Luke Graham was the Conservative Member of Parliament for Ochil and Perthshire South from 2017 to 2019, the candidate in Perth and Kinross-shire in 2024, and a former head of the Downing Street Union Unit.
The local elections in England and the devolved elections in Scotland and Wales are now just two weeks away, and the political map of the United Kingdom appears increasingly fractured. Different parties are leading in different parts of the country and voters are shifting in ways that make outcomes difficult to predict.
But beneath all the media noise and the now almost daily polling, lies a much less discussed reality: the UK’s fractious politics are not a result because its nations and regions drifting apart. It is fragmenting because they are becoming more alike — united not by confidence, but by a shared sense of frustration and pessimism, driving the electorate to protest parties or not to vote at all.
Like many in our party I’ve been out on the doors over the past weeks, and the feedback is very mixed. In England, Reform UK is well positioned to benefit from Labour’s rapid loss of support. Many long-standing Labour voters speak openly about their disappointment with Starmer and their desire to register a protest vote. Most disillusioned Conservatives made their move in 2024, but there remains an unpredictable exchange of support between Reform UK and the Conservatives, as Reform UK vote share continues to gently decline as the party takes on more turncoats and begins nailing its policy colours to the mast in areas broader than immigration. In tightly fought local contests, where margins are narrow and candidate quality matters, outcomes are particularly difficult to call.
Meanwhile in Scotland, the fractured unionist vote means that the SNP are set to benefit (again). As the polls make clear, this is not because of a sudden lurch towards separatism, indeed the polls are locked at 55:45, but because the unionist vote — representing well over 60 per cent of voters — remains split across Labour, the Conservatives, LibDems and now Reform UK. Fragmentation, rather than enthusiasm, is what sustains the SNP’s dominance.
The frustration on the doorsteps is tangible, as people unhappy with 20 years of SNP rule feel they have few places to turn other than Reform UK or to not vote at all. In fact, the only consideration sending a collective chill down SNP spines is the fear of a low turnout. And this fear is justified, many may be unhappy with Labour, but there is very little affection for the SNP on the doors and “not voting” is becoming a common response on canvass returns and could cost the SNP the majority they are counting on.
Without an outright majority, John Swinney’s SNP will struggle to justify a fresh push to break up the UK. Although the SNP’s continued presence in Bute House will enable the nationalists to continue to chip away at the UK, and as they have promised, work with Plaid Cymru and Sinn Fein to “change the dynamics of the UK” (hint: it will involve trying to break up the UK).
The picture is equally fractious in Wales, with Plaid Cymru and Reform UK neck-and-neck, Labour and the Conservatives trailing and the Liberal Democrats virtually non-existent. Indeed, by the afternoon of the 8th May we could be looking at one of the most mixed and fractured political maps of the UK for a generation.
But peeling back the polling and claims from nationalists that the “UK is over” another picture starts to form. This image of UK shows that far from the four nations of the UK drifting further apart, they are becoming more united in frustration and pessimism. The latest polling from JL Partners undertaken with equal samples in England, Scotland and Wales, shows that all parts of the UK blame the UK Government for a lot of local issues, with the proportion favouring local and devolved services in Scotland almost the same as it is in Wales and England, meaning that there is no specific, unique Scottish or Welsh dislike of Westminster, any more than there is in England.
Preferences on key policy questions — such as support for North Sea energy production or lower income taxation — show notable consistency across all three parts of Great Britain. Most significantly, pessimism about the country’s direction is widespread and deeply entrenched.
In this sense, Britain is not a house divided into competing national identities. It is, rather, a country experiencing a shared loss of confidence — “one nation united under gloom”.
It is no surprise then that parties offering to break the status quo (Reform, SNP and Plaid Cymru) are beneficiaries. And this is why the Labour government’s appalling performance is so damaging, not just for Labour, but for the entire country.
The sheer absence of ideas, the inability to articulate what Britain is for as opposed to what we are against, and the nonexistent national message (or uniting goals) has led us to this place. Rightly, the public are despondent and want to blame (and punish) those who they feel have been so uninspiring.
Encouragingly, there is still some movement in the polls, Reform’s momentum has plateaued and the SNP’s dominance is more fragile than headline results suggest. And on the doorstep, many voters who have experimented with protest politics are beginning to question their choices and are now more “Reform curious” than fully signed up to Farage’s party.
May’s elections will not resolve these questions. But they will provide an important indication of Britain’s trajectory — towards fragmentation and multi-party politics — is becoming entrenched, or whether a more stable political alignment can begin to re-emerge.
Either way, the results of 7th of May will set the scene for the next General Election and many of the key battlegrounds.
Despite what the nationalists say, the map may look divided. The concerns of electorate are not.