamentally rooted in fairness and dignity, are caricatured as ideological excess rather than serious attempts to widen opportunity and challenge discrimination.
Difference becomes the problem.
Pluralism becomes suspect.
Empathy becomes weakness.
That should concern all of us, whatever our politics.
The policing of politics
Even institutions traditionally expected to remain above partisan fray are not immune.
The politicisation, or perceived politicisation, of policing is particularly troubling.
Public confidence depends on operational independence and restraint.
When senior police figures intervene in ways that can be interpreted as entering political contest, particularly in sensitive electoral periods, it inevitably raises difficult questions.
Equally corrosive is the repeated rhetoric around “two-tier policing”, often deployed with little evidential rigour but considerable emotional effect.
Once confidence in impartial law enforcement begins to erode, democratic trust suffers.
A conversation that stayed with me
Yesterday, a friend contacted me.
Jewish. Non-binary. Thoughtful. Civically engaged.
They asked, in essence, whether it was time to consider leaving the United Kingdom because they no longer felt safe about the direction of travel.
Pause for a moment on that.
Not because this reflects the view of all Jewish people, all LGBTQ+ people, or all minorities. It plainly does not.
But because the fact that such a question is being asked at all should give us pause.
When people begin to wonder whether their own country is becoming less safe for them, something significant is happening.
Political rhetoric has consequences.
Even when those deploying it insist they are “just asking questions”.
Even when they frame themselves as anti-establishment truth tellers.
Words shape climates.
Climates shape behaviour.
Labour’s failures, too
None of this absolves Labour.
The present government and its leadership have often appeared politically hesitant, strategically muddled, and insufficiently compelling.
Too often, they seem reactive rather than visionary.
Too often, afraid to make principled arguments for fear of short-term backlash.
Too often, trapped in the assumption that tactical caution is the same thing as political strength.
It is not.
Vacuums get filled.
But Labour’s shortcomings do not make right-wing populism benign.
Reasons for hope
And yet.
This is not the whole story.
Reform’s failure to make major breakthroughs in London matters.
The continued, patient growth of the Liberal Democrats matters.
The Greens’ more dramatic advances in parts of London and elsewhere matter too, even where one may disagree with aspects of their programme.
These developments suggest something important: Britain is not moving in a single ideological direction.
There remains a constituency for pluralism, environmental responsibility, internationalism, evidence-based policy, and politics that is less performative and more humane.
That matters.
Deeply.
What kind of country do we want to be?
The central question is not whether people are allowed to be angry.
Of course they are.
The question is what we do with that anger.
Do we channel it into rebuilding public services, renewing civic trust, strengthening democratic institutions, and tackling genuine inequality?
Or do we direct it at whichever vulnerable group is most politically convenient?
Do we choose solidarity?
Or suspicion?
Complexity?
Or slogans?
Hope?
Or fear?
Britain has always been at its best when confident enough to be open, tolerant, and outward-looking, not when consumed by grievance and nostalgia.
I do not fear democratic change.
I do fear a politics that teaches people to see neighbours as threats.
I fear a country in which minorities feel increasingly unsafe.
I fear institutions too weak or timid to defend democratic norms.
I fear a political culture where outrage replaces thought.
But fear alone is not a political programme.
The answer to populism cannot simply be panic about populism.
It must be something better.
Something more generous.
More serious.
More courageous.
Because if mainstream democratic politics cannot offer credible hope, others will continue to profit from despair.
And history suggests they rarely leave things better than they found them.
C. E. Lord OBE 