Screengrab from the BBC’s local election results tracker

1. This is an unwelcome watershed for outright fascism

For most of my adult life the BNP has been in decline. Fascists have had no significant place in parliamentary politics or local government, even if they’ve held sway in the media, and exercised influence through proxies like the Brexit debate.

Reform’s massive sweep through the local and devolved elections has shredded that norm. These are extremely scary times given Reform’s policy platform on remigration, worker protections, and human rights and equality frameworks.

2. The rise of Reform is more than a warning for a future general election - the party’s control of local authorities will harm people now

Local authorities allocate increasingly scarce funding for services that have a huge impact on people’s lives – particularly the lives of marginalised people. SEND provision, social care, housing support, services for migrants and refugees – all of these are vulnerable to being disfigured or dismantled by local authorities with explicitly regressive agendas.

Expect to see further redundancies and possibly closures in the migrant support sector in particular. Those who are already largely excluded from the social safety net will bear the cost.

Also expect resignations, firings and chaos as the reality of Reform in local government plays out.

3. The picture is marginally less bleak than I expected

In February 2026, I conducted a PESTLE analysis for a UK-focussed philanthropic funder. At that time, polls suggested that Reform might become the largest party in the Senedd, and the official opposition at Holyrood.

That didn’t happen. Labour was routed in the Senedd in favour of Plaid, and Scottish Labour and Reform ended up tied at Holyrood, with the SNP coming out on top. Labour also took a beating in London, with notable losses to the Lib Dems and the Greens. That represents a glimmer of hope for progressives. Even the tin-eared will have heard it now: out-Reforming Reform will not be enough to save Labour at the next general election.

4. Keir Starmer’s days are numbered

I said to my husband last night that I think Starmer is too intransigent and too bad at politics to step aside on the basis of these results. This morning he made clear that he intends to cling on. I don’t think he’ll still be in post at the end of this year.

I’m laughing out loud at this from the Guardian live blog: ““Keir said in Cabinet that he wouldn’t discuss the elections or his leadership, and that he will only speak to cabinet ministers about that individually. Then after the meeting he refused to see Cabinet ministers individually.”

5. Labour’s progressive wing is still in disarray

Part of the reason Starmer still hasn’t gone is due to a lack of a credible challenger. This is frankly laughable given that everyone has known for months that the local elections would be judgement day for the PM. Burnham still isn’t in Parliament. Rayner hasn’t sorted her tax bill. Many of the unions aren’t keen on Miliband because of his stance on oil and gas. Streeting has the Labour Right’s backing, but the doorstep appeal of a dead fish (no thanks to the NHS-Palantir row). I genuinely do not understand how Labour’s left has had months to get its shit together and yet still can’t meet this moment.

6. The Greens need to sharpen their campaigning on home affairs

I am absolutely made up to be living in a borough that has a Green Mayor, and a Green Council. Massive respect to the Greens’ ground game and to the politics of working-class solidarity that they’re pushing to build. At the same time, they have to up their game if they’re going to wield and hold onto power. They can’t afford a repeat of Zack Polanski’s avoidable bust-up with the Met, which likely didn’t do them any favours in the run-up to the polls. That requires them to deepen their policy on home affairs and get proactive in campaigning for practical solutions (which are often upstream of the police and the Home Office), rather than getting into spats on social media in situations where the facts haven’t yet been established.

7. Extra-parliamentary campaigning is needed to create space for progressive policy and legislation

I agree that a coalitional approach is needed to meet this moment. I disagree that this has to come at the expense of flagship campaigning. Well-run, strategic campaigns can lead to policy change, either by pressuring government into a change of course, and/or by leading to changes in party policy in advance of a general election. Now is the time for progressives to be identifying and resourcing campaigns for those policies that they want to see front and centre in election manifestos – I’d be looking at facial recognition and ILR changes as a starting point from a home affairs POV.

8. Progressives need to win in digital and legacy media as well as on the doorstep

I’ve seen some takes saying that progressives are in an online echo chamber – in part I agree, but I don’t think that the solution is to cede the terrain of social media to the Right, especially not in an era of AI fascist rappers. Progressives need to keep the pressure on in digital and legacy media, as well as on the doorstep.

9. Social justice philanthropy still doesn’t understand the scale of the threat

Some of us have been warning funders for the last couple of years that the rise of Reform represents an existential threat to human rights, democracy and equality, as well as to the organisations that defend them. In other sectors, such as climate, we’ve seen funders spend down in the face of such a threat. Yet in social justice philanthropy, resources are not flowing at sufficient pace or scale to mitigate or adapt to what’s potentially coming. Where those resources are flowing, they seem to be disproportionately available to an ever-burgeoning network of consultants (I am a consultant, I am part of the problem) and reviews/knowledge-gathering as opposed to delivery of strategic work. Please let’s stop rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic and get on with it.

10. Westminster needs proportional representation

It’s time.

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Since the beginning of March I’ve been on a residency at Buinho Creative Hub in the Alentejo with my good friend and long-time collaborator Alex McNamee. For the most part we’ve worked on separate projects, but we also stole an afternoon to produce a joint text for the end-of-residency exhibition, called circular water. It’s in two halves, and my half functions as a compressed diary of my time here, you’ll find an edited version below.

