Today’s historic results - my initial thoughts

Three points many people will miss.

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Today is a truly historic day in British politics. Elections have taken place across England, Wales, and Scotland and the results are rolling in.

I’m going to be joining our Inner Circle and Paid Subscribers for our exclusive weekly Live discussion later on today to fully dissect the results and offer a deeper analysis of what I think they tell us about the future of British politics. But for now, here are some initial thoughts.

Three points are key.

First, as I’ve long predicted in this newsletter, what we’re witnessing is the ongoing, next phase in the post-Brexit realignment of British politics.

Reform is enjoying major gains across the country - from taking Havering council to winning every available seat in Hartlepool, from cementing its stronghold in Eastern England, in North East Lincolnshire, to capturing Newcastle-under-Lyme council.

But Reform is polling especially strongly in areas of the country where people voted for Brexit and strongly oppose mass uncontrolled immigration, broken borders, soft-on-crime policies, and what they see, understandably, as the managed decline of their once great country.

Reform is currently averaging roughly 40 per cent in the most strongly pro-Brexit, and more working-class areas of the country, but only roughly 10-15 per cent in the most anti-Brexit areas.

What is this telling us?

It’s telling us that Nigel Farage and Reform have now leaned fully into what I wrote about last year: the ‘golden opportunity’ for this revolt.

They’ve now fully inherited the post-2016 realignment that Boris Johnson and the Tories briefly tapped into at the 2019 general election but then squandered by betraying millions of Brits through the ‘Boriswave’, the mass influx of immigrants, and losing control of Britain’s borders.

Some of the shocks are seismic.

This morning, for instance, Labour Minister Lisa Nandy woke up to find that Reform has captured 24 of 25 seats in her own northern area of Wigan.

While Labour MP Angela Rayner - who hopes to succeed Keir Starmer as leader - woke up to see Reform capture 18 of 19 seats up for election in Tameside - which also reflects the ongoing impact of our campaign at the Gorton & Denton by-election.

If Angela Rayner cannot even inspire people in her own area to vote Labour, some might ask, then how on earth can she ever inspire the rest of the country to do so.

If Labour MPs think that the answer to all this is to further relax immigration laws and ape the extreme liberalism of the Greens, or further anger Brexit voters by announcing “closer ties with the European Union”, then with all due respect they have no idea what is going on in their own backyard.

Either way, in these areas and more - including, I suspect, Wales later on today - it is the deeper realignment of our politics that’s allowing Reform to mobilise a broad, durable, and coherent electorate of blue-collar, culturally conservative, middle-aged and older patriotic men and women who work hard, play by the rules, and pay their taxes but are utterly sick and tired of being treated like second-class citizens in their own country.

They oppose mass immigration. They are fed up with broken borders. They want to leave the European Convention on Human Rights so that Britain can control its borders and laws. They want criminals punished. They want workers prioritised over welfare scroungers.

They want to slash foreign aid and spend it instead on frontline public services. And they want the decent majority of British people to be put first in their own country.

The second key point about these results, which many people will miss is that …