British politics is being reassembled before our eyes, and last week showed who is doing the assembling. Reform UK led the national vote share at around 27 per cent. Labour lost 38 councils. The Green Party gained four. A quarter of all councils ended the night in no overall control. It was all there well before polling day: a voting population described as frustrated, bewildered, disconnected, or all of the above.

English councils have been stripped of resources for decades while their statutory duties have grown. Core spending power fell by more than a quarter in real terms between 2010 and 2020, with the deepest cuts falling on the most deprived areas; the worst-hit councils lost almost half their funding. Adult social care, children’s services, homelessness support, and public health all now run on budgets that bear no relation to the demand placed on them. Local democracy has been quietly emptied. Councillors meet, debate, and vote, but the meaningful decisions are made elsewhere. In Whitehall and in the boardrooms of private contractors.

At the same time, the conditions of work and life have changed in ways that make collective political action harder. The factory floor, the union branch, and the local party meeting were once the everyday infrastructure through which individual grievances became political demands, at least for the workers who could access them. That infrastructure has been hollowed out. Union density in the UK has more than halved since 1979. The Amazon depot and the call centre do not give paid release for collective bargaining meetings. The gig platform does not have a workplace at all. And news arrives through a phone, not a branch meeting. We are more atomised than at any point in living memory.

Yet collective action has not disappeared. Tenant unions, climate groups, migrant-justice organisations, and neighbourhood projects are real and making a material difference where they exist. The pro-Palestine demonstrations persist and have been the largest in British history, despite the state’s increasingly harsh measures to silence dissent. What this collective energy has not yet done is translate into governing power, locally or nationally. Our work must continue to change that. So that the gap between what people want and what their governments do stops being the empty space the right keeps filling.

There exists a monumental mismatch between us, as individual political actors, and the places where we cast our votes during elections. Changing a voting system (currently first-past-the-post in the UK) may not, on its own, increase voter turnout if the disconnect between the system and the individual persists. The void created by this allows authoritarianism to thrive, backed, in Reform UK’s case, by a single £9 million donor and a £5 million campaign budget. The 2011 referendum on changing the voting system was rejected on a turnout of around 42 per cent, expressing the same disconnection we see today.

Labour’s role in this is specific and not incidental. Returned to government in 2024 under the guise of carrying forward the Corbyn-era platform, the party has spent its first eighteen months confirming that no change is on offer: continuity on austerity, on migration, on the climate, on Gaza, on the rules of the economy that produced the crisis Labour was elected to address. When the party of opposition becomes indistinguishable in substance from the party it replaced, voters draw the conclusion that the system itself is closed. That conclusion is the precondition for “burn it down” politics. Reform UK did not invent it. Labour helped deliver it.

The space Labour has vacated is not empty. The Greens gained four councils last week. Your Party is contesting elections from the left. The pro-Palestine movement persists on a historic scale. Tenant unions, climate groups, migrant-justice organisations and neighbourhood projects continue their patient work. These formations now need to work continuously with one another, across borders, and over the long timescales that turn their energy into governing power. That connective work is what builds the alternative.

This is the work DiEM25 in the UK is part of: not an electoral vehicle but the collective infrastructure being rebuilt. Transnational solidarity expressed in concrete local work. British politics will be reassembled. The question is by whom, and for whom. Let it not be by a politics that divides us, but one that names what has been taken from us and organises to take it back.

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