I’d like to swim but we’re landlocked. The nearest lake is a sulphur-strafed mine-dusted molten mirror in the sunset’s drip, a wordless screen written with stars. The rains have etched slick sprays of mould up the plaster, an uninvited puddle through the raised floor, blooming, and now the fruits of the last few weeks of deluge are coming to air. Lemon trumpets of clover flute open and closed with the day, bright-heart daisies give way to punches of lavender: sturdy, folded, bristled for drought. The rain rolls through the clover into miniature snapping irises – can’t you see how hard they’re trying? - wildflowers into dock, fennel, cleavers. Interfaces of sunlight, gas and water that know they won’t survive the months to come.

I look over the paddock and see our own three sisters even if we’re just two now, next to the fig tree, dwarfing it, a wedding arch of courgette, flashes of crisp dead flowers through the waving olive tree, and with the racing season at triple speed pinpricks of elderflower that bud and bloom in seconds. We know which plant is who.

It’s summer in March and I hear you wish the wind warmer, the house lighter, as if you are the only person who matters. It’s older, sicker people who die first when the leaden heat comes, and you are both. I get the sense that you’re speaking something into being.

I can’t imagine myself beyond text here, steeped in acres of dry sky at the top of the hill. The morning dew’s gone from the garden table and even the clouds have stopped rolling through in the afternoons. My hair’s taken on the spirit of the house, woolly and crisp. I keep finding insects in my pans seeking refuge from the weather, and in my retreat from other people’s anxiety I’ve inhaled my books. Now they’re alveolar, spun through my lungs, rustling in my breath.

At night I get the sense that something large is passing over the roof of the single-story house. Not someone walking over my grave but maybe checking if I’m dead yet. Though they might not be here for me. I use a browser that deletes my history at regularly scheduled intervals, I can press the fire icon and watch a sheet of flame roll up the screen. I watch people bent under the weight of their lives and think perhaps this is a useful way to be. The town is in chorus at all hours: the swallows chatter, the dogs howl up spinning at the church bell. Chickens, cats, sheep, other people’s urgency, your total desolate confusion at what has become your life. If there were more water here I’d dam it, jump in to jump out.

My life was given back to me for an undisclosed stretch of time and when you complain I want to take you by your shoulders and tell you this is what there is, everything, take it as it is.

The wind’s gusting warm.

Rain and light have met in wet earth to throw up lush spindles that try.

In other news…

• I was longlisted for a literary prize a couple of weeks ago! My dystopian short story With Hope, Without Hope, Absolutely (h/t Mike Davis) caught the attention of the team at the Disquiet Prize out of over 1000 entries in fiction. It was out of the blue and made me smile. I’m hoping to publish the story soon.

• It’s been beautiful to see half a million people on the streets standing up to fascism this weekend. Special admiration and congratulations to one of my best friends, Minnie Rahman, who worked flat out for months as CEO of migrants’ rights charity Praxis and member of the Together Alliance to get the march off the ground.

• Beloved Glasgow Print Studio - where I learned to etch when I first moved to the city - along with all of the amazing arts organisations hosted in Trongate 103, is at risk of eviction by City Property. City Proprty is an arms-length body which is trying to hike rents fourfold despite Trongate 103 having been established as long-term accommodation for arts organisations using public money. Sign the petition and if you’re in Glasgow, get on to your local councillor or MSP about it. If our artists have nowhere to practice, what’s left?

  

· I’m back living in London, rejoicing - for reasons that will be elucidated below - at the ackee and callaloo in the corner shop, and writing a book in the British Library. It’s 2019 all over again.

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It has taken me a long time to call myself a feminist. Looking back, I think part of that was complacency. My world growing up was dominated by women. Most of the men in my family, apart from a beloved uncle, had been made redundant before I was born. I was attended to by my Mum and my Grandma and my twin aunties. I had a scholarship to an all-girls sch…

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I think I can count on two, maybe three hands the number of artists (excluding writers) whose deaths would make me cry. I learned this morning, waking up at GMT +7 two paces from the sea, that David Lynch is one of them.

I first came across him as an artist located in the relatively cursed genre of men recommended to me by ex-boyfriends, and for many y…

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Photo by Wasi Daniju

First, the horrific fascist violence that the UK has seen this week is the logical endpoint of a state-sponsored hostile environment for migrants. I led campaigns against the hostile environment for several years at Liberty (even won a few), so some history: the term “hostile environment” was used by Liam Byrne under New Labour in re…

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The fire started in a faulty fridge on the fourth floor. It grew to catastrophic proportions due to a poorly managed refurbishment commissioned by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, which paid more attention to aesthetics and cost-cutting, than residents’ safety. During the refurbishment, the Tower was wrapped in cladding, which, despite the m…

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The North Sea at dusk in March 2022. I was on the boat to Orkney. The wind had numbed my ears and hands the light was so beautiful I cried.

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This week has reminded me with painful clarity of the degree to which white supremacist violence against Black women in public life is normalised, and especially Black women with progressive politics (however close …

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When in late October I was brought round after twenty-six hours knocked out, my body had become public property, and I was subject to the strange rhythms of the ICU, and the opinions of a phalanx of clinicians, and the physical constraints of the reams of tubes that had begun protruding from me overnight. Other people might have relaxed into the hum of …

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